Tilmann visiting

But there was only one day to bridge before Tilmann arrived, a meeting with whom I found surprisingly difficult to arrange. In his group of eight it was simply impossible to find a consensus, so we ended up meeting a deux for a coffee on my campus. Later in the afternoon we went to the spectacular Maokong Gondola which took us across Taipei’s surrounding jungle-covered hills. It was amazing to see Taipei 101 peeking over the hill-tops and seeing the city disappear in the ubiquitous smog (or was it just fog? Tilmann and I had a fierce debate over this). At the terminus we walked around and had some food, only to be invited for dinner that night by Sebastian a class-mate from my language class. On the way back down we had the most amazing view over nightly Taipei, stretching all the way across the valley. Dinner was nice and after joining my language-class-mates at their dorm for a nice roof-top-view and a round of ping pong, we went to Shida where we had beer on the streets together with hundreds of other Taipeians. It was a great feeling to soak in the atmosphere both figuratively and literally because warm air carried the scent of all varieties of foods through the air.

The next day we met around noon to explore the end of the red line: Danshui, the nearest you get to the ocean by public transport from Taipei. The weather couldn’t be better, so we walked along the river mouth for many kilometers following the river’s example of reaching the sea. On the way there we passed lots of different motives for our cameras, with which we were constantly armed. There was an amazing street artist from Georgia who put up a breath-taking fire show. Further down we took side-roads which brought us to a little pier leading to the famous ‘lovers’ bridge’ (WHAT you haven’t heard of it??). There we had some mediocre food and went for a stroll around the pier to take pictures. On the way back we took the hard choice and walked all the way back to the MRT station. For our good-bye night we went to have some apparently tamed cocktails in Ximen where we watched people walking by and had a really good conversation about goals in life, game theory, identities and whatnot. We disagreed and that made it all the more interesting. Good times! Definitely! You don’t have this kind of conversations every day. See you next time in HK!

The palm drive with the mist-covered library in the end

The Maokong Gondola and Taipei’s surrounding mountains

Taipei at night from the fancy exchange student dorms (NOT where I stay)

Danshui riverfront. Where Taipei’s Danshui river meets the Pacific Ocean

The old Dutch fort in Danshui with obligatory ‘clogs’

The pier peeking into the ocean with the Love Bridge covering the yacht harbor entrance

When Tilmann left, I admittedly fell into a big hole, having to catch up with a ton of work from the week before and struggling big time to make it on time to all my language classes. In a way, my sleep schedule was totally messed up and I had a really hard time falling asleep so I would not be tired the whole next day. On Friday I was so tired that I didn’t wake up until sunset… The weekend also didn’t make it easy for me with low-hanging clouds and freezing temperatures (i.e. outside and inside). That called for a change – big time! So on the days following the weekend I went to play squash, I tried a new vegan restaurant around the corner with my language class mates and planned the trip for spring break (which turned out to be more complicated than I thought). I sent out tons of Couchsurfing requests (find me on Couchsurfing.org) to people in Tainan and Kaohsiung, one of whom, Selena, accepted my request.

Long time no hear

Yes it really HAS been a while. Well – as you can see in the last post, I basically started to be slacking when Sarah came to visit me in Taipei and I certainly didn’t waste our precious time together on the computer blogging. We spent the first couple of days wandering around Taipei, watching Black Swan (which I didn’t like as much as apparently everybody else did) in the movie theater, taking advantage of the media section of NTU’s library (1000s of movies!), hanging out with my friend Lee and going to the Imax (our first time). On Friday morning my first try-out yoga class started. I found a sport, which I could convince myself would rather help my health than destroy it (like American football or anything else I did before). It is much more exhausting than I thought. So exhausting in fact that I desperately needed the meditation we did at the end of the session. Yoga is really cool because it gets you to move for the sake of moving and it takes out the competitive aspect of sports. Competition can be nice but as far as I have experienced it, it usually takes sportspeople to the brink of hostility. And it also creates a certain form of atmosphere within a team that is characterized by roughness rather than by friendliness. All of that is gone in yoga, where the only thing that you are trying to converge to is becoming one with the universe (whatever that means) rather than with the group’s stupid rites of masculine rivalry. Anyway, I like it very much!

Impressions Sarah and I got while walking through Taipei:

Lee, Sarah and I at the IMax:

Campus impressions:

Career day on campus:

View from the roof of the law faculty:

Dinner with Alex:

A lemon:

This was also the day that, after two nights, we could not stand the smell of the old mattress any longer. When we turned it over we found out why: the whole bottom of it was full of MOLD. Yuck! It smelled like a family of dead mice was buried under the mattress. On that day, we went on an odyssey to find a new one. So we wandered around the city looking for a back-friendly, inexpensive mattress, which is so much harder than you might think. The mattresses were either thin as a sheet of paper or as expensive as a car (in one shop they started at 600 Euros). So we ended up where every European student would end up for a mattress: IKEA! I invested big time in that mattress, much more than I could because Sarah and I shared the costs for her flight. And that is also what my credit card company told me indirectly by keeping my card in the ATM. So a whole new odyssey of calling my bank, calling the ATM provider, setting up a time for retrieval and being there on time was set in action. After my mattress arrived. I was so tired that I needed it to collapse on it (and so was Sarah).

Then, after five days, my language class started and from then on I had to get up at seven every morning to be there on time. The teacher and my classmates are very nice. There are two other Germans and two Americans in my class, all of whom I have met previously. Immediately during the first class I was introduced to Asian teaching methods: we were supposed to memorize one A4 page in Chinese within a week.

My three other classes are partly good and partly extremely boring. My class “Freedom in Kant”, taught by Christian Helmut Wenzel, a former teacher at Harvard and Stanford University, totally lives up to my expectations. He really makes Kant’s thoughts intelligible by expressing him in contemporary language and giving great examples. Still, I believe that for me, a second-year student who has hardly any previous philosophy knowledge, the class is very hard. Even some of the secondary literature takes me a long time to understand and usually it takes the ensuing class discussion until I understand them (often it is simply that I don’t know some of the crucial concepts used in these texts). One good thing of this class is also that each time we go out to dinner, so we can talk about philosophy in an informal setting. Then, I also take a class in Classical Chinese Philosophy, which is also quite interesting and rewarding. I realized how little is taught about eastern philosophy in European schools and also the big discussion whether there even is such a thing as Chinese philosophy at all (obviously our professor assumes that yes). Lastly, I am enrolled in a class which will turn out to be a mistake: Ecological Poetics or in other words green theory. The topic itself is great and expands my horizon quite a bit but it turns out that I am almost the only non-Taiwanese student in this class because it is a class for Taiwanese students to learn English. So what we do much of the time is discuss terms and grammar instead of talking about green theory, which is frustrating. In addition, I could not imagine a worse English language teacher than the one who teaches this class. I seldom met a person who mumbles more and articulates less; let alone the fact that he has a three-hour, break-less monologue.

Oh and yes, I enrolled in three other classes as well and I will take none of them because one of them was taught in Chinese and two others are simply way over my head. Plus when I told the person in the international office about my six courses plus language class he simply laughed out loud. The language class alone would keep me busy already he said.

So although Sarah was finally here, I was still in the midst of figuring things out for myself and I spent most of the time studying for my many classes and she joined me in the library (where she found many interesting books, so I’m sure she wasn’t bored). Accordingly the week passed without major incidents and the weather was also not so pleasant that we regretted not going out more. However, at the end of the week I felt very tired and miserable, probably a result from the stress, getting up so early and the bad weather. Saturday we slept in and we spend the day pretty much in my room to recover. And there might also be another reason why I didn’t feel good: Japan, as you may have heard, was hit by an enormous earthquake and the tsunami did not only kill, injured and rendered homeless thousands of people but it also severely damaged a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Hearing about this kind of event on the other side of the globe has an entirely different effect on you than it has when it could actually affect you and until very recently the news situation was so unclear that I expected serious nuclear fallout over Taiwan. The fact that European news were very soon switching to elections, Libya, etc. confirmed the pattern of news that make profit: those about events that affect people directly, visibly and potentially harmfully. From Friday on, no day – no half day actually – passed without checking the news. The next couple of days I spent negotiating with my parents, with UCM, with my embassy and Sarah whether I should return home. As you can see I have decided not to. UCM told me that I would only get full support if the Dutch embassy issues a travel warning, which it hasn’t.

On Sunday (I am talking about 13/3), though, the weather changed dramatically (24 centigrade and sun!) and with new energy we went to a campus job fare, where we were given tons of free stuff. At this fare it turned out what NTU is really all about: engineering. All of the present companies were just looking for engineers, so after a while Sarah and I would just pretend that we were engineers to be. It was fun just to be in the center of attention and tried being lulled into working for the one company rather than the other. We rounded that day off by getting some frozen yogurt with my former roommate Alex.

The last two days of Sarah’s stay we spent very calm and not trying to cram in anything memorable because, if forced, those things can easily feel artificial. On Monday, Tilmann, who is currently residing in Hong Kong, announced his surprise-visit to Taipei on coming Friday. He wanted to come for a while but didn’t because of his worries about the fallout over Taiwan and because of the usual trouble of finding a common date with his buddies. On Sarah’s last day we went to have some spectacular western style breakfast (lots of pancakes and bottomless coffee) with Alex and some friends from my language class. We realized that we basically were like the punch line of a joke: an Asian, a black guy, an Indian, a woman and a white guy walk into a restaurant. I guess you could call us a diverse crowd. In the afternoon Sarah eventually left, leaving me in tears and with a big gap in my daily life to fill. Looking back I think we had a good time and I think her visit helped us both and was definitely worth the tears.

Cherry Blossoms

Sunday started out as any Sunday should: sunny! and I overslept. So it happened that I rushed to the MRT being way late. I was afraid I would not be able to meet the group of couchsurfers that planned to go up Yangming Mountain to take pictures of the beautiful cherry blossoms. I rushed so much to catch up these five minutes, that I shared a taxi up the mountain and ended up being there earlier than everybody else. I wandered around and in the search of a 7-Eleven I met two wonderful couchsufers who happen to live in my dorm. Kiel and Lauren are two American exchange students who I bonded with straight-away and we decided to climb the mountain together on the look for the most gorgeous of all cherry blossoms. And this is what we found:

The pictures pretty much speak for themselves. From one minute to the other we went from huge crowds at the bottom of the hill to absolute solitude on the top. On the way we discovered some of the greatest treasures of Taiwan’s hills: unspoilt nature.

The moss was at some parts so soft that you could pet it. And while we were approaching the timberline I always had the scent of cherries in my nose – hmm, heaven.

Best of all was that when we got to the top, we decided to hitchhike back into town (no buses were coming), and the first driver who saw our sign stopped and gave us a lift. What a wonderful day!