Bubble Tea, Shi Shi

This past week was EAPSI orientation, which was incredibly action-packed. I happily took to being clueless about what was next and to having our Taiwanese chaperones tell us when to wake up, when to get on the bus, when to eat, and when to get up and dance or sing karaoke. Part of the orientation included three days of Chinese language training (8 hours total), which was intense to say the least. I am now very confident in saying what my name is, and just today tested the waters of ordering my very own bubble milk tea like the grownup that I am (I’ll continue to work on it).

One of our orientation expeditions had us at a Hakka village (the Hakka make up a substantial portion of the early Chinese immigrants in Taiwan), where we made and ate delicious Hakka food and learned about older ways of life in Taiwan. The way we cooked the food was pretty cool: we started with a 2’x2’ or so mud pit, and used fist-sized mud wads to create a pyramid-shaped cover over the top of the ~foot-deep hole. We then built a blazing fire inside the pit and let the mud wads heat up for ~20 minutes, then threw in meats, veggies, and eggs, all wrapped in foil. The result was magnificent. We MUST try this at home. Our yard in Fort Collins is apparently being harassed by the town for poor looks, so perhaps we should just convert it into a giant Hakka barbecue pit.

Other adventures included traditional Chinese foot massages, visits to the Memorial Hall of Chiang Kai-Shek (the 1^st president of Taiwan) and the Longshan Buddhist Temple in Taipei, and an awesome, rowdy night at the famous Shilin night market. We tried a veritable cornucopia of foods here (some of which were reminiscent of Fear Factor), which I’ll get to soon in a separate post.

The Taiwanese students that we got to know so well over the last week are some of the coolest, most charming people I have ever met, and I think I speak for the 30 or so of us westerners when I say that I feel very fortunate to have fallen into this situation. They slaved to throw us an awesome orientation, and we were all blown away by the entire experience. Can’t wait to see all these guys again, hopefully many times, over the next two months.