Arrival- Taipei for a Day

I'm in Taipei!

I survived the incredibly long airplane ride on a crummy air carrier-- China Airlines. Apparently, they have so many crashes that if they have another, they'll be discontinued. I'm glad I found that out after riding;) The flight was smooth, except for the bad food (yes, China airlines served seafood paella), unopenable carry-on luggage compartments, and the awful movies shown on the communal movie screen. You get what you pay for and this trip was free for me.

In any case, it got me here, to the slightly overwhelming Taiwan. We met with almost all of the other Fulbrighters here, and the staff from the office. The male-to-female ratio (3 to 9) reminds me of grad school with our token male, Ranald, among 16 women. I guess I should get used to that if I'm planning to stay in the field of education.

The weather here is hot. And humid. As one person describes it, "you will just never feel dry." And it seems true! Hopefully I'll get acclimated.

And I am entirely overwhelmed with the language barrier. About half our group has no Chinese language experience, but I feel entirely at the mercy of our Foundation staff members who do speak and those Fulbrighters who can speak. I can't tell the tones in the different words apart, let alone read the characters.

This has all led to the potential for me to not even be able to pronounce my own Chinese name. Apparently, the character my grandfather has used for our family name is not used in Taiwan, so people would think I'm nuts. But they won't let me not use "Wei" in some way (haha) since it would seem like I'm not proud to be part Chinese. And I had been going to use my grandmother's name, but it looks like that got thrown out the window for a Chinese version of my first name. So the end result sounds like "way tchi-nee." And has something to do with a historic area of China and gold.

On one final note, I'm having technical difficulties getting my browser to display things in English, so any adivce on those lines would be welcome. I've got lots of little boxes, rather than text in buttons or hyperlinks. So it's kind of a guessing game. My computer seems to be trying to speak Chinese with me. I'm glad at least that the characters come up only as boxes-- you can probably tell that I'm finding the characters intimidating and I just might not be able to tolerate such behavior from my lifeline to the States.