Culture Shock!

I've been in Taiwan for 6 days now, and WOW, it's definitely not what I was expecting. The first thing I noticed besides the fact that no one was speaking english, was how extremely hot it is here. Thank heavens for air conditioning! Unfortunatly where I live doesn't have air conditioning, but I still have a fan, so I will survive. :)

Since Taiwan is an island, they eat a LOT of fish. Before going to Hualien I flew to Penghu Island for a few days for vacation. My first official meal was in a little restuarant on the side of the road in Penghu. Below is a picture. It reminded me a lot of Lo Mein, but it still tasted different.

Pretty much people would eat anything and almost everything that they could catch in the ocean. Below is what I like to call 'fish jerky.' It's just a little dried up fish. It was actually kind of tasty.

We tried two kinds of fishing on Penghu. The first was with fishing poles, and I didn't catch a thing, except for some sea weed. We fished on a boat first, then we went to an island to go fishing with nets. This was so much fun. You would put the net around some rocks in the water. Then after removing the rocks, the fish that were hiding under the rocks would swim out and get caught in the net. There were also crabs and sea anenomes.People would cut open and eat the sea anenomes right there.



This is a little crab that I caught after we went fishing with the nets.

We went to a park to watch some fireworks. While there we met some people that had this lizard for their pet.

This bridge is very famous in Penghu. I don't know what the characters mean or say, but it looks cool. The girl in the picture with me is Kim. We will both be interning at the preschool here in Taiwan for 6 months.

I think this is called Bear Cave in english. It was very beautiful.

A lot of people go to this place to watch the sunset. It was on a cliff and there were cactus' everywhere. The cactus here is actually really cool because when it turns purple, people eat it like a fruit. I tried some, it kind of tastes like a grape. Anyways, a lot of times people will put it in cold drinks and sell it for about 20NT, which is around 60 cents. Food here is much cheaper than in the US.

I forgot what this is called in Chinese, but it's so good! The white stuff, if milk shave ice stuff. And then there are berries on top and mango on the bottom. The mango in Utah is discusting compared to the mango here.

So far, overall, I've liked being in Taiwan. The people are super friendly and love to practice their english with you. I've also started picking up Chinese words here and there. It's pretty fun.

Shiy Shiy for reading!

(Thank you)