The above said, most of our Taiwanese friends and teachers probably think we are terrified and lost in this scary foreign country. When we go somewhere with them, they divide us into groups and every group has to stay with it's "guide" during "free time" who seem to think that we will get lost on one street. The other day we went to Tainan city and I wanted to buy some souvenirs for my students back home and two ther girls in my group wanted to check out some traditional dresses in the next store. I went in the sweets shop and our guide panicked. She literally breathed down my neck and followed me around saying we should go to the other store and rejoin the group. I ended up not buying everything I wanted and was a bit irritated by the whole situation. The other two girls just wanted to run away.
Of course, those are our cultural differences that make us act this way. Usually (but not always), Polish people like to everything their own way - which makes us more creative, but less able to work in a group. From my observation Taiwanese like to have a pattern and a group. The mix of our characteristics sometimes causes problems. They try to be nice and caring towards us, we see it as annoying babying. That is why I think it's so important to meet as many people from different cultures and possible and at least try to see the world the way they do. We may be able to overcome our differences and combine our good points, no matter how naive it sounds.
Ok, no more musings, time for some travel updates!
As I mentioned before, we went to Tainan with our hosts: we saw some old temples, the Anping Fort (a naval base built by the Dutch), a tree house (a warehouse that was literally swallowed by a huge tree) and something that apparently a salt museum (we couldn't figure out what it was about and why did they take us there). Needless to say, that was not the best trip of this course.
During the weekend we went to Kenting and Fuguangshan by ourselves. Kenting is a beach resort, so we spent the day swimming in the sea (or more like fighting the waves) and hiding from the sun (still got a sunburn though...).
Fuguangshan is a huge Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of Kaohsiung. It was bulit in the 70's of the XX century, so it's not very old, but it's quite spectacular and you can really feel the peacefull atmosphere. The people there are very nice, offering tea all the time.
My camera's batteries died at some point, so I don't have so many pictures.
Kenting beach:
Well sometimes life's a beach ;)
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