Friday 9/27/02     Other Fulbright Projects, Shintori & Juicy

 

        We had to meet at FSE for the bus that was taking us to Yangminshan Country Club for our Fulbright Orientation Part 2:  Roundtable discussions of our projects, lunch, and dinner.  I was running late so I took cab to FSE who dropped me in the wrong place, telling me he should have gone some other way and to cross the road into a lane and I’d find it, apologizing profusely.  FSE is cursed!  Even when I pay for a cab I still have to find my way there. 

 

        They had coffee and sandwiches for us as we waited for everyone to arrive.  The sandwiches were the weird Taiwanese kind with spongey bread, filled with egg, tuna, dried pork sung, etc.  I pocketed a couple for the bus ride but when I tried one realized how gross it was and didn’t know how to get rid of them.

 

        We boarded a nice charter bus and I sat in front of Brian and we talked about some people we knew in common from Rutgers.  We arrived on a small narrow street where they warned us the bus was too big to drive right up to the YCC, so we’d have to walk a bit.  We ended up walking about 20 feet, laughing about the Taiwanese perception of a “far walk”.  People just hate to walk here.  Maybe because of their pointy shoes, and fear of sunlight.

 

        We were led to a conference room in the YCC which looks like a facility for organizational meetings like these—nothing luxe the way “Country Club” makes you think.  We sat around a very large U of tables feeling rather distant and formal, but couldn’t rearrange them, so we imbibed in tea, coffee, and pastries before starting.  I must remember always to starve myself a few days before any FSE event.  We each got a packet of everyone’s project proposal that we submitted with our applications.  I saw some really long ones and people mentioning their backgrounds and experience, and for a minute I thought they’d included our personal statements as well.  I panicked remembering I’d written a lot of personal cheese in mine.  But then I realized these were the Senior Scholars’, and they were required to write more detail in their proposals.  Flipping through I realized mine was probably the shortest project proposal of everyone’s, including the Junior Scholars’.  Felt a bit sheepish, but oh well, here I was and I got in with everyone else.  Besides, I used smaller font.

 

        As roundtable discussions ensued, I quickly got the impression that people were doing some really far-out, abstract, “scholarly” stuff.  The space over my head was like a wind tunnel, stuff was flying over it so fast.  It was all quite interesting though, and I tried to take notes here and there and remember who was doing things that could possibly relate to my project.  Here are a few excerpts from people’s proposals: 

 

        In contrast, my proposal went something like:

 

        We broke (I almost wrote “breaked.”  Isn’t it weird to say “We broke for lunch break?”)  for lunch, which was a humungous buffet spread of both Chinese and American food that looked ten times better than it tasted, but I filled up anyway.  The highlight was a small Swensen’s ice cream freezer in the corner of the dining room with several tubs of flavors.  I was cautious, but after people tried it word got around that it was REAL ice cream!  Creamy and normal!  So we had our fill—who knows when we’ll find real ice cream again.

 

         After lunch we continued the proposals.  I was one of the last to go, during which people were zoning from food coma, which can be good or bad depending how much you prepared for your presentation.  I actually had been mentally rehearsing somewhat all day, so I was reasonably coherent, considering I was fighting a slight tryptophan trance myself, and people were actually quite interested in my topic and asked all sorts of health care questions and how I was going to approach this or get my arms around such a broad topic.  And why wasn’t I comparing Taiwan to another universal health care system like Canada—why the United States?  I really wanted to say, “Well when I was applying for this scholarship, I had to make it sound like my results would be beneficial to the U.S., so they’d be more likely to accept me!”  and, “I know enough about the U.S. health care system so that I only need to learn about Taiwan’s now, not another country’s too,” and maybe, “I have no interest in Canada and the most I ever learned about it was from South Park The Movie.”  However, I instead said how much the Taiwan health care and medical field loves to emulate the U.S. in all their research and systems and sees the U.S. as some kind of model, and how my results could be beneficial to both the U.S. and to Taiwan.  Which were true.

 

        We bussed to BeiTou, the region sort of between Yangminshan and Taipei city, for dinner at a Mongolian BBQ restaurant.  We had to split up into three tables and loaded plates with meat, vegetables and noodles, then brought them to the chef who stir-fried it hibachi-style on a huge round hot cylinder while-u-watch.  There were also clothespins on our table which we could attach to side dishes of fish, turnip cake and other things that had to be specially longer-cooked, give them to him at a window, and they’d bring them cooked to our table.  It was quite good and once again, I stuffed.  We loaded back onto the bus pretty tired and they dropped us at an MRT on the way to FSE which was convenient.

 

        Ginger and Stella were going for drinks and I decided I could do something chill.  We ended up at a café, the Green Steps where I had a hard time explaining to the waitress I didn’t want to order ANYTHING, after my day of FSE consumption.  She didn’t look happy, but everyone else ordered tea or coffee.  Stella and Ginger each got fancy schmancy coffees in tall glasses with whipped cream and twisty straws.  Stella’s friends Lorraine and Daniel joined us, as well as her sister and her friends. 

 

We got word from Eric that he was with people at Shintori, the chic-chic Japanese restaurant I’d heard as having “a weird door”.  When we arrived we stood studying the door, a huge double structure, completely flat with no handles or knobs, waving and pushing at it, but before long someone who had obviously gotten tired of watching people make fools of themselves showed us by sticking his hand into an opening of a small stone sculpture nearby, and the door opened dramatically.  Cool!  We of course had to stick our hands in and out a few times to fully appreciate the novelty before it wore off. 

 

Inside was dim and quite trendy chic.  Eric, Dave, some blond guy, some Asian guy John, and some very made-up Asian girl were finishing up dinner.  We split up to go to a bar called Juicy.  It turned out Ginger’s been there before just last week, and it was called Milk.  Another instance of remodeling/renaming a bar/lounge to make it into the “new” trendy place?  What was the next renaming going to be--Soda?  Fizzy?

 

At Juicy my throat started feeling sore so I just got a soda, Ginger and Stella got JD on the rocks, we sat at tables but were squished and awkward, and some girl with short shorts and a hat kept grinning and winking at Stella.  We moved downstairs to a table but it was kind of awkward again.  Finally we all moved down to sit around a table on another level.  It was a nice place but perhaps I wasn’t feeling very social.  Then the guys started to move to another bar.  Ginger and I left, we were in walking distance from home there.

 

        By time I showered and got to bed I had to get up in under an hour to get ready to meet Jonathan to see the Teacher’s Day ceremony at Confucius’ Temple; he had an extra ticket I could use.  It was at the ungodly hour of 6AM but as part of my new vow to hit all the Taiwanese cultural events I could, I was making myself go.