"Queens of Kaohsiung"

11:30 pm Hello! I have made it to Kaohsiung! I am writing to you a day after we arrived here because there was some difficulty with the internet and the husband/electronics-guru is out of town at the moment. so we are sharing one computer with our host family so time is at a premium!

[Yo-yo and Tina using the computers 7/5]

For those of you who were with me closest to my departure I was worried about my living conditions. Well no worries here. We are situated at the top floor of a very nice apartment complex very close to the President Department Store. It is very nice and air conditioned! Not unlike our room that has a small window unit. Everything is in Chinese! We know "blue is on, top left is function"


The house is very modest but all on one floor. There is no air conditioning in the common areas but there are window units in the bedrooms. Thank you sooooooooo much mom for forcing me to take my pillow. That is the one thing that I appreciate the most.


When we got to the airport in Taipei last night the feel was more like a mall in bus station or a train station, so dramatically different from the M-16 totting security guards in Los Angles. When we got to Kaohsiung we cleared customs and collected our bags and immediately afterward there was our host families! It was more like a movie theater on the other side of the wall we passed out of. Chairs in a row, eyes fixed upon the door, awaiting arrival of friends, family, strangers in our case. Eyes darted from face to face in our group and quickly students were gathered by their host families! It was so nice to meet them! At first my instinct was to RUN! but then I calmed myself down and said, "its only a month. you did not just fly half way around the world to get scared when you got here."

The representatives from the school gave us our NTD lunch allowance and that was it. We were with our host families! Folayan and I were the last to leave because the car they brought was to small for our huge foreigner luggage. They had me take a cab with the two girls, Ya-ya and Tina. The cab was a bright yellow Toyota Yaris. It shook like going over the bridge at camp the whole time. The cabby and the girls only spoke Chinese/Taiwanese to one another and were very quick about it. I tried to be friendly and strike up a conversation but they were very shy. One memory from this ride was when Tina grabbed Yo-yo's hand and gave it to me and said "cold!" other than that I was on my own to gaze ga-ga out the window in this foreign place.

[Folayan and my host family with Ray and his host mom and her son. Row 1: Yo-yo, Tina, Linda (My host family), Grein. Row 2: Folayan, Son, Ray, Skylar]

When we got to the apartment it was very dark. There are very few streetlights off the main roads. It had rained in Taiwan and the ground was wet, so a few student's bags were wet but, saved again by the space bags, my stuff was all dry and packed just like I left it. We were shown a wardrobe to put our clothes in and I started moving stuff in to get out of my malting suitcase.

1:30 am The shower was cold but that is a good thing because it must be 100% humidity and its 29 degrees Celsius even at night. I stayed up for a little bit of the Internet debacle last night but I was tired and so I took a pm and passed out until 11 am the next day.