My Fulbright Year in Taiwan

Ian wanted a Frisbee, and hasn’t been able to find one. This is my fault. He has a great Frisbee in the US, and he wanted to bring it to Taiwan with him. I told him not to bother, that there are plenty in Taiwan. I was wrong. We just couldn’t find one anywhere!

On Saturday, we decided to go to Taipei and look there. We took the bus from Yilan to Taipei.

The bus let us off in front of the Taipei 101. There’s a huge shopping mall in the building, so we decided to look there. We had some Indian food in the food court, then walked around the mall. It quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to find a Frisbee in this mall. The $50 t-shirts, Armani and Prada outlets were a clue. So, we decided to look somewhere else. Somewhere a little more down scale.

Outside the mall there’s an open plaza. In one section of the plaza there are water spouts in the floor tiles, arranged in a pattern. It’s a fountain with no basin – pretty cool. There are regular performances of the fountain that are set to music. In between performances, kids like to play “you can’t get me” with the spouts, which squirt water in short spurts in a random manner. We saw a lot of little kids dodging the water. The boys knew exactly what was going to happen sooner or later. Sure enough, it did. A little kid got drenched, much to her surprise, but not at all to ours. It was pretty funny.

We decided to try the Gongguan area (公館), near the big university. We started off walking to the subway station.

We passed by the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall park. It looked there was a lot happening in there, so we decided to take a side trip into the park to see what was going on.

There was a demonstration of some Kung-Fu stuff that was pretty fun to watch.

There was also an old lady selling toys: soap bubbles, kites, and… Frisbees! Only NT$60 – less than US$2! We snapped one up, then had to try it out. We had fun in the plaza (almost hit an old guy two different times – woops), and got all hot and sweaty.

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Then it was time to lower the flag. A military honor guard representing three branches of the armed forces proceeded from inside the hall to the flagpole.

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The ceremony was interesting. The soldiers moved in a very scripted, slow-motion procession. After it was over, we were getting hungry, so it was time to proceed on to Gongguan to get some dinner.

We had some yummies at the night market, then took the bus back to Yilan. We were pooped after so much activity, but it was a great day.