First of all, you may be wondering how in the world I ended up in Taiwan, when I was just in Germany. Well, the plus side of having only a handful of students in my department at the University I'm studying at is that opportunities are communicated directly from the professors to the students. My Chinese teacher heard that I and a classmate of mine, Caro, were interested in going to China or Taiwan and it turned out that the school has an scholarship exchange program with the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei! We only had a week to do last minute rushed applications, but here we are.
We arrived on Sunday, September 1st at 7:30am. We left early the morning of August 31st German time. I remember my family trips to China when I was younger and I remember getting antsy on the plane. I can totally understand why my younger self was so antsy...13 hours (plus 1 hour of waiting) on a plane and your butt tends to get kind of sore. We flew with Eva Airlines (Taiwanese) and the service was very good. Plus, they served us food almost continuously. I'm definitely not complaining. :-) The only downside of the service was- actually it was mainly a regret of Caro's- there were no Hello Kitty decorations. :-(((
Our first day in Taiwan was, to be honest, kind of a struggle. We had just been travelling for 17+ hours and hadn't gotten much sleep and we needed to force ourselves to stay up for the whole day. However, we kept busy because one of my friends from Taiwan came to greet us and help us get settled in. It was wonderful and so sweet of her. She took us to her favorite bubble tea place and she was right. IT WAS DELICIOUS~~ Then we did some window shopping and had the popular Taiwanese noodles in a wonton soup. Also very yummy. After that we went home to rest and Caro and I hit our first night market (樂華夜市). It's amazing to see all the people pouring into the street with their friends and family to eat delicious food. And after all that, we both slept very well.
