Wonderful Town

Typing this in the airport, and will post it when I get to an inet connection in Bangkok. 5 days wasn’t enough. This is a really fun city. Lack of Chinese ability is so much less a problem than one would have thought. A fair portion of the population speak enough English to get by, and many of the signs are translated well enough (but only just). I really envy Ev having had a chance to spend the whole summer here. Now to invent a thesis topic that requires a year of fieldwork, and I can come back! (This isn’t likely with comp ling, but computerized translation services between English and Chinese wouldn’t sell poorly, on either side of the pacific. I’m sure someone is working on this.)

The heat wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I melt in Seattle when it gets above 85, and figured I’d be miserable in Taipei heat, but you get used to it pretty quickly. You just drink a lot more water, get used to your clothing sticking to you a little bit, and really appreciate being inside with air conditioning.

In the airport, I was stopped by this young woman (who claimed to be a university student, but would have fit in my backpack easily, so might have been 6 years old), and asked to take a survey about Taiwan's English environment, by which she meant "how easy is it for tourists who have no Chinese to get around and spend money here?" I gave them mostly good marks, and she was very excited that she could check the box for "American visiting friends" - I was the first she had found. She gave me a pen for my troubles, which has a pull out map of Taiwan in it - it actually pulls out from the side of the pen.

The flight out was uneventful, and I had an actual window seat this time, so I was able to see things (I flew out in the middle of the day.) I saw some sort of atoll in the south china sea as we flew over, with a small island at one side. I think I could see, from 30,000 feet that it was inhabited, with a harbor. The water was all light blue-ish green around it.