Here’s to my first post of what will hopefully be a collection (although my previous experience in writing blogs has proven that I am not the most reliable). I’m starting this to record some of the experiences of my ten month stay in Taiwan starting tomorrow (sort of – with the time difference and traveling, I actually won’t arrive in Taipei until what will be September 5).
What will I be doing during that time? To be honest, I actually don’t have a solid answer for that. I can tell you what I would like to be doing: I received a Fulbright student grant to do research on the environmental impact of organic and regular high mountain tea farming. I wrote the proposal because I think I’d like to be doing just that. I imagine it would be like this: plenty of days out hiking around beautiful, misty tea farms, learning about tea agriculture, taking breaks to sample and discuss tea culture and spending some time in labs learning cool new lab techniques. But I am also approaching this experience openly, considering that I have a lot to learn about Taiwan, tea farming and analytical lab techniques, it’s entirely possible that the three don’t mix well, or that there will be other reasons why this idea doesn’t pan out. In fact, I find it highly unlikely that reality will be anything like the above scenario, but there is only one way to find out.
So instead, I am going with broader goals to learn as much about Taiwan and environmental science research that is going on there (and elsewhere) as I can. If it turns out that I can swing this to include tea farming – great. If not, I hope that I can find other projects that are fruitful instead. I’ve been talking to biogeochemistry researchers at Academia Sinica and National Taiwan Normal University and I plan to explore the projects that they are working on as well as the feasibility of the tea plantation research that I want to do.
On top of that, I hope to learn a lot about Taiwan, make friends with Taiwanese people, take my mandarin to a whole new level of fluency and usefulness, and travel around the country to see the beautiful things that I’ve heard about it.
I’m really excited, but also nervous because there are still so many unknowns. I spent a lot of time stressing out about what I will be doing and how I will do it and where I will do it and when and… getting very worried while trying to plan for things that I don’t really have a feel for.
However, I have also been assured countless times that Taiwanese people are friendly, and that the food is good. How, then, can I go wrong?