Singapore

This is Lizzy, me and Alyssa on the plane to Singapore. We flew down last Friday, and stayed until Monday night. This is an account of our adventures. It's so much easier flying with friends. Much more enjoyable.


Lizzy fell asleep on her tray table and woke up with this seductive come-hither look. I think it was just as I took that the co-pilot of the the plane was walking up from the back. He saw us taking pictues, and offered to take one of the three of us, and we chatted for a bit.






Later on in the flight, Lizzy ordered a cup of tea (yi bei cha, by the by), and Dave (that's his name) brought it to her along with some JetStar Asia keychains for us and a list of fun things to do in Singapore. I was really surprised to meet someone so friendly who worked for the airline. In all my years of flying, I've never been approached by or had a conversation with the pilot of my plane.





The Singapore airport was beautiful. I took many other photos and had to limit myself considerably when posting them.


OK, I guess I'll have to put the rest of the pictures in another posting.

 

Musings

Ne how! Ne chi shenme? Wo chi bagel hua he hong cha. Wo xie huan.

Anyways… Right now I’m sitting at the Starbuck’s at Taipei 101 with my friend Alyssa and her roommate Louise. All the Taiwanese students are so kind and generous, especially to us meguoren exchange students.

I figured it would be good for me to just let everyone know exactly how things are and what I’ve been doing, rather than random pictures and cryptic messages about Taiwan’s political history. It’s difficult, though. I’ve been having trouble forming a narrative about my trip. Plus, there are so many details, and they all seem important. But I’ll try, though it may be out of order.

My room is very small… it’s about 12X15, and I share it with three other girls, all Taiwanese. All the rooms are set up the same way, with loft beds above our desks and little closet-y things. My mom sent with me Dan’s old extra-long dorm sheets and a mattress pad, but they’re not very useful, as mattress pads need mattresses. The beds here are made of metal and something resembling laminate flooring, and we have these straw mats on top of them. It was hard to get used to at first, but now I’m sleeping pretty comfortably.

I wasn’t going to put up the mosquito netting they gave me at first, but I quickly changed my mind. I never saw any mosquitoes, yet somehow I woke up covered in bites. So I put it up, and it worked okay, but now it’s falling apart (stupid Ikea) and I can’t find another. Also, since I’ve been wearing shorts and skirts lately, my legs are covered with awful, itchy bites. I’m all the time smearing hydrocortisone on them. If anyone has any advice, let me know. ;)

I have had some experience with the hospital system here (not firsthand, luckily). One of the other exchange students, Keith, was having really awful diarrhea, cramping and vomiting a few weeks ago, so at about 3am we took him to the ER of a nearby hospital. Unfortunately, we learned after the fact that it was not a very reputable one. They hooked him up to an IV for dehydration, and put him in the observation room for the night. It wasn’t a fun place to be. It was really grimy, and there were some really sick people there. At one point, a nurse came over to put some medicine into Keith’s IV. This nurse was probably not as experienced as one might prefer. She hooked up the medicine to the IV, but never attached it to the needle in his arm, instead leaving it dripping onto his bed. We watched this for a few moments, before I ran over to the nurses’ station to ask if she was going to hook it back up, and she ran over and hooked it up. Then, a bit later, she changed the needle, which left Keith’s blood splattered all over the floor. It’s probably still there. I wouldn’t be surprised; this place was really dirty. FYI, if you ever get sick in Taipei, don’t go to WanFang Yeuen.

After a while, a doctor who spoke English came over and told Keith he had inflamed intestines due to an infection, and they wanted to admit him for three to five days. That’s when I took that picture of Keith, it was a moment where we laughed so we wouldn’t cry. He ended up only staying one day after being admitted, and he’s feeling much better now after many doses of various antibiotics.

But this experience highlighted something I’ve felt a lot lately; that I’ve been living in opposite world, where everything I think is a big deal doesn’t matter, and what I think is trivial is of life-or-death importance. For example, personally (and this is just me speaking crazy talk), I think that the moment a person gets admitted into the hospital, they should get a gown and an ID bracelet. And that spattered blood should be cleaned up ASAP. Apparently, I’m the only one here who thinks this way, though.

But single-gendered dormitories, that’s something that should be a priority. There’s a girls dorm, and a boy’s dorm, and never the twain shall meet. It is a sacrilege to even stand in the doorway of a dorm of the opposite sex, and if it’s a true emergency and you simply must enter, you have to get a special red vest to be worn at all times in the building. When Keith was in the hospital, Alyssa and I asked the dorm supervisors if we could go into his room to get some clean clothes and toiletries for him. The woman gave us red vests. As we opened the door to go into the dorms, some boys sitting outside who didn’t know we had permission actually jumped out of their seats and ran after us, telling us not to go in, or we’d get in trouble. Then, the supervisor actually followed us in with A SECURITY GUARD!!! Who kept asking us questions about Keith’s illness and what hospital he was in, like he didn’t believe us. It was either they didn’t trust us, or they thought one of the tiny timid Taiwanese boys was going to attack us. It’s so important that we need a minimum of four cameras pointed at us at all times when in the dorm hallways. Yeah. That’s super important.

But poo on the floor of the girls bathroom can be left there for at least a week. No biggie.

The whole separate-dorm thing wouldn’t be so bad if there was a lounge area where everyone could hang out together. But there is none. If boys and girls want to hang out as a group together, we either have to sit outside or go out. There is a loophole (there’s always a loophole), though; boys are allowed to fix computers in the girl’s dorms. Computers tend to break a lot around here. ;)

By the way, did I mention we have a “curfew”? I’d tell you more about it if it actually meant anything, besides the campus supervisor wandering around meekly telling random people to please be in by 12:30.

All of us exchange students have been unble to sleep lately. Last night I was up at 2, wandering the halls, and as I turn the corner on the 3rd floor, I see Alyssa come out of her room, and she says "I can't sleep!" And I said "I can't either!" We tried to go sit on the patio area in front of the dorms, but the security guard flashed his flashlight at us.

Here's Alyssa helping me clean:















And here's our neighborhood, JingMei:

 

Pictures

Some pictures for your viewing enjoyment...


Fellow expats Jordan and Alyssa humbly greet the locals on the subway

Some interesting sculpture on the train platform

This is Keith.
Keith is sad.
Keith is very sad.
Keith had a bad day.
What a day Keith had!

 

2-28-1947

On Feburary 28th, I went to the 2-28 memorial park just to see what was going on. The 28th was the annaversary of what is called the Taiwanese holocost. I figured this was an important part of Taiwan's history and key in their development of democracy. I went with my friends Alyssa, Keith and Connor.

Anyways, when we got off the MRT station, we were handed literature from a group advocating Taiwan's enterence into the UN, which set the tone for the day.

As we walked through the park, there were lots of booths set up and in front of the monument there was a huge tent set up over a stage, where someoneone was giving a speech. As we got closer, we couldn't see who was speaking, but we could see that there was no audience in the tent, only press. We also noticed an alarmingly high level of security. Although I couldn't understand what was said, I stood and listened. After it finished, I asked a woman who spoke english about who was speaking and what was said. She said, "That was our president! He was saying we should have an independent Taiwan!" I was stunned. Asides from the security, I never would have thought it was the president speaking, because there was so few people there. There was a crowd, definetely, but it wasn't packed. People would wander in, listen for a bit, clap, then move on. Certainly not a scene you would see in America. I guess because Taiwan is so small it's not a big deal to hear the president speak.

After that, we went over to the 2-28 Memorial museum, housed in the building of the radio station which brodcasted news of the incident to Taipei. When we walked into the museum, everything was in chinese, so we were just going to get an english guidebook ad walk through alone, but we met a Taiwanese man named Victor who spoke english and said he would take us through and translate the signs. I assumed he was a tour guide, though he didn't have a name badge as the others did. But he was quite knowldgeable on the topic an was really generous with his time and explained everything to us.

I'm going to try to relate here the events of 2-28-1947 as well as I can, from what I saw in the museum. I was going to write a paper on this anyways, so hopefully this will make sense.

During WWII, Taiwan was under Japanese rule. Because the Japanese took raw materials from Taiwan to aid the war, life was tough, inflation was high, the government was corrupt. In 1945, the Japanese signed a treaty giving Taiwan over to the Chinese under Chaing-Kai Shek. When this happened, the Taiwanese people were happy because the corrupt Japanese rule was over. They hoped for China to bring a new era to Taiwan. On August 29th, the Chinese appointed Chen-Ye to be the govorner of Taiwan. However, there were no Chinese people in Taiwan until October, when chinese military personel and citizens came. By the end of 1945, the language had changed from Japanese to Chinese, and the chinese began shipping materials out of Taiwan to aid the war.

The beginning of 1946 is when things get complicated. Only a little over two months after chinese arrival in Taiwan, inflation began to go up. Because of inflation, railroad ticket and bus prices went up, and teachers began to ask for higher salaries. In August, there was a three-month delay in teacher's salaries. and they banned the japanese language in schools. all the while, they continued shipping materials to China. On September 17th, they shipped 9,700 tons of coal from Taiwan to China, and later banned the trade of gold. There was evidence of bribery in the government, but the citizens who complained were imprisoned.On October 25, Chaing-Kai Shek and his wife visited Taiwan for the first time since gaining control of Taiwan a year earlier. Protests and demonstrations became more frequent. By January 1947, electricity and water expenses had doubled, and the price of rice had skyrocked.

On February 27th, a woman selling cigarettes without the proper tax stamp was apprehended by the police, who began beating her. Another citizen tried to stop them, so they shot and killed him. This sparked massive riot, and people surrounded the police station demanding the policeman who fired the shot. By March 6th, the rioting had spread to south Taiwan.On March 3rd, Gov. Chen Yi set up a "February 28th Incident Settlement Comittee" and offered to call a cease-fire and release all political prisoners. Meanwhile, he secretly requested troops from the mainland and made a list of all opposers. Once the troops arrived, he declared the settlement comittee illegal and ordered all disidents to be killed. The rioting was quelled through indiscriminant killing.

On March 13th, Chen Yi began what he called "the purge", which meant hunting down and killing all doctors, lawyers, teachers, councilmen, intellectuals- in other words, any one who had recieved a Japanese education. They were not overly careful in who they killed and how they did it, so many thousands of unrelated persons were also killed. Due to pressure from the U.S., Chiang Kai-shek dismissed Chen Yi from his post on April 22. He was sentenced to death in 1950 for collaborating with the comunists during the civil war. In total, about 28,000 people were killed (around 1 for every 200 citizens).

In 1949, Chaing Kai Shek lost his battle to get mainland China under the power of the Kumanting party, and so fled to Taiwan and for the next forty years the Taiwanese lived under martial law. As we were going through the meseum, when we got to the part where they were describing the people who were killed, Vincent, who was showing us around, pointed to the picture of a senator who had spoken against the Kumantaing regime and said "That was my grandfather." That was really amazing. He said that after this incident, his family moved to Michigan.

Knowing this history explains a lot, like why no one wants to talk about politics. I ask all the students here if they watch the news or are interested in politics, but they say they aren't. They associate politics with unpleasantness, and don't want to think about unpleasant things One girl told me, "I know I should pay more attention, but I just want to be a kid!" As I am on my best behavior as a representative from the United States, I refrained from telling her this was stupid, but it really is. They don't want to talk about pollution or Bush, either. The people here are so nice, but they are so shy and reserved that it keeps them from being vocal about what they think. I will have to do something about this...