Tuesday began with breakfast at NTNU (National Taiwan Normal University). We're staying in their hostel that is for foreign visitors, kids on camps, and possibly also a standard hostel, I never quite figured that out. We have breakfast coupons to a couple of cafes on campus, so today was Camo Cafe. Breakfasts are a sandwich and coffee or tea, so I had one egg and bacon sandwich with ketchup on white bread, and the other day I had a bun with a full sized hash brown, fried egg, and ketchup, and some veggies. Neither was overwhelmingly good but the coffee was good, Americano with fresh espresso, milk, and cream. Coffee is overall quite good here I've found.
After breakfast we visited the Affiliated Senior High School of NTNU and had a great campus visit. We sat in on an economics class where we learned about the Tulip industry and supply and demand. The teacher did an amazing job of getting us involved with a warm up where she had the kids brainstorm reasons people in Taiwan would shop at Costco, then they had to try to guess her favorite three things to get from there. They had a great time and we got to know something about her. This part was in English which was great. Then she got into the lesson and switched to Chinese. A lot of us have taught a similar lesson before, so we were mostly able to follow along. I was really impressed with her rapport with her class. The kids in Taiwan stay in one classroom all day and the teachers move from room to room, so that was interesting to see in person.
After the lesson, we met with several people from the school (an English and History teacher plus a couple of directors) plus a student and had a really open and frank discussion about what school is like in our two countries. We talked about things like dealing with cell phones and internet use, high stakes testing, the impact COVID had on learning, respect for teachers, and school shootings/air raid fears. I'd say a good portion of what we talked about led to us feeling more similarities than differences between our cultures, which was pretty cool to see. I wish teachers in the US were respected as much as they are in Taiwan though!
The school has some really cool artwork scattered around including this kind of strange painting on the stairs. I took the picture before seeing the top step and then cracked up - see if you can figure out why.
Their views of the city are great too, this is from the upper levels.
After a lunch back at NTNU, we had a 3 hour lecture on an Introduction to Taiwan History given by Dr. Ian Rowen, a Professor at NTNU who studied at CU Boulder. He covered Taiwanese history from its earliest settlement through modern times, so it was a wild ride. His stories were amazing, he knows or has interacted with a surprisingly large number of modern politicians. My biggest takeaways were probably about the modern political structure of Taiwan and the ROC vs DPP. There was so much I didn't know.
We take group pictures absolutely everywhere, so keep an eye out for the banner behind us...you'll see it a lot!
After the lecture a large group of us walked down to Din Tai Fung, a bao restaurant that originated in Taipei. It was absolutely amazing and lived up to all of my expectations for bao. We ate about 10 different things and were stuffed.
I love how they show what's inside the dumpling, this one was obviously chicken.
I split a shaved ice with two other people on the way home because it was approximately the size of my head, but didn't get any photos. It was a layer of ice made with something that tasted vaguely like coconut water, then two huge scoops of mango (which is in season here and is the best mango I've ever had in my life), then a huge scoop of mango sorbet. It hit the spot! Back in my room I took this selfie to try to show the effect the humidity has on my hair, it's just curling all over the place. You'll see it get progressively worse and worst through my photos, I can't figure out how to control it plus I'm sweating absolute buckets every day so it just gets wet then dries then gets wet again. Pretty gross.
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