Poly GIP Taiwan

Day 4 - Fazhi Goodbye 大家好！This is William and Jordan reporting for Day 4 of our Taiwan trip! To start our day off, we woke up to a beautiful breakfast prepared by A Mi Lun’s chefs! Our breakfast consisted of bread with assortments of different spreads, along with Taiwanese cabbage, pork, rice, and many other staples. After we finished our breakfast, we split up into 3 vans and headed to the Zhuoshui River near our hotel. The van ride down to the river was super fun as we went off-road through the river and over rocks. As we arrived at the river, many of us decided to get in for a quick dip. We safely waded in the beautiful river while overlooking the mountains. Many students also decided to make rock  fixtures . We also visited a part of the river that was directly beneath a massive aqueduct that connected the two sides of the mountain.   After our fun adventure to the Zhuoshui River, we had an archery contest. Jack did the best out of all of us with a score of 36/50! As our a...

大家好！It's Mia and Alex. :) At 10 am, we were teachers; at 8 pm, we were Bunun princesses.  After getting to bed early the night before and still fighting off some jetlag, we met in the lobby at 8:50 am to depart from the beautiful Sun Moon Lake. Although we were disappointed to let go of such amazing views, those feelings quickly dissipated as we entered a new part of our trip. We drove about 30 minutes to a location where we got into three smaller vans as our large tour bus would not be able to navigate the small, winding roads that we embarked upon to enter the remote Pingshan Village.  We ooh’ed and ah’ed at the beautiful, lush scenery of the Pingshan Village and then we finally arrived at Fazhi Elementary School. We walked past classrooms full of kids gaping at us because, as Ms. Chung told us, we likely were the first Americans they had ever met. A big thanks to Kevin, the Fazhi Elementary School English teacher, who kindly set us up in a rest room full of Taiwanese s...

  Ni hao! This is Melanie and Kieran for the second day of the Taiwan 2026 GIP blog! Today, after a night of tossing, turning, and jet lag, we started our day off with a crisp wake-up call at 7:30 before heading down to eat breakfast at the hotel. At breakfast, there was a great variety of food, from traditional Taiwanese steamed buns to American delights like chicken nuggets and french fries! We then kicked off our daily activities by biking around Sun Moon Lake in the steaming hot weather. There, we followed Vincent and biked past beautiful views of the lake and different bridges, stopping very often to take pictures, until we finally reached the Sun Moon Lake Xiangshan Visitor Center. We parked our bikes and took a brief pause to take more photos, refill our water bottles, and enjoy the AC of the souvenir store! We then said farewell to the visitor center and biked back to the hotel; however, we enjoyed some free sample shrimp chips that a local store was passing out by our hote...

     Hello everyone! This is Ayende and Mira, proud to write the first blog post for the Taiwan 2026 GIP Trip! After a tiresome 14 hour flight filled with sour gummy skittles and the newly released movies you always get to watch on a plane (how do airlines get access to them???), we finally arrived at Taoyuan International Airport located in Taipei, Taiwan. It felt great to finally step into a new country and leave a week of difficult finals behind, literally. We walked through the airport all the way to customs where we needed to fill out a long google form and then wait in a long line for non-citizen entry. We were able to push through these obstacles, but then another road block appeared. We needed to find our luggage. We searched through baggage claim areas, yet somehow our luggage was almost impossible to find. That was when Ms. Chung roared from the crowd and exclaimed that our baggage was in baggage claim number 7, in the back of the airport! Finally we were all ab...

  June 15, 2024 While breakfast is usually not a topic of blogging, I wanted to start by appreciating the waitress at the Puli Ease Hotel where we were staying. This incredibly kind and caring lady saw how rushed our breakfast was, and put in the extra effort to ensure we could take our food to-go, and then gave us more food from the buffet to-go. This was a level of helpfulness I had never seen before, and she was truly incredibly kind and helpful. But moving on from breakfast, we left the hotel (to the goodbye waves of the waitstaff) and headed towards a paper-making factory. This factory still made paper the traditional way, and gave us a new perspective on how such a frequently-used daily item is made. We learned how the inner bark of the tree is harvested, soaked, boiled, bleached, and shredded to make pulp, and then we got to actually make the paper from there. Using traditional trays and bamboo mats, we scooped up wood pulp and water, then shook it to distribute evenly. Afte...