Visit National Palace Museum, Formosan Aborigines Museum, and Meet Fuhsing Students!

June 4, 2024

  

Today started off with a phone call at 7:08 AM. Not 7:07, not 7:09. We were meant to wake up at 6:30 AM, but our hotel-phone-alarm clock did not work out! Albeit a bit delayed, we headed downstairs to breakfast nonetheless. Then we served ourselves some breakfast…Breakfast?? More like BreakFEAST (Kratter 2024). From eggs to bamboo soup to steamed dumplings to salted duck eggs to “berry vinegar,” W.O.W! Stomachs full, we boarded our private bus and drove toward the National Palace Museum. It was almost as beautiful as the breakfast: The museum was made of several large traditional, palace-styled buildings, and an orange and cyan-tiled, concave roof. But, the inside was sleek and chic and definitely not bleak! Surrounding the buildings were old-growth trees and tidy gardens, almost in a French-style. The inside had many traces of the true, traditional treasure trove. We viewed pottery and porcelain from the Qing and Ming Dynasty as well as the most intricate carved ivory I’ve ever seen. The ivory carving is even named “the work of devils'' because its level of detail seems impossible for a human to create. We finished our tour and ate upstairs with a panoramic view of the valley (the museum is nestled in the valley).

    After our meal, we took a quick walk to the Aboriginal Museum. Inside, we saw boats from the Indigenous tribes of Taiwan. Currently, the Taiwan government recognizes 16 individual tribes. However, the story of the Indigenous Taiwanese is quite similar to the American Indigenous. We saw their traditional woven clothes, the architecture of their houses, and these tribe’s social structure. We ended the tour by looking at the practice of traditional tattooing… Traditional tattooing does not seem too fun, but it is a rite of passage for many tribe members. Some tribes value face tattoos while others prefer to tattoo other parts of the body. The process is not fun: I’ll just say this: modern tattooing is High School Music-styled basketball, while traditional tattooing is the NBA finals. One’s a lot more difficult than the other. Then, we left the museum and got on our chartered bus and started on our journey to the one, the only…Fuhsing High School.

Hey guys, it’s Alena. A special thanks to Theo for his zesty descriptions of our morning. Even though I had gotten a full ~8 hours of sleep, after our action-packed morning from the National Palace Museum to the delicious bowl of niu rou mian (beef noodle soup) to the Aboriginal Museum, I still craved a good nap. But as we drove through the vibrant streets of Taipei past the bakeries and food stalls and storefronts and people simply going about their daily lives, the anticipation of finally reuniting with our besties from Fuhsing had me jittery with excitement. Upon arriving at Fuhsing, we were greeted by the sound of children playing in the courtyard. A whole posse of kids in green and white and navy uniforms ran through our cohort as they played tag. To say that Fuhsing is a beautiful school would be an understatement. First of all, location. Fuhsing is located in an affluent part of Taipei with plenty of luxury department stores with 7/11’s and Family Marts interspersed among them. Second of all, its CAMPUS. Our friend from Fuhsing, William, gave us a tour of the school. The school’s arrangement is two tall and long buildings on either side of the main courtyard with a bridge connecting them in the middle and another building at the back of the courtyard. We screamed “STEVEN!!” as we laid eyes upon our friends who we hadn’t seen since January.

After reuniting with our friends and walking around campus, we headed to class. I went to art class with Jamie, and wow- those kids are talented. They were working on still lifes of fruit, and their teacher let Dylan, Emma, and I try too. But let’s just say… some of us are more artistically challenged than others… my pastel drawing looked like the inside of a children’s coloring book after it’s been desecrated by a toddler. Despite our lack of artistic prowess, all the girls in Jamie’s art class were so kind and welcoming, complimenting our developing Chinese and sharing laughs with us. Once we honed in our artistic skills (or lack thereof) for no more than 45 minutes, we headed to biology club. Even though we may think of enzymes and organelles and cramming for a biology test until 3 in the morning when we think of biology, this club really emphasized the fun, or rather cute, side of biology. After a short lecture, we got to interact with a bunny, two guinea pigs, and a hamster. Once the final period of the day concluded, we headed to our Welcome Ceremony. We watched a traditional musical ensemble featuring the guzheng, erhu, keyboard, violin, and cello, and we were blown away by the quality of their performance. So… the day before, we were asked if we wanted to perform anything, and… well, let’s just say it was NOT professional-adjacent. Our performance entailed 5 of us awkwardly huddling around a microphone to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.” You can imagine what that looked (and sounded) like. [Noted by Chung Laoshi: You all put on a great show! The audience was swinging to the music and thoroughly enjoyed it!] After the ceremony, we walked to dinner to meet our host families and eat a Taiwanese specialty. Two words: Hot. Pot. And one more word: Delicious. We ate SO MUCH MEAT. Towers of beef trays were stacked on every table as the smell of mala broth wafted through the air. One table even ate over 70 trays of meat. At that point, whether it was because of all the activities we had done throughout the day or because of the self-induced food coma, we all parted ways and headed home with our host families to get a good night’s sleep. We look forward to what tomorrow has in store!

Signing off,

Theo and Alena :)