Day 5

We had our first experience with the Taiwanese medical infrastructure today and our first introduction to Kojen. We headed to the head office for 10:30, and were escorted to the hospital by Alison, one of Kojen’s Taiwanese staff members. From the outside, the hospital was one of the nicest buildings we’ve seen so far. The inside felt more like a people processing machine than a place where people are treated. The whole ordeal took less than an hour – in, pictures, rapid health check, blood test, x-ray, out. We experienced what Brett refers to as “positive racism”; after the nurse checked our vision (a test I failed miserably) and our height, weight, and blood pressure, we saw the doctor, who checked our hearing with some machine that made a buzzing sound, and were told we could leave. I actually watched this doctor check off normal in the boxes next to spleen, liver, stomach, etc, without having laid a hand on me. Apparently, this is because I am white and thus healthy. This bothers me both because of my paranoia about my health and because I don’t like being treated preferentially. Ok, I take that back somewhat – it wouldn’t be so bad to be treated extra well when in a completely foreign environment where I am not at ease, particularly because I have been feeling almost invisible since I’ve been here. Walking down the street, I am one non-Asian person in a sea of nine billion Asian people; I think I have seen about 6 other white people since I’ve been here. I have never witnessed such a lack of racial diversity before, and it feels kind of strange. In comparison to Central America, where the locals stare you down, say hello, and are eager to start up a conversation wherever you go, here, people here pass you by without a second glance. I’m not sure why that is yet. I think it is mainly a cultural thing, as from what I’ve been told Asian culture is less outwardly welcoming than I would normally like.

In the afternoon we headed back to Kojen to sign our contracts. We were both feeling pretty good and productive before this but for some reason once we left the office we both felt horrible. I think it was information overload, which lead consequently to emotional overload. Rachel’s bags had finally arrived in Taipei so we decided to head to the airport to pick them up. Christine from Kojen gave us a map and directions to Taoyuan airport via an express bus. Once we’d finally located the bus stop, we waited nearly an hour for it to not come. “Maybe this isn’t the right bus,” we thought, and a nice man behind us who spoke just the smallest bit of English assured us that it was. Still no sign of any bus, the man behind us, who introduced himself to us but I didn’t understand so I’ll just call him Mr. Nice, asked us to share a taxi with him because he was going to miss his flight to Australia. I was so happy merely to have been noticed that I nearly cried, and we clearly accepted his offer. An hour later we were at our destination and without any difficulty picked up the bag and hopped on the express bus back to the city. This, my friends, is where we ran into trouble. We were exhausted, and upon arrival at Taipei Main Station we decided to hop in a cab home – unfortunately for us though, we didn’t have the little slip of paper with our address on it, only the map that Christine had given us, which as it turns out was not so good. The cab driver dropped us off in the location that we pointed to on the map, which turned out not to be near enough to where we needed to go, and we henceforth got horrifyingly lost in downtown Taipei, which was not a nice place for us to be lost in, because everything looks the bloody same. The map was not to scale, and I nearly lost it at one point, until a friendly couple stopped to ask if we needed help, and tried their best to help us find our way until I glorifyingly recognized the Diamond HK Style 24 hour restaurant that was on the corner of the street we needed to be on. Finally home – the word home used as loosely as possible here – we ate noodles from the 7/11 for the third night in a row and I started my 24th birthday off by crying myself to sleep.