Everything in Chinese

02.07.2009 20:15 P.M. (The date/time stamp is a new thing I'm adding because I sometimes post out of order that things are written.)

Where in the World is D Today?

Continually re-wiring his hard seemingly wired brain.

Today was a new first. With the exception of a relatively short phone call to Columbia and about 10 sentences with my roommate Josh as we were passing each other coming and going, my whole day was spent in Chinese.

I had several tasks to accomplish during the day. 1) Call Columbia. Check 2) eat some breakfast. Check 3) Find a laundry mat. This relatively simple task in the U.S. took me about 3 hours of trial and error today. But along the way I discovered where the movie theater is! AND Movies here are in English with Chinese subtitles. That’s a bit cockeyed but hey, they don’t consult me on these things. All I can do is work within the framework that currently exists.

Back to my quest for clean clothes…… The more I tried to enter act today with Taiwanese people the more frustrated I became. This was due partially to the ever present language barrier and also due to the seemingly innate shyness in Taiwanese towards Westerns. (I’ll come back to that in a moment.) But with the help of lots of hand gestures, coins and washing machine sounds the deed got done. And just in case you were wondering, the laundry mat is an easy 10 min walk from my apartment if I take a leisurely pace. I think it’s gonna cost me about $200 to get my clothes clean. I’ll let you know how that goes. 3) Find Laundry mat, Check!

4) Find some Lysol to kill mold in bathroom. Check and in that process found a local grocery store. (Say it with Me) AWESOME!! Again about a 5 minute walk from my apartment. 5)Find the Carefore. Carefore in the French version of WalMart. Don’t Ask, I don’t know. In the 10 sentences conversation with Josh he said it was about 4 blocks away. I never found it. I followed what I thought were his directions but ended but up on Yanping Rd. (That is the street I live on by the way.) I was clearly lost. I think I may have even said out loud, “How the heck did I end up on Yanping?!) Blog entry for another day “Industrialization, Globalization, and the City Planner is on Drugs!” So in the face of that failure and seriously hurting feet, I’m working on 5 hours of walking now, I head back to the grocery store get a few items and go back to the apartment.

Now back to my previous thoughts on Taiwanese shyness and Westerners. First thing you must note is that I will rarely refer to myself the U.S. My being from the U.S. is irrelevant here. I am simply Western and NOT Taiwanese. Neither good nor bad, just is. I have found many Taiwanese just simply afraid to speak to me. They seem to be SUPER AFRAID of making a mistake in front of me. It doesn’t seem to dawn on them that they are the ones in control. I am the one that doesn’t speak the language! They have the power position from my point of view. This applies to Taiwanese that are say about 28 yrs. old and older. The younger the less afraid they are to at least try even though it’s totally frustrating for all of us, they do want to be helpful. Kudos for that.

No, as far as other “Westerners” I encounter on the streets are concerned. They are a bunch of arrogant bastards! They WILL NOT speak to me or even acknowledge my presence. I had to lump a huge category of people into one pot, but I don’t see many Westerners and when I do I get crapped on. So if you’re a westerner out there in a foreign land reading this, “What up with that?!”

I don’t think that this a race issue. I spoke to couple of black women on the street the other day thinking they might be American, but the were from someone in Africa. It was a very brief encounter, but they seemed happy to be seen! I think this is a case of an Imperialist mindset. I am only inferring here based on what I know in history, White Europeans are used to being on top and that mindset seems to be the one I encounter on the streets. Just a thought.

One other quick observation from today and others; children are the same all over the world. They climb up on things they probably shouldn’t. They make funny faces at strangers and say things they probably ought not and embarrass their parents. They wonder off from their parents, get disoriented and freakout with lots of screaming for their parents, and theirs a father not too far away holding a purse and a coat saying something in the order of “Boy! Come on here and stop all that screaming!” Kids bump and run and trip and crash and get up and do it all over again, sometimes smile and sometimes get fearful of strange faces. There is this basic need to explore their world in whatever manner they can. These little Taiwanese kids are EXACTLY the same as my boys were growing up half way around the world in a different time. God is so good in His design of us. When I see these kids, I have just a little more hope in the possibilities that someday maybe, just maybe, Humans will get it right. Maybe this adventure of mine will pave the way a bit for one of these little ones. I like the sound of that.

Peace