Culture shocked.

I’ve been gone 6 months and I thought I had managed to escape this rather uncomfortable state of being. I was wrong. After convincing myself that I’d been slowly losing my mind over the past 4 weeks, I accidentally came across some information on culture shock.

My perception of culture shock was always this sudden onset, overwhelmed feeling of standing on the street an hour after stepping off an airplane in some exotic land thinking, “Holy shit. This isn’t _______ (insert hometown here)”, much like I did upon arrival in Saigon. The thing about that feeling is that you get over pretty it quickly, and 2 minutes later you’re enthralled by your surroundings, gawking at everything like you’re a kid in a candy store. This is not culture shock.

Culture shock is late onset and doesn’t happen to any random traveler. Only those who choose to put down roots in a foreign culture and manage to do this for at least a few months will experience culture shock in its true form. It’s characterized by the following:

- Idealization of the homeland
- Negative stereotyping of the host culture and its people
- Obsession with cleanliness
- Excessive irritability
- Insomnia
- Insecurity
- And lots of other fun things…

I’d say it probably started with insecurity. All of a sudden I realized that I had no clue how to understand the social cues here, and I was constantly aware of what I was/wasn’t doing and how the Taiwanese were reacting to me. I always felt like I was doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and that everyone was looking at me thinking things like “stupid foreigner” and “get the hell out of my country”.

Not so much.

This then led to the negative stereotyping, which I won’t go into with any further detail because I’m entirely aware of what an ass it makes me to walk into a country that has been so welcoming and think such negative things. Glad to say the negative stereotyping has since passed.

The negative stereotyping segued into irritability, where every minor aggravation seemed 10 times bigger than what it really was. You all should’ve been flies on the wall in my brain for a day. My patience had far surpassed the point of unforgiving, but thankfully this never went any further than my own internal dialogue. It’s hard to jump off your scooter in a giant intersection and express your rage on the idiot who’s conveniently chosen the ONLY 3 feet of open space in which you could make a right turn to rummage in her purse, find her ringing cell phone, and proceed to answer it. At a green light. I’m still not over that.

The obsession with cleanliness has been a gradual thing, but yah, I’m probably borderline OCD. I wash my hands a minimum of 10 times a day, partly because I spend the majority of my waking hours with hundreds of germ filled little monsters, partly because I see too many cockroaches not to, and partly because I’m constantly freaked out that I’ve touched something foreign and gross that will soon end up in my eye.

Insomnia has been a less than fun side effect of all this. Over the past few weeks I’ve been lucky to fall asleep before 4 or 5am, but thankfully this is finally changing, as is everything else. Now that I’ve pinned down the cause of my insomnia, road rage, and obsessive-compulsive hand washing, I’m happy to report it’s all fading away.

THIS:

is what I call home.

It's pretty crazy. One minute you're getting on your scooter for the first time, driving into the chaotic hell that are the roads of Kaohsiung. It's seemingly 5 minutes later and you're calling chaotic hell your home.

Today I went to Lotus Lake which is a series of pagodas around a small lake. I was reminded of home when I saw some Mounties, Taiwan styles:

The guy saw me trying to take a picture of him, so he actually turned around his horse to pose for me. I got a little embarrassed at this point and pretended like I was taking a picture of something else, but he busted me and totally knew it. I snuck a picture as he was leaving. Little did I know that I would later have another run-in with Taiwanese law-enforcement. I may or may not have gotten horribly lost and ended up in the wrong city AND county, and I may or may not have gotten a police escort back to the familiar roads of Kaohsiung. Woops.

The following are pictures of Lotus Lake in Kaohsiung.

Taipei

This weekend, while you were enjoying copious amounts of beer at Moses and fabulous turkey dinners at home, I was off on the other side of the world wandering the streets of Taipei, Taiwan. October 10th is a national holiday in Taiwan, so 4 other teachers and I decided to make the 4-hour bus trip north to see the big city of 13 million people.

The buses here are ridiculous. Giant leather reclining chairs that are easily twice the size of a greyhound seat, complete with massagers, a personal TV and play station. Needless to say the trip started off well…

Our first day we went to Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world (no longer the CN Tower) and shopped. It was a bit of a reverse culture shock as there were tons of Western stores and foreigners. We’d been on a bus overnight and hadn’t slept too much so the sight seeing was kept to a minimum. We went out that night to a bar called Luxy, which at $30 for cover and $10 for a drink, proved to be an investment…a worthwhile one. We were actually still dancing when they turned off the music and asked us to leave. Yep, a little embarrassing. Apparently we were enjoying our tequila shots and each other’s company so much that we failed to notice the exodus of 1000 people.

Sunday I decided to take off on my own to explore the sights of Taipei. There’s a little bit of English in Taipei, so it wasn’t a terribly difficult solo mission after living in Kaohsiung for 5 months. I went to the Chiang Kai Chek Memorial, an absolutely enormous complex of 3 buildings (memorial and 2 pagodas) which, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, is dedicated to Chiang Kai Chek. He’s a dead Taiwanese nationalist who was a little on the psychotic side. I then went around to a couple of temples where I apparently distracted heavily from the activities at hand. It’s amazing how one single white person can attract more attention than a centuries old, intricately built, sprawling Buddhist temple…but I did. It was a domino effect. 2 young Taiwanese girls came up and asked for a picture with me, then another group, and then another group. Needless to say I felt a little awkward. Any non-Chinese in Taiwan is quite a novelty.

Today we decided to make it up to the top of Taipei 101 and look out from the observatory. It was a pretty amazing sight, which you’ve seen in the pictures above. It was definitely a good weekend and Taipei’s a pretty good city. Much cleaner than Kaohsiung. There’s much more I’d like to see, shop, and eat in Taipei so a return trip is in order!

The first picture is of the Longshan Temple and then, obviously, the view from the top of Taipei 101. If you double click the Taipei 101 shots you'll get a much better view ont he city. The last two are two of the three buildings at the CKS memorial.

Stupid Foreigners...

Those who know me know that you’d be very hard pressed to find someone more scatter brained than myself. I do fun things such as lose my wallet on an annual basis, drive over my iPod, go to the gym without a t-shirt, shoes or shorts, forget my knapsack on the city bus, or when I’m REALLY on, I leave a weeks worth of luggage on the greyhound…24 hours prior to taking off for Mexico.

The following story should come as no shock to any of you.

So I’m doing laundry tonight. It’s midnight, and while waiting for my clothes to finish drying I decide it’s the perfect time to see the sights of Kaohsiung. I’m driving down a main street here and my scooter starts to feel funny, so I stop and try to start it again. Nothing. So I try again. Nothing. I try to kick start it, only to realize I don’t really know what this means or what it is I’m supposed to kick. 2 jumps onto some random part of my scooter (which is definitely NOT supposed to be kicked), and one small oil spill later, I am unintentionally sitting on the pavement. I do the most logical thing, which is to get out my cell phone and call Steph or anyone else who can come and pick me up. But oh wait, that’s right. I don’t have minutes on my phone because I went to go buy some more only to realize I’d left my wallet on my bed. Perfect.

I’m starting to get a little worried at this point; it’s 12:30, it’s dark, and there are plenty of creepers driving past me and slowing down, but they’re far too busy staring at the white girl to concern themselves with helping her. Finally 2 girls turn around. They aid in the fruitless attempts at kick-starting my scooter. Once they give up I resign myself to walking my scooter up the road to the nearest scooter shop where I can leave it until tomorrow. The entire scooter-push up the road I’m swearing like a sailor and regretting buying a scooter so cheap. I never consider that maybe, just MAYBE this is my fault, not my scooter’s…and then I see a gas station and it dawns on me that wow, I don’t remember the last time I got gas. Oh wait, yes I do. It was that day 2 weeks ago when I locked my keys inside my scooter seat at the gas station…and oh shit, this is the same gas station, and oh shit again, it’s the same gas attendant that had to pry my seat open with his screw driver and yep, oh shit again, I can tell by jackass smirk on his face as he watches me wheel my gasless scooter towards him that he definitely remembers me.

I will never go back there.