屏東縣 Pingtung County

Whereas Taipei is a uniquely Asian mega city, Pingtung County reminds me much more of other developing foreign countries I’ve been to.    I started in Pingtung City with my class as part of a field trip to the Pingtung Christian Hospital.  With very developed global health projects ongoing in Malawi and elsewhere, the hospital is an important counterexample to the outdated model of strictly Western nations as “donor countries.”

I stayed for the rest of the weekend in Pingtung County, visiting 潮州, 內埔, 車城, 恆春, and 墾丁, as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant friend from my high school Chinese class lives there.  In Neipu, we went with his other Pingtung County Fulbright teacher friends, to a Thai restaurant, where each table was in its own private gondola on a little stream.

綠豆蒜 sweet soup of mixed beans and rice noodles

In Chaozhou, my friend has a huge room with a private bathroom in a huge modern apartment with a nice kitchen (by Taiwanese standards) for 5000 NTD a month.  For that amount in Taipei, you could maybe get a tiny room with a tiny window, no kitchen, and a shared bathroom.  As well, the weather was amazing, warm and sunny the entire time.  They say their few rainy days parallel the few sunny days in Taipei.  But also there’s so much nothing to do there that we went bowling in a nearby town on Friday night.  The towns where all the Fulbright teachers I met lived had no bars, no cafes, no gyms, and few parks.  Many of them had only beginning level Chinese, so the language combined with limited opportunities to meet locals their age meant that most of their friends were other Fulbright teachers in the county.  Especially currently with no tourists allowed from abroad, there are extremely few other foreigners in the area.

Since it is more rural in the south, no one walks anywhere; everyone rides scooters.  I got to ride my first since being in Taiwan, as my friend and I scooted down the coast to Kenting.  There’s no greater joy than riding on the back of a scooter between mountains and oceans with sunny weather and a cool breeze.

We spent the rest of the weekend in Kenting, which gave me extreme nostalgia for Kona, Hawaii.  It was a smaller town with smaller waves, but surfing in the sunshine always gives me a longing to abandon the rat race of real life.

It is a common thing here for the police to turn on
the lights at clubs and check everyone's IDs

My friend’s indigenous co-teacher invited us to her friend’s club, so we ended up at with free drinks at a VIP table of a nearly empty club with live music and glitz worthy of Las Vegas.

We had an enormous amount of fresh sashimi for very cheap by the Houbi Marina, and we climbed to some scenic lookouts in the Maobitou Park (cats present both in the shape of the rock formations and running around the paths).