To Taiwan with Students

It does not always mean you have had a delayed flight when you are behind your schedule during your tour abroad. Our plain arrived at Taoyuan International Airport about a half hour earlier than its flight schedule. However, a bus had trouble, and that caused one class to leave the airport well behind the schedule.
Good luck and bad luck come in turn. The delay forced us to go to Zhongzheng Memorial at dusk. As we climbed the steps to the memorial hall, dusk fell, the buildings and monuments were lit up, and the park itself was surrounded with the lit skyscrapers. Breath-taking beauty spread around us. The lit gate at the other end of the park seemed to be open to a completely alien world.

Next morning, we were in a completely alien world. As we headed to Zhongshan Girls' High School in buses, motorbikes ran around like speeders in Star Wars, cars ran head-to-head as if to make defense against the bikes, and even a public-transportation bus cut in front of ours like a battleship. What a dazzlingly exciting world we were in!
In the high school, each of our students was introduced to their buddy. The Zhongshan buddies escorted our students to a hall where a welcome ceremony was held. Familiar lengthy speeches started. Students, both ours and theirs, familiarly started buzzing. It was, however, rather surprising that as many as 2 broadcasting companies came to take footage. One crew, to my real surprise, picked up two pairs of students and led them out of the hall to have an interview. As the ceremony went on, another crew naturally started interviewing another few pairs of students in the hall. A Japanese photographer who was accompanying our tour was taking pictures, in contrust, with reserve.

Jiufen used to flourish in its gold rush days, and revived itself with tourism, instead of becoming a ghost town. A famous Taiwanese movie, Feiqing Chengshi, was filmed here. The imaginary town in the Japanese movie, Spirited Away, was inspired by this town. These two films helped attract both domestic and Japanese tourists.
Its streets looked retrospective. I went into a public lavatory, which looked modern. However, it had, as expected, no toilet paper. It was a flush toilet, but it had a bin to put used paper in.

It is always fun and exciting to see how our students behave in a different culture. This time, I could even observe how Taiwanese students react to our students.
In Zhongshan Girls' High School, some of our boy students were very popular. I was wondering if they had been, or would be, so popular in Japan. So many girls, so many minds. Cultural differences seem to have even varied the minds.

Chinese cuisine is one of the three best food in the world, and is one of our choices when we dine out in Japan. Having Chinese food every day, however, is another thing, especially when the dishes are genuine and are not modified for Japanese tastes.
One girl student got sick in her stomach, and had to spend her afternoon with me at a cafe along Tanshui Beach. She had a cup of tea, and I had a cup of coffee, as we spent more than 2 hours on the deck of the shop. A middle-aged Chinese man was playing the ocarina as a kind of a street musician near the shop across the promenade. He seemed to have just 4 or 5 songs in his repertoire. As we heard him perform many cycles of his songs, sipping our cups, a marvelous purplish orange sky ceded itself to the dusk. Spotted lights romantically twinkled along the beach. Taiwanese couples started filling the beach, in stead of their predecessors, families and large groups of people. The girl was unluckily fated to be entertained with the middle-aged man's music together with another middle-aged man at her table.

Last-minute shopping is always busy and thrilling in the airport. It's a challenge to try to use up your last penny. After going through the embarkation procedure, some girls were busy purchasing further souvenirs including brand cosmetics, other girls were visiting fast food restaurants to use their last pennies, some boys had given up and were making a long line to exchange their Taiwanese currency, wasting their time and charge for remittance, or they might have been paying their charges to Taiwanese officials to show their gratitude for the friendliness of Taiwanese people.
The time had come for the students to come to the boarding gate. Three girl students were still missing. They must have been those who asked me the whereabouts of Starbucks in the airport. When I started worrying if I should go all over to the other end of the airport, I found three girls rushing toward us along the long corridor. There came the three girls, with their last memory in Taiwan clutched to their bosom, a Taipei Starbucks cup.