Stinky tofu is not for me

It is currently 11:27 PM, Taiwanese time.

So, I arrived safely in Taipei and met up with my partner and two other people, Vicki and Cato, who will work not too far from where we are staying. There was some confusion with the driver, who spoke no English, and we spoke very little Mandarin. He was supposed to take Vicki and Cato as well and drop us off in our respective groups, but none of us knew that. He made a phone call to an unnamed lady who translated to us that the driver was wondering where the other two people were (only Allison and I followed him to begin with :P)

The driver dropped us off a small apartment right across the street from a 7-11 .Yes, they have those here too, except the wares are a lot more Taiwanese, as you can imagine. We finally meet our mentor and provider, Dr Shen-Shan Lu, who greeted us warmly and promptly showed us to our apartment and gave us a tour.

This is our living room. I love that fan, seriously.

This is my room:

Our kitchen! The machine which you can only see half of is for water. The hot water is really HOT! There's a small fridge behind the door and no microwave, but I'm not worried about that.

Initial observations about Taipei after a little exploring:

- The buildings here are, shall we say, spatially efficient. I've never seen so many little stores in one area. There are easily 20 different food places in just a mile or two radius around our apartment. Also around 10 bicycle/auto stores.

- Scooters and motorcycles outnumber cars 10 to 1. Oh, and the traffic is pretty crazy here! It is common to see motorcycles weave in and out of the way of trucks or cars. There is always a crazy amount of scooters parked outside a building.

After waking up this morning and taking care of blogging/email/etc business, Allison and I went for a walk to look around. Apparently there's an exhibition going on in the local museum, covering the Chinese war of three nations. We headed to the botanical garden, which is where we're going to be working for the next 4 weeks (after that we're going to the field sites). We went to the wrong building, to the confusion of our mentor. He sent two of his staff member, Sophia and Jason, to fetch us. They brought us to the correct building and we met the rest of Dr Lu's staff: Poki, Anita, and Michael. Super awesome friendly bunch.

It was around lunch time when we arrived so we walked to a noodle place and were treated to some vegetable noodle soup. There were these chunks in the soup that I swear looked and tasted like meat, but were made of soy beans, if I'm not mistaken. We ordered a plate of stinky tofu, after I was persuaded to at least give it a try. It really did reek, they weren't kidding. After I bravely tried a bite, I decided that stinky tofu is not for me (and we have a blog title, folks!) Jason joked that he hated stinky tofu. "I hate it, so I must destroy it," he said, taking a big bite.

Allison and I spent the rest of the after working on our demonstration with two cameras and one microphone, reviewing it so that when we actually present it, everything goes smoothly.

Chinese I learned today:

Store: 商店 (Shāngdiàn) - dian means store, add a prefix to describe what kind of store. Shangdian just means any kind of store. Bookstore - shu dian

Restaurant: 餐厅 (Cāntīng)

Goodbye: 再见 (Zàijiàn)

You're welcome: 不客气 (Bù kèqì)

Elevator: 电梯 (Diàntī)

Stinky tofu: 臭豆腐 (Chòu dòufu)

Forest: 森林 (Sēnlín)

Zai jian! (for now)