Despite long term radio silence, I am in fact alive. I use the excuse "I'm an exchange student" for everything now, so I'm just going to apply it here too: I'm an exchange student; we often forget we have blogs on account of all the things we are doing and forgetting (accidentally or on purpose) to write about.
So it's been what, a month? Over a month? I wanted to be quick about this, but that's not going to happen unless I omit a bunch of stuff. So, looks like I'll just have to omit a bunch of stuff. Again.
About a week ago was my 3-month mark, the point at which the culture shock "experts" told us that everything starts to go downhill for a while. You're supposed to miss home, miss the holidays, miss the comfort of being somewhere familiar. I should know by now that things that apply to most people don't usually apply to me, but I still expected some sort of drop in mood, circumstances, etc. around this time.
Not so. Not even a smidgen of a dip. The opposite, in fact.
Now, I'm not saying problems never ever crop up. When you enjoy excitement in your life, they are inevitable. What matters is how you react to them - with solutions, instead of stress and sulking. Once you make the solution your focus, things mysteriously start to work in your favor again. Or at least, that's my experience so far. For every problem, there is a solution - it's just a matter of finding it. And that is not as difficult as it used to sound.
Okay, here's something that might be interesting to some people: all of us exchange students had the opportunity to experience a traditional Taiwanese coming of age ceremony a couple weekends ago. When I first came here, I had this mental image in my head of traditional clothing, fancy temples, complicated rituals, and all these things I just mentally associate with ancient Eastern cultures. You don't really see that in everyday life, or at least most people don't, but this special ceremony was a way to experience it anyway. We were taken to a huge, fancy temple in Taipei with some of the most striking architecture I've ever seen and given traditional clothing to wear for the ceremony. I don't want to know how much the clothes cost, but we got to keep them for free!
Honestly, I've never been one to derive meaning from rituals; it's just not my thing. And I have to admit, I definitely didn't agree with a lot of the ideas presented to us in the script of the ceremony. However, I did enjoy experiencing something that other people find significant in their lives. That is representative of my general mental attitude towards Taiwan: I want to learn to understand and live with this culture, even if I don't want to be fully assimilated into it. Now that I think about it, I feel very much the same about the culture of my own country.
By the way, the reason I have time to do this right now is because I'm home from school with an infection and I already gave in and watched all the episodes of the Office I missed because I didn't feel like studying. What can I say, being sick makes me lazy.
Earlier today I went to see a rather questionable Taiwanese doctor who basically had me diagnose myself. He literally asked me what I thought I had, then gave me an ultrasound (?!?!?!) and prescribed medication for the condition I suggested (good thing I'm pretty sure I'm right). While in America I would just be given a simple antibiotic pill to take twice a day, here I am given a holy ton of different medications (7 pills twice a day, I think?) that I can't find on ANY pill identifier website. Bottoms up, hope I don't die.
Well, that's all for now I think. I have so many things going on that I don't even know where to begin to write anything else. Time to go catch up on another random TV show... I'm thinking House. Illnesses seem less depressing when you watch people who are pretending to have something worse.
