Culture Shock

There is a strange sensation I have lately.  I feel slightly nervous, my immune system is wearing down.  My countenance is tired and saggy. I feel internally that something is wrong. It’s sort of like the feeling you have when you wake up from an anxiety dream about sleeping through class or something…speaking of which, I have been having strange and interesting dreams lately…more so after I got my memory foam pillow…hold on a second.

MEMORY FOAM PILLOW ACHIEVED!!!

OK… But with this, I feel like my brain is lagging behind my body. Like I am underwater but my head is in a protective bubble. It is only a matter of time before I am immersed. I wonder how I will react. So apparently this is what being uprooted feels like.

But see, my body is also reacting. This is the land of lunch and dinner…there is not to many American breakfast foods here; Although they do eat eggs with everything and at all times of the day here. They have these things called tea eggs, which are basically hard boiled eggs steeped in a vat of hot black tea. They do not look appealing, but apparently they are all the rage here.  But you know what you can have for breakfast? That’s right…pork dumplings, pork noodles, or pork rice. So needless to say, my body is starting to give me a piece of its mind. If it could speak it would say something like “what IN THE HELL are you doing?”.

So that was inevitable. But on the plus side, it seems that foods are less acidic here, because I had heartburn constantly in the states and I only get it here when I drink…a lot. The restaurants all close between 2 and 5…interesting fact. Here’s something else...apparently Japanese people eat lots of curry, and so do most Asian people. Who knew? I went to a Japanese restaurant and this girl was like “those are Japanese currys” and I was like “really?”. And she was like “yeah they are everywhere in Japan”…who knew?

Here’s a bit on Taiwanese religion; The religion here is Taoism…but not the Taoism you may know from Lao Tzu or the Taoism of Tai Chi. In fact it’s not really even Taoism… it’s Shenism, which is traditional Chinese folk religion with maybe a little Taoism and Confucianism. 

So Taoism is pretty hard to figure out. There is a pantheon of Gods, probably like a hundred of them. This of course is all mixed in with the history of Buddhism, which dates all the way back to ancient India. Most of these concepts are pretty foreign and unfamiliar to us. It seems easier, though, to make a study of Christianity than of Chinese religion if for no other reason than Chinese religion has a few thousand more years of history behind it. I don’t even know how one begins to understand these things. There’s a lot of stuff going on here that seems to have nothing to do with the four noble truths or the eight fold path. What the hell do I know anyway…apparently not that much.

            So I look like captain America today (accidentally). I am wearing red shoes, blue pants, an Obama shirt and a red white and blue towel. I am officially Mr. USA right now. The kids were tough today. These children are better than American inner city children, but maybe only a little better than children from other places. Some of these kids are wearing on my nerves today. And then on the subway, these two little (*)s were full on having a karate match with yelling and everything. I wanted slap the (*) out of them. But I decided that moving to the next train was perhaps a better course of action.

            My boss said I’m probably not eating enough. I think that’s true. Because I think I’m loosing weight. After being in Brazil, my family and I had commented on how we all were skinnier. In other countries, they apparently don’t inject their cattle with creatine…how strange. Anyway, I plan on rectifying this situation presently. Work was stressful today. Had to do my regular class which was giving me a little more nonsense than usual, sub for a class and create a science lesson on the fly for some other class. I was NOT in the mood for this today.

            Another note about Taiwanese society. They have two political parties…Green and Blue. The blue ones want to maintain status quo and occupy the north. The Green ones want independence and occupy the south. Basically, the Blue ones don’t want to provoke China…which seems smart. They don’t really want to reunify because actually, Taiwan is a very liberal society. In fact, I think Taiwan is more liberal than America. Maybe because they all live close together and must be more permissive of various behaviors. Taoism is a departure from Confucianism too, emphasizing wild nature over control. Anyway, society here is highly adaptable and transformative. They all speak at least two languages, Mandarin and Taiwanese and many of them also speak at least some English. They also face constant threat of invasion from mainland China…yet the aboriginal culture is still alive and well in the south and they want independence…so it is a very interesting place to be. That’s all for now.