Arrival to Taiwan

On August 1, 2008, I arrived in Taiwan on EVA Airlines flight 0001. The flight was extremely long, 13 hours to be exact. Despite the length of the flight, the aircraft itself was quite bearable for economy seats. I remember flying on Delta and United internationally, and they were nothing compared to EVA Airlines. On EVA, each passenger had their own interactive touch screen that gave them the option to watch a movie, pick a television show, or play a game. The leg space was great for an economy seat, and the accommodations for the business and first class elite were amazing.

The people I flew in to Taiwan with were Mary, Jamie, Ann, Brett, Adam, and Julia. Once we made it to Taiwan we ran into a few more girls: Virginia, Evie, Alana, and Jill. Soon Mandy, Nell, Elizabeth and Faith met up with us as well. We all took the shuttle to our hotel. They provided rooms for each of us, but they were not all ready when we arrived so we had to split up between a few rooms for everyone to freshen up. After freshening up, they distributed $20,000NTD to each of us and we headed to the Foundation for lunch boxes. After lunch they gave us more explanations of the living arrangements and expectations. We walked to a local electronic store to take pictures for our ARC (alien resident card). Then we all went to Story Land, an interactive historical children’s museum. After the museum we all went to dinner at a Chinese Muslim restaurant. We were all soooo exhausted, we had landed in Taiwan at 5 am and we didn’t get a chance to really rest until we made it back home from dinner around 8:30 pm, and to top it off we had to have our luggage downstairs by 8:20 am to go to Yilan in the morning.

I woke up the next day well rested and extremely excited to see where I was going to live for the next 11 months. Taipei seemed really nice and similar to Beijing in its size and culture, but I had no real idea what Yilan was going to be like. It took almost an hour or so to travel to Yilan because of all the traffic going through the 3 long tunnels that connect Yilan to Taipei. As soon as we exited the 3rd tunnel, we were able to catch our first glimpse of the county. To the left I could see the Pacific Ocean and a glimpse of Turtle Island that was not too far off the shores. There were palm trees everywhere and the weather and location of the city reminded me of Florida. They split the 16 people in our group up into two groups, one was to live in Loudong and the other was to live in Yilan City. I was amongst the latter group, and thus was going to live in downtown Yilan for the month of August. In September, we will move to our permanent locations depending on our placements with the LETs (Local English Teachers).