Taiwan

I feel overwhelmed trying to explain almost 2 years of living abroad doing something I never thought I'd be doing (teaching English) learning something I never thought I'd be learning (Chinese) in a place I never thought I'd be (the other side of the Earth).

Some of my early memories of Asia were Looney Tunes cartoons where they would dig a whole and out came a person from the other side of the Earth - a stereotypically Asian person (things were much less PC back then, weren't they?).

There is just too much to say about living in a culture and learning to understand a culture that is so different from my own. It brings me back to square one. I'm in Taiwan and it's upside down from where I'm used to being.

I painted an upside down photo of myself from my first night in Taiwan. It's a very concise way of saying that I've turned my world upside down, and it's one of the most unexpected yet worthwhile things I've done in my life so far.