Today we hit one full week of being in Taiwan and it still feels so surreal to me. I feel like it has been ages since we all met up in the JFK airport, and we have done and seen so much since then. Our day started out with a visit to Professor Chen’s brother-in-law’s printing company, Hong Jaan, in which we had the opportunity to see the manufacturing side of businesses. It was cool to hear about how the products that they print have shifted over the past years as we have developed more and more technology. This shift has moved from mainly printing books to printing products such as healthcare packaging and specialty prints, like wedding invitations. I also found it fascinating that there was a shrine for the god of real estate in the office at the building as this showed a direct connection between religion and business. The owner said that they pray to this god on certain days each month and burn paper money as offerings in order to bring wealth and prosperity to the company. Another connection that I noticed was that the printing press also prints items for the temples, such as the prints shown in the photo below that were for an upcoming ceremony or festival.
After leaving the company, we toured around Dihua street for a bit and then were allowed to explore the area for an hour and half. After some window shopping, we decided to get ramen for lunch. This was my first time trying Ramen and it is safe to say that I enjoyed it. We were also able to see a temple that contained a match making god there.
We then headed back to the hotel for a quick outfit change, and then another long MRT ride to Beitou, one of my favorite sites we have seen so far. Since many of the “excursions” were closed on Monday, we ended up walking through the Beitou Park and up a hill to a Buddhist temple, Puja Temple. It was pouring down rain. We arrived at the temple shortly before its closing time, and decided to wait and watch the closing ceremony. While we were waiting, we were greeted by a buddhist monk who explained the history of the temple, as well as, gave his perspective on who Buddha is and how one can achieve enlightenment. I found this experience to be super unique and cool. He told us that many of the indigenous people were scared of the Hot Springs, so they avoided the Beitou area. During the Japanese colonial era in which many Japanese people moved to Taiwan, they ended up settling in Beitou due to the fact that they had a lot of Hop Springs in Japan and took it as a sign to stay there. They then built this temple. The Buddhist Monk that we met said that he was the eighth generation since then, and that there are now 11 generations total, which I thought was really interesting. His message to us contained a lot of good themes, some of which included paying attention to your own energy (promoting good energy within yourself), accepting both the good and the bad, being a kind and compassionate person, being in control of your emotions, and not being possessive of earthly things. All of these, to me, seem to be common moral themes among many different religions, and I think this internal connection of morality is super interesting as well.
For dinner we had Tonkatsu. This was my first time trying that as well and I thought it was pretty good too. Afterwards, we had a long ride back to the hotel, and ended up going to bed early to be prepared for our 6:45 departure time the next morning.