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Saturday, June 7th, 2025

Taiwan: Day 16 – Dharma Drum Mountain

Day 16 of our program in Taiwan entailed a 6 hour visit to Dharma Drum Mountain — a monastery nestled in the hills of northern Taiwan. We started our visit by receiving an introduction to the monastery, and then proceeded to engage in several meditative activities. Previously we had only meditated the way most people would imagine it — sitting, eyes closed, and letting your thoughts and feelings wash away. We did this too, however we were introduced to several other techniques. One of these involved slow walking in nature, where we walked in a slow pace while taking in […]

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Wednesday, June 4th, 2025

Bucknell in Taiwan: Final Presentation

Personal Growth Being in Taiwan and exploring this country has allowed me to deepen the way I perceive various cultures and compare the differences in living between Taiwan and the US. I admittedly knew little about Taiwan before coming here and wasn’t sure exactly what to expect of the culture and way of life here – most of what I previously knew of the country were that it had tensions with China, and that there was a “dispute” over which entity should be the rightful owner of the Chinese and Taiwanese lands. Spending time here has allowed me to see […]

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Wednesday, June 4th, 2025

Taiwan: Day 15 – Cooking Class

Today was a more relaxed day, which I definitely appreciated as the last few days had been quite hectic and filled with activities. Our main activity for the day was a cooking class, where we learned to make zongzi, which are dumplings with sticky rice, pork, squid, egg yolk, mushrooms, boiled peanuts, and a few other ingredients. We cooked the pork belly, added sauce to the rice, ad completed a few other preliminary steps, which were quite easy and a lot of fun to do. The hard part came after – we had to wrap all the ingredients into bamboo […]

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Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025

Taiwan: Day 14 – Studio 76 & Jioufen

We started off day 14 with a visit to Studio 76, an entertainment tech company that creates, adapts and peruses original story IPs on global, multi media platforms, which I was pretty excited for as I really love watching movies and was excited to learn about the production process and how that looks in Taiwan. To be honest, it quickly became clear that the production’s main objective was to generate revenue rather than make quality movies, as the majority of the movies the company was producing were extremely digestible and unoriginal, and the owner himself said he broke into the […]

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Sunday, June 1st, 2025

Taiwan: Day 13 – Back in Taipei

Today we took the bullet train from Kaohsiung to Taipei, and spent the day exploring some temples and a museum. To be completely honest this day wasn’t one of my favorites – the heat and humidity made being outside really uncomfortable, and I found it hard to really pay attention to the places we visited as the weather just felt so unpleasant. The museum did contain some really interesting history about Japanese presence in Taiwan and the disappearing of certain people/officials, however I got exhausted pretty quickly and lost the energy to read through all the factoids. Taiwan’s hot environment […]

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Sunday, June 1st, 2025

Taiwan: Day 12 – Fo Guang Shan

On our last day in Kaohsiung we visited the Fo Guang Shuan museum/temple, which was located around half an hour outside of the city. The place was grand and we probably could have spent days exploring everything there. There was a long, slightly elevated pathway, leading up to a giant, golden statue of Buddha, with a temple underneath it. The pathway was also lined with pagodas, which held different purposes and offered varying activities. One of our tour guides, who was a monastic nun, led us through a meditation ritual in a prayer room. The room’s center piece was a […]

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