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Saturday, May 24th, 2025

Day Five – Taipei

Today we visited Taipei National University of the Arts and were guided by a current student, Daniel, and a past student, David. At last, it has begun to rain more consistently. I didn’t think to check the weather and bring my new umbrella, but luckily there are many ways to procure one. There is a rack at some MRT stations with old, lost umbrellas that you can borrow and return, and there are also rentable umbrellas that ultimately cost about NTD$20 a day. We were shown around the campus as well as a few of the students’ art exhbits. The […]

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Saturday, May 24th, 2025

Day Four – Taipei

Day Four was mostly free for us, with our first and only true engagement starting at 1, so Hanna, Malli, Mikey and I took a walk along the river after waking up at around 6 AM. It was meant to be a bike ride, but we were having many, many technical difficulties. It was a lovely walk anyhow, and we ended up talking to this one man who was walking 5500 kilometers over the course of a 1.5 years (5k a day) as part of a deal he made with his friend. See more on his Instagram page, which you […]

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Friday, May 23rd, 2025

Day Three – Taipei

Day Three was our first day visiting Taipei’s temples, although I had a sneak peek the night before as I had visited the local temple dedicated to Mazu, Tianhou Temple, with Malli and Prof. Young. It’s deceptively small on the outside, but it opens up into a wide courtyard with a waterfall leading to a koi pond and an open area for worship and divination once you step in. This temple also had the strongest scent of incense: Xingtian, the second temple we visited on Day Three, was one of the first to stop offering incense for environmental services. In […]

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Thursday, May 22nd, 2025

Day One & Two – Taipei

Jet lag compelled me to sleep immediately after arriving to the hotel, so this will be a combined reflection of the first two days we’ve spent here in Taiwan! We arrived at 6 AM on Tuesday, so we got a lot done despite having just got off our 16 hour flight (ouch, but not as bad as I thought it would be to be honest). First, we visited the Chiang Kai-Shek Hall. Imagine a larger scale Lincoln Memorial, with a stairway with 89 steps and framed by beautiful, traditional Chinese architecture and trimmed hedges (see below). One half of the […]

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Monday, May 12th, 2025

Pre-Trip Thoughts – 5.11.25

I’m really excited (and almost equally nervous) to be flying out to Taiwan in a little over a week from today! It’s been wonderful getting to know Prof. Chen, Prof. Young, and all of the others who will be going on this trip, and I’m looking forward to growing closer once we’re there. I’m also very stoked for some of the activities we have lined up on our itinerary, especially the ones where we will get to meet people. My main goals are to make new friends and experience as many things as I can that I would not be […]

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