Musings in Liuzhangli, Taipei City

I'm sure some of you may have received emails or text messages from us saying that we'd finally found an apartment in downtown Taipei (it's posted all over our facebook pages too, hee hee.) We've been here since Wednesday, and must say, it's really starting to influence our perspectives on daily life here.

For the first time, we have a sanctuary, a little space in a sprawling chaotic city. We're away from the street so we hear nothing of the city that bustles beneath us. We have space and beauty and comfort and cleanliness and convenience. We live in a little neighborhood which is far enough away from the universities to harbour few other foreigners, and therefore enjoys a genuine community feeling - lots of kids, oldies and little markets, a genuine Taiwanese experience. We walk out our door and buy our mangoes from a little stand whose owner puts own his noodle bowl - though not his cigarette - to charge us for it. (The market is not unlike those at the Queen Vic, though a little more haphazardly placed).

Being in the south-east of the city centre, the world's tallest building - the Taipei 101 - looms large above us as we take the three-minute stroll to the Metro.

Simon had a couple of spare hours on Friday and headed down to the local Ikea. He bought some lovely homey things, both aesthetic and practical. Honestly, the things he bought - like a gorgeous white vase with beautiful white and purple flowers, tall enough to highlight the high ceilings - are such Simon's style. He often reminds me of Robyn in that way - clearly a knack for interior decorating! The way in which he organises his personal space has become something so familiar to me, a real sign of my home-life.

So there's picture frames of us and our favourite books lined up along our shelves... what a dramatic shift. We're certainly in this for the long-haul.

It's a little confronting, actually, seeing the same neighbours on my walk home each night, exchanging smiles and glances of burgeoning recognition. This morning we ate breakfast - a total experience here, totally worth skipping museli for - at a little sandwich and tea house, dining out on egg sandwiches and OJ out on the street. The lady who owned the place could speak English (in fact, she had her Master's degree, so her English-language skills were quite good!). She asked if we lived in the neighbourhood and seemed so pleased that we lived in the area, saying, "oh, that's great, we're neighbours!" It really doesn't get more welcoming than times like that, especially as she offered us a complimentary sandwich afterwards and said that she was looking forward to seeing us again.

Likewise, next door to our building live an elderly couple who run a scooter repair shop (which, courtesy of the sheer number of scooters that dominate the landscape, can be found on every corner.) Our landlord kindly introduced us to them on the first night that we arrived. Since then, it's a great feeling coming home, wandering past the shop and seeing their big smiles as we yell out a hearty "nin hao!". Welcome to the neighbourhood.

In fact, this afternoon we officially signed our one-year lease, which begins tommorrow.

This Thursday begins our summer class schedule. This will be the insane two-month period in which Simon and I work 10-12 hour days, six days a week, in order to deal with the huge intake of students that our school takes on over the summer vacation. (Makes me think of Australian lazy summers down at Carnegie pool, Chadstone shopping centre, lazing about inside watching daytime TV and hanging out with friends... not a common experience here! Instead, students are sent by their parents to intensive English classes until they go back to school for the new semester.)

The summer will allow us to make a ridiculous amount of money by student-standards (a bit like the slog we did in our mutual crummy jobs before we left). It will no doubt render us totally burnt-out by the time it's over. This will mean that we can put the money that we save away for travelling after Taiwan, and be able to pay for our Chinese class-semester at National Taiwan Normal University, which begins on September 1. We're still harbouring dreams of seeing the Lhasa Palace and the Taj Mahal before we come home!

On that note, as I sit here I know that my body is squealing at how inadequate I've been at keep myself healthy in the past month or so. I'm convinced that now we have a fridge and a house that will change! And we're so ready for it.

In fact, we're so ready for this moment. To finally immerse ourselves in Chinese cultural heritage in a beautiful city with a people who are so free-thinking, open-minded, welcoming and overwhelmingly friendly. Taiwan is the Chinese experience I had always hoped for, and as each passes, I feel closer and closer to the little isle of Formosa, the underdog of the Far East.