When I came to Taipei, I must say I was not impressed. Here was a city, on some island in Southeast Asia that everyone has been praising up to the moment when I got up and left. We drove in on a taxi, saw a city of two tall towers, and everything else seemed dirty and cluttered and uninviting. No one really spoke clear English to us, the hotel seemed too small, after two weeks of travel through (very carefully picked by our tour guide of course) hotels of Mainland China. The first walk to Taipei 101, turned out to be across a street with a lot of construction, and lowly not at all well-kept gardens and it was raining. The idea of spending two months in this city at this point seemed very hopeless and almost unthinkable.Little did I know then, that I'm actually going to love it here.
The first week was a rough one for me. The idea of staying somewhere without speaking the language and without knowing anyone, while exciting and desired, also seemed terrifying. The fact that the day before my parents left, the University's dorm told me they did not have my name on the list of rooms, was also not at all encouraging. Eventually they figured that the system has not updated yet, and the next day I had a room.The first two days I saw no one in the 13-floor university dorm full of students. Everyone was a ghost. Whenever I saw a white person I felt the desire to jump in front of them and scream "HI! Do you want to be my friend?" But of course I didn't, that would be just a little bit weird. I instead gradually started to round up all the things I would need to use in the next two months: mattress, pillow, blanket, broom.
The curious thing about the dorms is that they really don't come with a mattress. To me it seems like a very odd thing not to recycle. Think of all the students who come through here every semester, and all of them buy their own mattress and then discard them when they leave. That just seems like such a waste!
But there are private bathrooms, air conditioning and a fridge, I guess saving on the mattresses means you can keep your leftovers safe from the fruit flies (who do find any food especially fast).
Another weird thing is that electricity and water are not included in the rent. You have to buy a separate card, which you insert into a little box by the door, and it proceeds to charge you for every time anything is turned on. Given that air-conditioning had to be paid for separately, I would often rather endure the hotness and humidity, but that's just me.
And then I went out. The internet was not connected to my account yet, I still had no homework, for classes did not start for another two weeks, and I knew no one in the city. Although the National Taiwan University's dorms are very nice, staying a whole day in them, without internet, without things to do, and without a properly comfortable mattress was unthinkable.
To cheer myself up, I did what I usually do, because it seems like an appropriate thing to do when alone: I went to the Art Museum.
By far the greatest thing about the NTU dorms: there's roof access.
