my 10min New Years, goodbye Taiwan, review of the exchange

Before I come to the farewell-Taiwan part here, some words on my amazing New Years celebration:
I guess everyone knows about having these different states of lets call it "willingness to interact with people" depending on situation and mood. For example when I'm in a good mood and leave my apartment I hope to meet people and chat a little "what a wonderful day!", "Taiwan's really awesome, right?".
On the other hand when I'm feeling pissed about something, I like to share my complaints with someone: "oooh Chinese is soo hard!", "It's so horribly cold!" or "Bah - I hate stinky tofu!" ;-)
And when things get worse I start not wanting to interact with people. And when I have to, I hate it!
This, even worse, was Lihong around New Years with some nice infection of food poisoning :D (Probably from Tainan as JiaXiasha got it as well). Fluids leaving the body from all opening! I haven't felt that horrible for a good while and was actually close to going to a hospital the night before New Years with the only good thing beeing my lovely Swedish friend Larsson taking best care of me at some point. I told him that when he dies, I will hold a funeral speech to mention that ;-)

However, my new years celebration literally went from 11:55 to 12:05:

party-party!!!

Furtunately I recovered relatively quickly and was good to go again for finals week. So I had my final exam in Chinese that went pretty well. I'm still not sure though how much effort I will put in learning more Chinese in the future. I might really go for Spanish first actually. If I had put the effort of learning Chinese into learning Spanish instead, I'm quite certain that I'd be fluent by now!

A last adventure I had, was a visit of the Buddhist nun at the Yangmingshan mountain. For the way back, I decided to try my luck with hitchhiking and already the first car coming by offered me a ride. But not a normal ride in a normal car. No. This instead:

Sitting on a cable drum, tools around, great view - what better way to travel?

However, the driver was speeding like crazy through the windy mountain road what my stomach was not too fond off. And finally arriving after a 30min drive I felt sick for the next 2 hours and had to lie down for a while after coming home :D Great!

And of course I have been pretty busy with the preparations for my departure. I also sent a huge suitcase home to Germany with stuff I don't want to carry around with me during my final travels. It ended up really, really expensive so let's not talk about it... ;-)
And then of course came the saying goodbye to new (and old) friends. But similar to my farewell at UCSD, I feel certain that I will see many of the faces again not too far in the future - so I haven't been too sad.

with good old Larsson and some last delicious fooooood! yumyumyum

saying goodybe to Iris (met her at UCSD)

...and my language exchange friend Stefany

Now some last thoughts on the Taiwan exchange in general.
One comparison that came to my mind regularly was this exchange compared to my former exchange at UCSD. While this comparison is certainly a bit difficult as I've probably changed a bit and came here with different goals, I found three things I preferred at UCSD: First while the weather in Taiwan has in general been quite nice, I've been freezing during the last weeks and occasionally it rained a lot, while the weather at UCSD was just PERFECT! And then this awesome beach nearby where you could go surfing...
Second my courses at UCSD had been much better and exceptionally interesting, while at NTU I barely found any courses I liked (what is mostly due to not so many classes beeing offered in English but Chinese instead).
And third, probably most important: I-House! While there was basicially nothing to complain about the housing here and the location was great, the room just perfect and the staff helpful, it just couldn't compare to the greatness of Ihouse with its outstanding international community (though this is like comparing an average good person to Gandhi! Seriously, Ihouse was this awesome!). Also, I ended up hanging out mostly with Germans - not that I have anything against Germans (I mean I'm German!) or that it wasn't fun - it's just that I didn't come to Taiwan to meet my fellow countrymen. And in stark contrast to Ihouse, here I had to put some active effort into meeting locals/Taiwanese for example by looking for language exchange partners.

Even though this might have sounded a bit negative, the exchange on the whole has been an outstanding experience! Including my travels to other countries I have deeply experienced Asian culture - Japanese Onsen, Korean Bibimbap, Chinas Great wall and nature, Singapore and of course Taiwan, you pearl! While basically not knowing pretty much anything about Taiwan until about one year ago, I came to fall in love with this lovely island. The Taiwanese people in particular are probably the most hearthy and upright people I've so far encountered and the Taiwanese culture is very authentic Asian - just what I had been looking for. And basically every week was packed with adventures and cool experiences such as (extreme) hikes, learning about Buddhism and meditation, the delicious food, exploring nightmarkets and cities, singing karaoke or soaking in hotsprings to name a few.
I definitely want to come back sometime!

A new environment of course also brings change to you. When people asked me about my plans for the future before I had started my trip here, I had used to tell them, "Well, I do have some plans now - but I guess after Taiwan things will be quite different" and indeed this happened and I got a lot of new plans and ideas for the future.
One change I found quite interesting is that I used to think that an exchange semester is the very best opportunity to experience a foreign country as most of the stuff gets organized for you while you are able to dig quite deep into the culture and meet lots of people. However, by now and for future trips I feel that I would prefer beeing more independent and organizing pretty much everything on my own. In particular I have 3 destinations in mind where I want to go next trying this: India, South-America for learning Spanish (maybe Argentina) and travelling through China/Taiwan again to improve my Chinese. I might have about 2 month at the end of this year so let's see where that's going... :-)

Now I'm looking forward to the upcoming month of travelling through Southeast Asia and soon also seeing Berlin, friends and family again, living with my good-old roommates Melli and Jakob and eating fresh German bread again!

I've been on the top of the 101 tower again, this time at night - what a fabulous view!

This has been a long post and might come like a final ending for the blog. Nevertheless, I will write some more posts in the upcoming weeks during my travels through Southeast Asia. Probably four more posts to come, one for each country - so stay updated ;-)