I'm back, by popular request!
Nearly a year ago, I returned from my England adventures, bubbling
with the excitement that Oxford had to offer. I settled down into a temporary
life back home: living with my parents--a situation that for some would
represent backpedaling or defeat, but for me was actually a lot of fun, mostly
because if fun were muscles my parents could beat up your parents--working at
the Princeton Review, tutoring a lot, applying to law school.
Oh, right. Law school. Most of you, dear readers,
probably know this, but in the fall I will be moving up to Boston and starting law school.
That left me with a summer: three months before law school, in which I would
not be tutoring or teaching. Three months to clear my head a little bit,
make some money, have a medium-sized adventure. I applied to about ninety-seven
thousand* internships, sowing my cover-letter-and-résumé seeds broadly and
indiscriminately, having little hope for each individual attempt but great
optimism for the venture as a whole.
My internship process received an interruption
when I checked my e-mail one morning to find one from The Princeton Review's
Taipei office: seeking teachers, it told me. Summer teachers, part-time
teachers. Couldn't hurt, right? I fired off another cover-letter-and-résumé
combination, and to my surprised was invited to interview. Well, you know the
rest, or at least the important parts. A summer in Taiwan might be the exact
medium-sized adventure for which I have been looking, so I took the job (after
some not inconsiderable convincing by TPR Taiwan's fantastic directorial
team).
I arrived two days ago. I speak very little
Chinese (I can say "hello", "thank you", "I love
you", and--probably most importantly--"kitty". I have Ms. Abby
Rowswell to thank for that last one), and I read even less. Still, I won't have
to know any Chinese to teach, and nearly all of my co-workers and office-mates
have English fluency. I'm staying in a tiny little room in the Zhonghe district
of New Taipei City (think metro Taipei: NTC surrounds the main city and is served
by its metro transportation systems). My place might be tiny, but it's
comfortable and I like the location. My co-workers were surprised at its
distance from the city ("wait, you're in New Taipei City? How long does
it take you to get here?!"), but it's not more than 25
minutes' travel time to reach the office. 
The view outside my window is a good
representation of this part of town. It's heavily populated, and vertically populated:
signs of life pour from every grate and window. House-plants, laundry, and
roaming cats (māo!) spill out into the air. Taiwan is even more
hot-and-humid than you've heard: every day is a bad hair day, and I can
barely make it to the ground floor without being coated in a
thin film of sweat. Still, that somehow lends to the sense of pervasive and
undeniable life that Taipei exudes. If all else fails, one can
always duck into a Wellcome Mart for some air-conditioning.
Anyway, training's going well, I suppose. I've met some interesting people, and I look forward to getting to know them better. I'm going to resolve to be magically better at taking photos--we went to a fab place for dinner last night that I simply forgot to record. Ah, alas. Fortunately, I have three months' of dinners and outings and city rovings to document.
Much love!
*note: actual number probably somewhat less than
ninety-seven thousand
