My Travel Adventures

The second week of taking classes online has almost passed and, despite the all-around rumblings and mumblings, I can honestly say that I have enjoyed quite a few aspects of my online education. First of all, it cuts down on a lot of boring walking time. Yes, exercise is important, but it is also much nicer to go to the park than to walk to school past nondescript buildings along a wide, noisy road. Secondly, I get to play my guitar between classes, which is better for my mental state than scrolling through increasingly distressful news while standing in the hallway. Thirdly, I get to search up words I don’t know on my phone without the teacher knowing. Shh, that’s a secret.

I have been holding off on writing this post for fear of my blog becoming one of those self-indulgent Coronavirus quarantine blogs that have recently been filling up all corners of the internet (in terms of obnoxiousness, second only to videos of celebrities sniffling about having a bad time in their luxury mansions). If I want to continue to write a blog about my personal life, however, it appears impossible at this point not to dwell at least a little upon perhaps the worst pandemic to have hit the world in a century.

It occurred to me during a dream I had on April 19 th that I had forgotten to post a few pictures I took in between my visit to the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum and my trip to Da’An Park. On the Sunday of March 15 th , I took two or three hours to tour a few sights on the blue line of the Taipei metro, which is a line I hardly ever use. I started at the North Gate, which is the last part of the late Qing fortifications in Taipei to retain its original appearance. After that, I took the metro to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial. I am back-dating this post and attaching pictures below.

I spent much of the week off poring over books and various documents at the NTU library. Right now, I am studying missionaries in the 19 th century, and some of their stories – especially those of Spanish missionaries, who are often neglected in secondary literature in favour of anglophone Presbyterians – are truly fascinating. Nevertheless, after three full days of reading Spanish letters from the 1860s to the 1890s, I felt like a little bit of a break from studying would be in order.

I originally intended to get some administrative tasks done after spending the Saturday in Keelung, but the weather was so nice that it became difficult to persuade myself to stay indoors. I remembered that Taipei still has many sights I have not seen, especially in the more historical part along the eastern bank of Tamsui river. Flipping through the pages of my guidebook, I happened upon a section dedicated to Datong – I decided to make a few-hour trip there.

As soon as I cancelled my flight to California, I started to compile a mental list of places I might want to see in order to make up for my scrapped travel plans. I have not yet been to Sun Moon Lake, Jiufen, or the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum in Chiayi, all of them places enthusiastically recommended to foreign travellers. Of course, the Penghu Archipelago, the Matsu Islands, and Kinmen are all worth seeing as well, but with the current epidemic, I think it best to avoid air and water traffic if at all possible.

Everything has been falling apart this week. I almost dread to look at my phone in the morning for fear of what bad news might be coming my way. First of all, the Russian Chorus cancelled its tour to California because of the coronavirus epidemic. Apparently, as many cases have cropped up in California during the past few days as have been reported in Taiwan over the course of these past two months. Since my program has, in the meantime, been issuing warnings left and right, as well as imposing quarantines every now and then, I decided that it would be foolish of me to try my luck, and cancelled my flight.