In the Eye of the Hurricane

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.

Last Sunday evening, we received an email from ICLP stating that all classes had been moved online for two weeks. We had been warned that it may come to this measure should two or more students at NTU test positive for the Coronavirus, in which case the whole university would suspend classes for fourteen days. Nothing of the sort, however, had happened. Since only the ICLP had adopted this policy, I figured that the decision must have been motivated by fears over the number of students recently arrived from abroad – what an ironic turn of events!

In the past few days, the world has been consumed by chaos over the epidemic, while the number of Taiwan’s cases has stayed remarkably low thanks to the government’s effective prevention policies. More recently, numbers have been rising faster than before, mostly among people arriving from abroad. In an attempt to prevent the crisis rom escalating, Taiwan prohibited foreign nationals from entering the country, which, combined with a CDC travel advisory of the highest level for the entire world, prompted many US students to return home (a decision which, even at this point when we have relatively little information about the state of affairs in the US, seems like one they might come to regret).

Anyway, while my friends around the world are flying home from their fellowships and staying with friends after being callously kicked off from college campuses, my existence here has felt like life in the eye of a hurricane. None of the students in my program (at least hopefully) have been going out much, and I myself have only left my apartment for meals and trips to the grocery store. The only exception to that, when the isolation felt overwhelming, was my visit to Da An Park just two blocks away from where I live.

 A Taiwan barbet at Da An Park
 The Taiwan barbet is called 五色鸟 meaning "five-coloured bird" in Chinese
 A lotus flower
 A black-crowned night heron
 Another black-crowned night heron
A vibrant pink lily

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