My Travel Adventures

We got Thursday and Friday off this week for Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday commonly associated with the death of the poet Qu Yuan (but which, in reality, seems to have had a much more complex past, viz. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Boat_Festival ). According to the story, Qu Yuan drowned himself upon finding out that the state of Qin had captured the capital of his homeland. The locals raced to retrieve his body in their boats, and when they did not find it, threw sticky rice balls in the river so that the fish would not eat the dead poet. Allegedly, the race for Qu Yuan’s body became the dragon boat race, and the rice balls (zongzi) originally fed to the fish became the main food associated with the holiday.

Summer quarter has begun, and I am more aware than ever now of just how much I am overstaying my original plans. Although a few have remained, many of my friends have left Taiwan, and my staying here through the summer seems somehow wrong and out of whack.

Many of the past few weeks have been quite draining (which is part of the reason why I separated my writings on my struggles with Taiwanese bureaucracy into several posts; I simply did not feel like writing, and even if I did, I do not know what I would have written about). Classes ended three weeks ago, and I have mostly been studying for the LSATs while reading Czech poetry – Svatopluk Čech, K.J. Erben, Petr Bezruč, Jan Neruda, and Vítězslav Hálek. It is quite embarrassing, to be honest, to only have read some of their works in their entirety at the age of twenty-three, but I suppose that’s just the plight of students at international schools. At the same time, I have been working on poetry of my own, but I have not the faintest idea whether it is any good. Time will tell, I suppose.

During the second week of break, Lane, Alison, and I made a little trip to Hualien, a town on Taiwan’s east coast. We took an evening train from Taipei, arriving shortly after eight o’clock.