The Midyear Conference was a blast!
Nine of the Yilan ETAs (including myself) and about twenty other Fulbright researchers attended. There were also FSE staff and board members, AIT representatives, and family members of some Fulbrights. We left from Taipei on the morning of Tuesday, 30 Jan at 8 am, on two large buses. By noon, we were at
Sun Moon Lake in beautiful
Nantou, Taiwan's only landlocked county.
There we had a feast of a lunch at a unbelievably swanky hotel and restaurant called the Lalu. It was everything I've come to expect from lunches with Dr. Wu, FSE, and AIT. After lunch, we had just about 90 minutes to wander around the area before boarding the buses and heading onward.
[Since some of my readers (A-hem! Mom, Dad!) still use dial-up, i'm scaling back the number photos on my blog. However, I've set up my flickr account to accomodate visitors, and most of my blog entries correspond to a photo album there, which is pretty obviously named and dated.
To see my photos on flickr, visit:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlevi
To see more from the conference and Nantou, you can visit this specific album:
(click here)
Thanks.]
We arrived at hotel in Shitou at 5 pm. We checked into our rooms, and went to the restaurant for dinner. There's not much of a town at Shitou. It's kind of a large park/experimental forest area. The hotel was kind of a mountain lodge type place. Our rooms were large, cozy and kind of rugged-looking, but very nice.
Dinner was a bit lackluster for me. Clearly this place was not prepared to serve vegetarians, so the few of us among the group ate about four courses composed entirely of-- i kid you not-- bamboo. Sprouts, shoots, steamed, fried, sauteed... Bamboo is one of my favorite things, but not as a food.
After dinner, we collected ourselves and convened in a conference room to get down to business. We were told if we completed the presentations that night, the rest of the conference would be free time. The Yilan group was held to the end, and by the time the other researchers finished, it was almost midnight. As a group, we convinced them that we could finish in 30 or 40 minutes, and while some of them were getting a little crusty, we powered through, made some great short and snappy presentations, and finished by 1 am.
The next morning we went on a guided nature tour of the forest. We then ate lunch at a different, bamboo-free restaurant, and had a free afternoon before dinner. I convinced Luke, Ben and Zach to hike up the mountain to an observation deck. We were had a map of the area, but soon found out that it was not at all to scale. The trail up was mostly on rugged stone steps that seemed to go on and on and on. We stopped several times to debate whether to cut our losses and turn around, but in the end, the "we've come this far..." mentality prevailed. We got to the top, which was quite cold, just as the sun was setting. It was perfect. However, we had to hurry back down to make it to dinner on time.
Dinner was more bamboo. Fortunately, there was a party afterwards, complete with plenty of junk food. After this party, about 12 of us, half ETAs, half researchers, converged in someone's room for a rousing game of Taboo, supplied by Julian, into the wee hours. It was great fun. I always enjoy getting to spend time with the other Fulbrights.
The next day, most of us slept in. We had lunch in Shitou, then loaded up the buses and headed back to Taipei. We arrived at about 5 pm. FSE booked rooms for the ETAs there, so we checked in and then several of us went to dinner together. It was an Italian/pizza place, with a real brick oven-- amazing, right?! Getting there was extremely frustrating, as we were wandering around in a big group and the streets were not signed or numbered in any reasonable way, but the food was worth it in the end.
Later, I met my friend Allen at NY Bagels. Somehow I was still hungry at midnight, so I indulged myself on some bagels and milkshake.
The next day, Luke, April, Zach, Viktor and I had lunch at a new Middle-Eastern place, which was wonderful and cheap. By the way, all I do is eat. :-)
After that, they all returned to Yilan, but I spent the afternoon killing time until my flight at 7. I looked up showtimes, and went to the theater, hoping to see The Last King of Scotland, but alas, for some reason the times were wrong. I watched Apocalypto instead, which was a big mistake. Horrible movie, waste of time. Needlessly violent, a sort of Mayan Rambo.
I made my way to the airport, where I met Ben, just in time for our flight to Bangkok.
