Reflections on Taiwan
I am honored to have been included in the first Fulbright International Education Administrators Seminar in Taiwan. I applied to this experience to enrich myself and to hopefully bring back ideas on how my university can send more students to Taiwan. This seminar marks my first experience in an Asian country, and it was an opportunity of a lifetime to see life in Taiwan and to hear from locals about their home country and culture. I greatly enjoyed seeing how welcoming and open-minded the people I encountered were. Especially when I do not know the language, I try to avoid being the stereotypical traveler who thinks that everyone knows my language. So, I enjoyed the pantomiming and my (sometimes failed) attempts at interacting with people in markets, restaurants, and on the street. I only had one time that I truly felt frustrated – and that was when I had already eaten a meal at the night market, and I was wanting to pay. It shows how trusting Taiwanese people are when even with expressions and trying to hand over money, they thought I was wanting to order food, not pay for what I had already received. Then there was the
