On top of the work load, due to road construction, she also had an hour long bus ride every evening… so, at five-years-old, Sabina was going to school and beginning classes at 9:40 in the morning and not getting home until after 6:00 in the evening. For the record, this “homework,” was never assigned by me, and I think it is absolutely ridiculous that a poor kindergartener goes home at night stressed to the point of tears. Her parents said she cried at home every night because of the amount of homework she had. Though she showed no signs of it at school, she apparently was extremely unhappy. We have the same birthday, and for all of these reasons, she’s both my favorite, and a huge part of the reason I resigned my teaching contract. If you know anything at all about my kindy class, you likely know all about her, and how she’s the cutest, spunkiest five-year-old I have ever met. I was told that my favorite student, Sabina… aka Tomato… would be leaving our school. Shortly after I returned to work, I was dealt a seriously blow to the chest. Read more about where I stayed, what I did, and how I struggled with Mandarin here. Of all the places I visited in my few days there, my top three favorite spots were Bitou Cape, Ximending Cinema Street, and Elephant Mountain. My last night, I stayed at a fancier hotel close to the airport where I treated myself to a bubble bath, room service, and jumped on the extremely comfy bed in a bathrobe. My hostel was cheap, clean, trendy, and the staff was so friendly. Taiwan was so dope and I loved every minute of wandering around solo in the pouring rain.

If a super-typhoon couldn’t ruin my trip, you’d better believe I wasn’t going to let a (for lack of a better word) fuckboy ruin it either. You really do learn whether or not you vibe with a person when you travel with them. He was a total shit head for the entirety of the time we were talking to each other… and I should have realized it sooner, but his accent made it easy to forgive his rude comments and damn near constant complaining.

We tried to hang out again the next night, which resulted in us having a big argument on the streets of Taipei, me walking back to my hostel by myself in the middle of the night, and him sleeping with a random girl he met at the club. I gave them a smile, waved, and, as the train doors closed behind them, I breathed a sigh of relief in honor of my solitude. It was so well done that they didn’t even realize I was shaking them off. Meryl Streep, look out… because I truly deserve a Golden Globe for this performance. I went earlier, so I’m going to go on to the temple. I very strategically pulled out my map while we were on the subway and said, “Heyyyy, you guys should totally go check out the Memorial… You’ll reallyyyy like it. In my head, I’m thinking, damn… I do NOT want to spend the rest of the day in this beautiful (albeit rainy) country with this whiney human. His exact words were, “Well, that sounds kind of boring… I don’t want to do that… But I don’t know what else we’ll do, so we’ll just come with you.” He wanted to know what I was up to for the rest of the day, so I told him about the temples I planned to visit. After 10 minutes of his constant bitching about bug bites, I was over it. After hanging out solo for most of the day, I met up with him and his friend (rather, ran into them) on Elephant Mountain. Though my visit fell during the biggest super-typhoon of the year, I still had a kick ass time, and made it to almost all of my top destinations.Ī friend of mine, and a guy who I had sort of been seeing off and on in Seoul also just so happened to be in Taipei at the time. After a rough August at work, this break was so needed and so well deserved. After weeks of planning and counting down, I finally made the trip to Taiwan in mid-September.

Ivideo pickup taipei main station