Connor’s Journals

October 5, 2025

Busy Busy

At the National Palace Museum. The pictured bronze artifact is older than the United States, along with hundreds of others.

Inbound Orientation shaking hands with my District Governor, Archie.

Game time at Inbound Orientation! My team and I had just won first place in a game of charades.

My homeroom class

My first 30 minutes in Taiwan (I was so tired from the flight- I was barely hanging on)

Me and the Chinese class students at KaiNan High School

Me and a fellow American RYE student in front of Taipei 101 (my favorite thing)

Where to even start... I've been here just over one month now. I think more has happened in the past month of my life than the previous 3 years. But first things first- the airport. It was the first time I had ever flown alone before, as well as my first time leaving the US. Definitely an intimidating experience, but I felt very prepared and confident in my ability to navigate the airports. To be honest, getting from Tampa Airport to Taoyuan International was pretty uneventful. Aside from me trying to keep myself awake the whole time to prevent jet lag (which did not work.) However, when I stepped off the plane in Taiwan, the confidence I had vanished pretty quickly. I knew exactly what I had to do, and it was easy to just follow everyone else getting off the plane. I had known I was going to come to Taiwan for around 8 months before that, and I had all the time in the world to prepare. But until I got off that plane, the entire exchange was just a concept. It only existed on paper and in me telling everyone that I was going to go. Walking from the plane into the airport through that weird metal tube was a surreal experience. What was unexpectedly striking as soon as I got off was the smell. The entire country smells different from home. The extreme cleanliness and thick silence of the long hallway to the center of the airport made things seem even more alien, but it gave me some time to take a uneasy breaths as I stood on the moving walkway. The only people who were on that side of the airport were those who had just flown in on my plane, but once I got to the center there were a lot more people. I got my suitcase, stood in line to have my passport and visa checked, and everything was fine. I was surprised to find that not only my host family, but many many Rotarians and their families were there to greet me when I came out of the airport. It was a bit of an awkward experience because I was very tired and too nervous to speak any of the few Chinese phrases I knew. And then, I was sat down and fed a feast of Taiwanese food, quickly enlightening me to a key aspect of Taiwan: that it is IMPOSSIBLE to starve in this country. Every time I come home from any event or meeting, I always have eaten a full meal and come home with a load of snacks. I have a mountain of random little snacks in my room... After eating only being able to eat a little bit of food (I had just eaten on the plane 2 hours earlier), I loaded into my Host Dad's car, and took my first ride on the Taiwanese highway. 

Every day after that I’ve been busy. There’s always something to see and something to do, just look at a map anywhere and there’s the name of a new place I can get to in 20 minutes with the MRT and see. It feels as if I’ve been airdropped into a new life. I’m not homesick, at least not yet. It feels like there is a perfect partition in my brain between the life I had in the US and the new life I have here. One month in I’ve reached a point where I am comfortable, but everything still feels special. The adjustment was a bit difficult at first, but again, I felt prepared. And everyone here has been so welcoming. My classmates at school, my host family, my host club, even random people. The staring sometimes makes me a bit uncomfortable, but it also helps remind me that I am an ambassador of my country and I need to act accordingly. It has honestly helped me with my anxiety because what else am I going to do, just never go outside?

Being a part of Rotary has also been very important. It’s given me tons of opportunities to meet and make friends with other exchange students and Rotarians. And Rotary here is very active. Every 2-3 weeks my exchange district gets us all together to do something, like the inbound orientation and the lantern festival. Interacting with the other exchange students has to be one of the most interesting parts of what I’ve experienced so far. It’s cool to hear about the other students’ nations and how they are feeling about Taiwan coming from their culture. Because there’s so much to do in Taipei, every week a group of exchange students get together after the weekly Chinese class. Funny thing, it’s quite common for my group to run into another group of RYE students at a random MRT station, and then we merge together to form a huge group.

As for the language, Chinese is hard in some ways and easy in others. You can do a lot with the language with even a limited vocabulary- the grammar is not bad compared to other languages. However, memorizing the vocabulary is difficult. To really know a word, you have to remember the word itself, the tone, and the character, and in some cases (like with my Chinese class homework) you need to remember how to write the character with correct stroke order. But once you really master the character and its character, you can surprisingly do decent amount. At school, since I don’t really understand much of what the teachers are saying, my homeroom teacher told me to just study my Chinese. So, when I’m not eating lunch or at PE, I am studying my Chinese, which is giving me a good 3+ hours a day to study. I’m improving a lot, but there are some students in my district are miles ahead of me. There’s one girl who I think is already fluent…

There’s not much else I can say- it’s too much to get in one journal, so I’ll have more coming within the next month or so. Thanks for reading.

Connor