Last time, I told you that I had some unexpected hiccups in the first leg of my trip.
There were a number of problems:
My friend’s son got sick. I was supposed to stay with my friend and her family. However, her son fell ill and I initially had to find a hotel at the last minute.
The hotel was more expensive than I wanted to pay. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice, but I needed to find cheaper accommodations. After the first 2 nights I switched to an Air BnB.
I only traveled with hand luggage. As a result, I needed to buy a few things upon arrival. More about this later in the blog post.
Something else you should know is that my diet recently has become very restricted.
About 6 weeks before my trip, I began getting rashes all over my body. It was annoying. I was able to figure out that if I cut out certain foods, my rashes cleared up completely. In fact, my skin right now as I’m writing this is healthier than it has ever been in my life.
The foods I cut out were:
Gluten
Dairy
Nuts
I have also been vegetarian most of my life, making it hard to eat out especially when away from home. I planned in advance by packing some oatmeal, but that really only covers 1 meal. I also don’t want to eat oatmeal every day to be honest. It’s not my favourite food.
Because of this, buying breakfast on my first day in Taipei took about 2 hours…but I got to practice Mandarin as a result.
Every problem is a language learning opportunity when you’re abroad. In my case, my restricted diet led me to read menus for hours, looking for a place where I could eat. I would never sit down to read in Mandarin for hours back in Canada - it’d be too hard to motivate myself.
On a similar note, since I only brought hand luggage I didn’t have a razor to shave. It took me about 30 minutes to figure out where to even buy one and then another 30 minutes to figure out exactly what a razor is called in Mandarin. You might wonder why it took me so long to find one single word.
You might wonder why it took me so longer to look up a single word. Why not just Google Translate it?
The thing is, online translators are prone to errors and I don’t trust them. To get around this, I followed the following process:
Asked Chat GPT. Either Chat GPT or DeepL are my initial go-to places to look up new words.
Google image searched the word that Chat GPT gave me. Unfortunately, all the pictures that showed up were electric shavers instead of razors. I wanted a razor.
Clicked a few related searches that Google suggested. One of those searches generated plenty of pictures of manual razors. I was filled with hope!
Copy and pasted the word I thought meant “razor” into a Mandarin dictionary app. It turns out I found the Mandarin word for Gillette, the shaving company. Sigh. How frustrating.
I went on Gillette’s Taiwanese website. I then read through it to find the right word for razor and copy/pasted it into both my Mandarin dictionary app and Google Images to confirm I had found the right word.
Finally, I walked to the nearest shop that sold razors and tentatively asked the lady who worked there, in Mandarin, if she could show me where they were.
This was the final test. If she understood and walked me to the section with razors, I clearly had found the right word. Thankfully, she understood. Woo-hoo!
Another benefit of going abroad to learn a language is that the simple act of walking outside becomes a learning opportunity.
For example, while walking to buy a razor, I tried to read everything around me and stopped multiple to look up unfamiliar words. Here are some of the pictures I took while walking. Most of these were vegetarian restaurant-related since I was keeping an eye out for food I could eat. I had either stopped to read these (and looked up unfamiliar words) or just snapped a picture so that I could read it more carefully later.
To wrap up my day, I spend an hour or two looking for cheaper accommodations on AirBnB
As I said earlier, every problem is a language learning opportunity when you’re abroad. If I were in an English speaking area, finding an AirBnB would be straightforward enough. However, doing so in Taipei was harder because I was messaging back and forth with hosts in Mandarin instead of English.
As a summary, during my first day in Taipei I ate, bought a razor, and booked an AirBnB. That took me the whole day and I don’t mind at all.
This is quite simply because of how much Mandarin I picked up along the way. Additionally, one of my favourite things about traveling is not visiting tourist attractions, but rather it’s the mundane, day-to-day living. It’s interests me to put myself into the shoes of someone living in another part of the word.
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