You can blame Portal 2 and Valve's marketing for my delay in concluding this story. And I also feel less inspired to finish this story but here it goes.
A few weeks ago I was made aware that some people have a misunderstanding of why I came back earlier than anticipated. They thought it might've to do with something shady, since I guess I never told some people why I was back, and Kim and Christina didn't say much about it either. Woops. The reason I came back is kinda anti-climatic, the short story was that my visa simply ran out and I didn't want to spend the extra money to do a visa run (this involves me buying a roundtrip ticket out of Taiwan to a nearby country), so I decided to come home. This was about two months in and after many demos and interviews, I stopped caring about getting a job and stopped seeing myself teach English in Taiwan for a whole year.
In the midst of wandering, a companion. I think that's what Taiwan was and is for the three of us, it was a time of wandering, to discover who we were, what we loved, and what we were good at. The first month was a hard and humbling experience. We lacked hope, energy, and I think our prayer life was non-existent. We thought it would be easy to find a job and an apartment but the search was soul crushing, and our prospects dwindled. But God was ever present in a very subtle way, giving us small glimmers of hope when we really needed it. God blessed us with a church very early on through Friendship Presbyterian Church. It was either the first or second Saturday night that I searched for an English speaking service in Taipei. One of the results was FPC, and I suggested it since it was relatively close to an MRT stop compare to other churches, and the service was at 11, which wasn't too demanding. We enjoyed our first service there and started going to Impact, the young adult/singles ministry that was just starting up. We sticked with FPC since; Kim and Christina are still attending today. It's not very common that the first church you visit you find yourself being able to commit to; so I believe God played a big role in leading us here.
FPC is a Taiwanese church with both an English congregation and Chinese congregation. The English congregation is run by Pastor Dennis, who's an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church of America and most recently served in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The English congregation attracted everyone from around the world, noticeably from the United States and Indonesia. We befriended students from abroad, editors, a daughter of a diplomat, a 3D modeler, amongst others; you people know who you are. Our time here felt like college all over again, then again it wasn't that long since we last left it. One particular group of guys I met were all Indonesian graduate students getting their masters at Taipei University. There's this one guy who's ancestors ate the missionaries that visited them several years (I don't know how much, I'm hoping hundreds) ago. In case you didn't know, missionaries dying on the mission field is a VERY SERIOUS TRAGIC CURRENT MATTER, AND IS IN NO WAYS A LAUGHING ONE EITHER, but when he first told me this I lol'd anyway, hard too. Who would've thought missionaries were so delicious? *Nom nom nom* Ok I'm a horrible person, I'll stop, for now. As a testimony to the sacrifice of those missionaries, the guy's tribe eventually became one of the most prominent Christian tribes in Indonesia, HURRAY! This is what I miss about Taiwan the most, the people, because I could tell a lot of them invested their time in us and poured their love out to us because we really needed it. And if it wasn't for them my time in Taiwan would feel very meaningless.
Job prospects in Taipei weren't looking so good, so that's why we broadened our search a bit south, to Hsinchu, about 40 miles south of Taipei to be exact, only 30 minutes away via the High Speed Rail. This was about a month in I think, maybe less. So the three of us all went to interview at this one school, but there's only two positions. This was the ultimate dream job, it followed the both the American and Taiwanese school regiment so that means that we get a winter break, a spring break, and a Chinese new year break. The school also offers free housing for the teachers. It's unheard of that a school would provide these amenities, so we knew we had to prepare for this interview. After the interview was over we felt like we did pretty horrible and it was like any other interview that we've done. Apparently though, it seemed the employer was very impressed with Christina and offered her the job, but Christina being the good friend she was, didn't want to leave Me and Kim. So eventually the employer caved in and offered the other position to Kim and offered me housing with a really good rate and assistance with finding another position in Hsinchu.
Hsinchu has a much more mild climate than Taipei, it was nice and cool and a lot less humid. Most of it might have to do with the change in season though. We liked Hsinchu, but as time went on and Kim and Christina were getting more involved with their jobs, I started seeing that Taiwan and teaching English here was becoming less of a fit for me. I also didn't believe in the product that most of these schools were selling, a lot of these students were just learning English just because their parents were forcing them. And I don't think they were getting that great of an education, because you'll have a hard time getting around Taiwan with just English. I say this because as I was travelling through South East Asia, we got by pretty easily because a lot of people understood and spoke English. The English schools in Taiwan don't have much to show for it, and if people in Taiwan do know English, I wouldn't credit the Buxiban school system, bold statement I know, but that's what I came up with through my experiences.
As our visa deadlines were coming up, we were looking at different ways to reset our stay for another 30 days. The most common method was to visit another country and come back, thereby giving us a new visitor's visa. Kim booked tickets to the Philippines, since she has family there. Christina has another 30 days since she managed to get a 90 day one. Albeit all the research that I was doing, a visa run was going to put a dent on my already fleeting cash pool. So I gave Korean Air a call and they moved my flight up to an earlier date free of charge. I took that as a green light. I only had about a week left in Taiwan when I made the decision to come home. When I told my friends this there was a loud wailing and hysteria amongst them, ok not really but I felt bad that I had to leave. I wasn't able to come to the last Impact meeting since I was super sick and snot was running out of my nose like crazy. It was pretty gross, you can ask Christina about it. As much as I wanted to stay in Taiwan, I felt that God has already used this window in time to show me what he wanted to show me. Everything else that I'm trying to discover He will show me at another place and time.
In the midst of wandering, a companion. Me and God, respectively. And current.
Kim's attempt at snapping a photo of us at Taipei 101. Should've just bought the damn thing. Oh well.
