The great Adam Levbarg and his lovely S.O. Eva have started leg one of their 6 month journey — Los Angeles to Taipei. You can follow their travels on their new blog.
My favorite story is from Day Three — and I think this will be fascinating, even if you don’t know Adam:
I experienced my most profound case of culture shock the other day when Eva’s friend and former junior high school teacher asked me to speak in English to her class so that they could have some experience speaking with a foreigner. Although Taiwan is ethnically diverse with Japanese, aboriginal and ethnic Chinese minorities, there are still very few western people here, and this is especially so in the smaller towns like Taya. Eva related to me her first experience as a child seeing a Westerner as something of a strange combination of wonder and intense curiosity. She had prepared me for the fact that people would stare at me, however at Eva’s junior high school, it went beyond staring. I was a superstar.
As I would walk past open classroom windows, dozens of students would turn their heads and stand up, yelling heavily accented “Hello!”s and “How are you!”s and then giggle wildly before I could respond. One classroom burst out into loud applause and uncontrolled laughter when I said back to them in Chinese “Very well, thank you.” Most students however appear to be quite shy, and would never have the courage to speak with a foreigner outside of the safety of their student enclave. Consider this history when I walked into a classroom full of uniform-clad 13 and 14 year olds (see photo). I spoke for 40 minutes, with Eva serving as translator. They asked me about what I thought of Taiwan, what sports I played (I said miniature golf, and the concept fascinated them), and whether or not I liked stinky tofu (see photo). One girl proudly declared that her favorite food was McDonalds, and I found out later from Eva that telling her I did not eat at McDonald’s was a confusing blow as she was most likely trying to impress me with her love of American food.
The bell rang, class ended. The students did not want to leave. About a third of the class pulled out their camera phones and in an instant I was bombarded with a cloud of notebooks, arms shoving pens and pieces of paper at me as they clamored for my autograph. Several people wanted real photographs with me and I posed for the teacher who took three group pictures with the kids pushing in to try and get closer to me.
