Day 6: Living in Neihu
A strange call woke me up. Once again I had to try to understand all the strange noises that came from the other side. But even when the words started to sound more like English, I didn’t understand a thing. It’s simply no use calling a tourist on jetlag.
And for some reason I didn’t care what it was all about, as if the phone call never happened. I knew my number was passed down to some people that might want to contact me, but I didn’t really give much though about it.
This would maybe have been the only free day I could get here in Taiwan. Nobody would barge in and drag me someplace else, neither did I know anywhere to go on Sundays. So as I was looking out of the window, down to the street, I knew that today was just for Neihu and me.
Neihu is basically a residential outgrowth of Taipei, with row after row of five-story apartment buildings destined for growing families. Along the main streets there are plenty of small shops and restaurants where the locals would get breakfast before going off to work. With a bit of exploring I could find some nice small parks where the elderly would gather on exactly the same spot everyday. It made me think of my village back in Belgium where housewives would do such a useless thing as cleaning the walkway in front of their houses to have a chat. I also found several elementary schools that seemed larger than my old high school. I’m clearly not a city person for it chocked me to see that even some of the metro stations were named after nearby high schools.
Later I would hear that Neihu is named to the lake that was close by. The whole district is characterized by the so called ‘Big Lake’, Dahu. To keep it original they decided to call the space surrounding it ‘Inner Lake’, Neihu and the park in front, Dahu Park. This all sounds so easy, even childish if you ask for the translation. But thinking about it, the original names of most European cities must have been no different. We just grew used to them like the locals here. Nevertheless, it is still funny to find out that Taipei means ‘place of the north’, and yes, there is a Tainan (south) – Taidong (east) – Taixi (west) and even a Taizhong (middle). And there’s where the easy geography ends. Most other countries’ names are similar to the original one. I don’t think that Faguo (France) or Yingguo (England) are so difficult, but why does Meiguo (America) get to be named ‘beautiful country’?
Nevertheless, back in Neihu I think that a lot of people were wondering what a foreign student was doing here. Normally I would go live close to my school, but this apartment was really too good to miss. There is a lot of space with the little furniture I found here. The kitchen is nicely equipped with enough machines to cook dinner. And even though there were some problems at the beginning, with hot water and such, they got resolved. But actually the greatest advantage of living here is the Taiwanese friend Danny who would come to sleep in this apartment too.
Well, once he would come.
