mommy! mommy! look! it's a waiguoren!

"their bark is worse than their bite."
or so the saying goes.

i suppose that's fortunate for many taiwanese people. actually, my taiwanese friends have told me that we foreigners are nicer than we ought to be.

after being in taiwan a year, i've learned to live by a "go with the flow" kind of lifestyle. in general, most things have completely stopped bothering me. rabid dog? almost got hit by a scooter? oh, dead cockroach on the restaurant floor? it's all part of being here.

one thing i have never quite accepted, however, is being stared at. taiwan has made me extremely aware of how white i am. even more aware than new cross, and that's saying a lot! children stare at me wide-eyed. they point... waiguoren! i want to say, 'kid i know what you're saying!' but i just keep on walking. and i wouldn't mind the kids if adults, real adults, didn't stare at me so often. sometimes, on mrts or buses, they'll switch seats when i sit down. most of the time, they'll just skip over me and sit next to another taiwanese person. and on very rare occasions, they'll come to sit down, have a glance at me, process for a good second that i'm a waiguoren, then choose to stand instead. i can almost see the inner debate... stand or sit next to her? stand or sit next to her.... errrrrrr.... stand!

in such situations, there's really a mutual discomfort going on.

for being such naturally shy people, however, i'm amazed by how often i've been approached for random things. several times, i've been offered a job. on occasion, people have asked me questions about my culture or my experience in taiwan for a school assignment. and a few times, people have simply asked me to be their friend, usually because they want to practice their english. the first and third have always seemed silly to me, because for all they know, i could be psychotic.

but the best and funniest incident happened over the weekend. i went on an outing south of taipei with the teachers at my school. we saw a famous waterfall, wrote our wishes on balloons and sent them into the sky, ate a lot of taiwanese food, and generally just got some cleaner air.

and somewhere along the line, this happened:









now the strange thing about this situation was not that complete strangers asked allison and me to take a picture with them. that's a very common thing. rather, i found it unique that they were all guys. i've gotta say that after spending a significant amount of time here, that has happened to me all of ZERO times before. most taiwanese men react to me in one of the following ways:
1. invisibility
2. apathy
3. sheer terror

look. laugh. be envious.