Day 1 - My first step on Taiwan island

Today’s Programme
Morning	Picking up from airport
Afternoon
Evening	To organize into group
Hotel	Taoyuan Training Center, TaoYuan

I had to wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning to catch the China Airlines’ morning flight to Taiwan. It was terrible to wake up so early because I went to bed too late the night before. It was like 9 pm when I arrived home (back from work) and I packed stuff till almost 1 am because I found that my bag was over-weight. The baggage allowance is only 20 kg but my bag had 23 kg. T_T (It’s not my fault; the bag alone weights 5 kg.)

I took the Taxi and I arrived at the airport around 6 am. The first thing I had to do was looking for my Dui Zhang (Group leader), P’Arm. He was right there at the meeting point. I got my passport (It was with him because I had to apply for the visa), plane ticket, and a tie from him. Everybody was there with their family but I was alone :(

I went to check-in alone. We didn’t need to do group-check-in because the seat was already fixed. I had no problems with my bag as the ground-officers were all Thai. It’s easy to ask them to allow my over-weight bag without extra charge. While waiting for people (lots of them were not on time), I was too hungry. I had to ask my new friend, Hong, to look for something to eat. Finally we got Chinese bun from 7-11 (famous mini-mart in eastern Asia). P’Orn phoned me to go to take group picture when we haven’t finished eating yet. Hong and I had to run back to the check-in counter to take group picture. We were lucky, we didn’t miss it :-D


Getting on the plane, I didn’t expect good facility from China Airlines BUT I was pleasantly surprised because there were touch-screen PTVs with a TV-on-demand program. It was much better than Cathay Pacific’s touch screen. The In-flight magazines were very old because that was connecting flight from Amsterdam but it was March issue ‘cos it left Amsterdam on March 31th ^_^ hehe lucky me I can collect March issue too :-D

The funny thing was that my seat was next to Louis’. The airline really randomly arranged the seats for us. I guess it’s because they arrange the seat using surname (our surnames start with Ta…) The air-hostess served the food after we spent long time complaining (to ourselves) that we were starving to death. Louis ordered Fish steak that didn’t look yummy while I ordered Pork with rice. Luckily, hers was not yummy, mine was (hahaha). Finishing eating the food, I played with the PTV but it crashed and the error messages got displayed on the screen. I waited like 10 minutes until it re-started.

We arrived at the CKS airport with the feeling of being in Bangkok. The CKS is as old as the Don Muang airport in Bangkok. There wasn’t many traveling information at the arrival hall. Our passports were collected after we walked trough the Immigration counter to the luggage claim area. Xiao Zao da ge (“Xiao Zao” is his nick name; “da ge” means big brother), the leader of Fu Dao Yuan (“FuDaoYuan” means something like baby sister), was waiting for us at the luggage area with the green uniform. The green vest that he wore looks like uniform of Thai motor-cycle service which looks funny for us. I thought he was waiting for foreign workers as I saw some officers got inside the arrival area to collect the workers, but da ge was waiting for us (we are labour, finally).
Leaving the arrival area, the other FuDaoYuans (for short FDY) were singing a welcome song with the light orange sign. I felt somehow embarrassed because there were so many people around. We stopped at the waiting point to take group picture. Suddenly, I had to leave my stuff and run away from the group ‘cos I saw Information Counter. There aren’t many English information books, but I collected them all.

After taking group pictures (with orange sign), we got into the bus, each group is in a bus and has two FDYs, except the first group that also had FDY’s leader, da ge. I was in Dui2 (group2). My FDYs were Mian Bao and Jessica (I don’t remember her Chinese name). During the way to our destination, they introduced themselves and Taiwan. They also announced our roommates (I was with P’Yui, Min, and Nat) and room number. Everything went so fast that I didn’t have enough time to take a nap.

The place we were to stay was Taoyuan Training Center. It’s like a vocational school that is located on the hill, in an urban area with no pollution, but there’s really nothing interesting like shopping areas or mini-mart. There were only factories around the place. We called it Prison….

Getting into the room, I felt like “OH My God!!!”. There were 2 bunk beds with furniture and a pack of shower stuff. These looked great but the floor, the tables, the chairs, the pillows, and the blankets were full of dust. There was somebody’s jacket in the wardrobe and it made us scared of ghosts too. There were no toilets and bathrooms in the room. I felt lucky that it’s shared toilets because they smelled badly. After clearing the room, they let us walk around to introduce the center. There are lots of pink flower around. This flower is called Du Jian. It’s just an ordinary flower in Taiwan. They said we don’t have this flower in Thailand but it looks familiar to me.

The name of the flower is named after a bird. There is a story about it--There was a very poor couple. They had a Du Jian bird. They loved it very much and take good care of it. After the couple passed away, the bird was extremely sad and cried out too much till its tears become blood. The blood fell onto the floor and became the Du Jian tree with the Du Jian flowers.

After we finished the sightseeing, they gave us some free time and told us to meet at the canteen at 6 o’clock. Oh damn, the last meal I had was at 10 am, on the plane. I was starving to death. I spent long time to walk from the bed room to the canteen because the canteen is on the hill, I need power to get there. The food there was like Chinese + Thai food. Their intention was to cook what we were familiar to. They had Thai chef there too.

After dinner, they brought us to a conference room and introduced all of Fu Dao Yuan’s. The leader of FDY is of course Xiao Zao. The vice-leader is Xuan Xuan. Jessica, Joyce (Jessica’s sister), and XuanXuan are the most beautiful girls there. (No cute guys.)

This night we went back to the bed room at 8.30 pm. Bed-check time was at 10.00 pm. I didn’t sleep very well as it was still full of dust.