Earthquakes! | 地震

September 19, 2022

As indicated by the title of this post, I’ve experienced my first earthquakes here in Taiwan. The first was on Saturday night around 9:30pm. I actually was in the shower, and lost my balance but wrote it off on dehydration/dizziness. It wasn’t until I got back to my room and my roommate asked me if I had felt the earthquake that I put the pieces together on what had happened. Taipei felt several aftershocks and another larger earthquake on Sunday afternoon around 2:35 pm. During the Sunday earthquake, I was eating a grilled cheese in a coffee shop, one of my first American comfort food cravings. There was also one on Monday morning, but it was smaller. For these specific earthquakes, the epicenter is near Taitung, a city southeast of Taiwan. There, they experienced magnitudes as high as 6.8 (Sunday) on the Richter scale, and had some pretty significant damage. Here in Taipei, we experienced 3-4 magnitude on the Richter scale which is not enough to cause any significant damage.

Taiwan’s infrastructure is generally well-prepared for smaller earthquakes. The buildings are all built with seismic activity in mind since Taiwan rests directly above a plate boundary in the Pacific ring of fire.

In case you’ve never experienced an earthquake before, I’ll give a brief description of what it’s like. For the quakes and aftershocks, I was usually in my room, and the sensation was similar to being on a rocking boat. I expected things to be more rumbl-ey, but it was a pretty gentle sway. The past couple days, I’ve been a little motion sick from the earthquakes. When I sit still, I experience a perceived rocking in my chair, similar to the sensation after getting off a boat after a day on the water. Other than this strange sensation, all is well here in Taipei and I am safe.

Earthquake report from the national weather bureau

Earthquake grilled cheese and tea @ Louisa coffee

My first full week of classes was last week, and on the whole went really well. I ended up dropping my economics class— it was too theoretical and a little bit beyond my mathematical ability. My Chinese classes have so far been enjoyable. My general Chinese classes are a little bit easy content-wise, but reading is a huge challenge because Taiwan uses traditional characters and I’ve learned simplified characters. Nonetheless, I’m learning a lot and hope to practice precision and fluency in my language use. I’m also taking a business Chinese class. This one is pretty challenging because there is a lot of vocabulary that I am very unfamiliar with. However, I see this as a great opportunity to learn some new Chinese in an area I haven’t studied before. Aside from Chinese, I’m really enjoying my political science class on democracy in Asia and my entomology class. My schedule is great too—I don’t have class on Mondays or Wednesdays, so it gives me some time to get out and explore.

On Friday evening, Hannah and I went to see the National Symphony Orchestra. They played a great program consisting of Debussy’s Marche écossaise sur un thème populaire, Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy performed by violin soloist Paul Huang, and Mendolssohn’s 3rd (Scottish) symphony. I really enjoyed the musicianship of the orchestra and the soloist. The concert hall was beautiful inside and out. It sits on a large plaza with the Taiwan opera house and the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial hall.

The national concert hall at night

The Taiwan National Symphony Orchestra

Saturday we spent the afternoon with Wendy. In the evening, we went to a small soup dumpling shop in a night market. The soup dumplings were excellent, but for me, the shumai stole the show. Shumai are another type of Chinese dumpling that I usually don’t care for. The shumai we ate at this shop were by far the best I’ve ever had.

Outside the dumpling shop, 正好鮮肉小龍湯包

The shumai are in the bottom steamer, the other two are soup dumplings

On Sunday, I went with some new friends on a bike ride along the river in the south side of Taipei. It was a lovely trip—the path was similar to the lakefront path in Chicago. We rented YouBikes, Taiwan’s bikeshare bikes and rode during sunset. When we reached our destination, the Bitan bridge, we rented a small boat and got out on the water under the bridge lights which was really fun. Afterwards, we took the MRT back to campus and ate a delicious Thai meal before heading back to the dorm.

Biking during sunset

Some new friends :)

Bitan bridge from the water

I’ve also been doing some sporadic birding with the help, guidance, and encouragement of resident-ornithologist-in-spirit, Sean Lyon. Sean is a dear friend who I met back at Cornerstone Church, lovingly nicknamed bird-man Sean. If you ever need to identify a bird, send him a picture and, usually within an hour, he will respond with an eBird link and an identification. He has really encouraged me to get out and explore the natural landscape of Taipei. Since there are a lot of different birds here than there are in the Midwest, I’ve been much more excited and eager to learn about and identify them. Here on campus, we have a number of ponds and small lakes that are great for seeing a wide variety of species. Honestly, birding is like pokemon-go, but in real life. I was skeptical, but I tried it and it’s actually quite fun once you get to know a couple of the species.

Black crowned night heron

Common myna

Black swan

Domestic swan goose

Despite some of the challenges of making new friends, I’m overall happy, healthy, safe, and enjoying learning lots of new things about Taiwan. As always, I’d love to hear from you! Here’s a couple extra photos to finish off my post for this week.

Faint rainbow over the NTU library

Stunning sunset on NTU royal palm boulevard