2014: Applied Anthropology, Chinese New Year, Yilan, and Food (of course)

I feel like I've finally had time to breath for the first time in 2014. It's the Chinese new year, so I have about a week off from school. Before that I was busy juggling school and a part time job that someone hired me for over LinkedIn (so for all you people that say LinkedIn is useless...). I was conducting interviews around Taipei with retailers about some of the products they were selling. I wish I could be more specific but they seem pretty strict about what I'm allowed to post online. In any case, it was a great learning experience for me. All the interviews were in Mandarin, so that was really challenging, but I also picked up a lot of new vocabulary. This is also the first time I'd gotten a job that had me directly utilizing the skills I developed by studying anthropology in college (so for all the Yahoo! articles that say it's useless...). I conducted interviews, wrote field notes, took photographs, and wrote up a report on my findings...hey wait, that sounds like my Research Methods class!

One thing I did not like about the job was how I can only divulge the information to my employer. The ethics of this kind of work is something I've been thinking a lot about, because the information is not shared and I am assisting an American company potentially gain a leg up in the Taiwanese market. In any case, I've been doing a lot of background reading on not only the ethics of business anthropology, but also the history and practice of it (National Taiwan University's library has a pretty decent anthropology section in English). These books have also been dropping a lot names that I'm going to follow up on as I try to work out where I should go to get my master's degree.

I finally wrapped up this project near the end of January, and classes ended about a week after that, so I was free to set off for Yilan to spend the new year with my old host family. I brought them a homemade cheesecake (my host sister loves them) and Krispy Kreme, which finally didn't have a line that was five hours long (it just came to Taiwan in December and has been hugely popular...I feel like walking around with a box of Krispy Kreme has become a fashion trend or a status symbol somehow). We had a huge dinner of several dishes, some made by my host mother, some by her mother, and some picked up from Costco. There was chicken, fish, turnips, pork, mushrooms, and fish ball soup.

After eating, we went to stop by and visit both of their grandparents' homes, which are just around the block. Once there, the kids all received red envelopes and lotto scratch cards. Then we went to Luodong night market to cash in the scratch cards and get some snacks and dessert (like crushed ice with green tea tofu pudding and red beans at Bao Xin Fen Yuan, yum). The next morning, we went to 三山国王 (San Shan Guo Wang, Three Mountain King) temple to usher in the new year by lighting incense sticks and eating free bowls of congee with picked vegetables. So far, I'm pretty pleased by 2014.