A beautiful morning
Another early morning for me... I woke up around 3:30 this morning, stayed in bed until about 4:45 listening to War and Peace on my iPod until it was abundantly clear that the morning did not hold any more sleep for me. I went down to the main lobby of my dormitory and bought some juice from the vending machine, then grabbed my camera and wandered outside to watch the sun rise.
The campus of Asia University is designed to prominently feature Greek and Roman architectural elements, like Grecian columns, classical statues, domes, and so on. As the sun slowly lightened the sky over the mountains in the east, I sipped from my juice box (seriously, we should have more milk and juice boxes in the states, I love them) and tried to familiarize myself with the campus. The air was cool, the sky just light enough to make faint shadows, and there were no mosquitos in sight. After some more wandering and stopping at our local 7-11 (they are all over Taiwan!), I returned to my dorm room where my roommate, the lucky girl, was still asleep.
The air inside was stuffy and uncomfortable compared to the cool breeze outside. Suddenly, I was seized by the somewhat uncharacteristic desire to go for a quick run to explore the area immediately beyond campus. The university's campus lies about 40 minutes outside the city of Taichung, and it is in a fairly rural part of the county. The campus is ringed by rice paddies -- I have a clear view of them from my dormitory window -- and running past them this morning was lovely. I even ran past a small farm where there were roosters actually going "cock-a-doodle-doo" as the sun rose!! No joke. What an experience.
The only bad part was that the area around campus, like many rural places in Taiwan (though not in China) is populated by stray dogs. One or two of these ruffians were afraid of me, one simply ignored me, but most of them started barking and giving chase. Uncool. The moral of the story: if I ever want to go running again (which, let's face it, is pretty unlikely), I should do it on the track with some of the other students (whom I met on my way back, also up in the wee hours of the morning due to jet lag) and not in the streets where the dogs roam freely.
posted by Kelly @ 5:53 PM
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