Making a Home for My Tissues

For some reason, today has felt like the longest day during my entire trip. You know the saying, "Time flies when you're having fun?" Well that was not so true for today. 

Slicing the Cedar

Logs waiting to be cut

Sharpening the blade

At the Shueili Wood Utilization Center, we first learned about how they cut, process, and utilize the wood.
It's amazing how much faster the entire process has become because of different inventions and machinery. Learning about how we use this natural resource has opened my eyes to just how many places wood is used. Can it be possible for a topic to be extremely interesting at the same time as I'm not interested in it? That's how I felt at times today. Learning about the process and logging was great, but it's definitely not a suitable career for me.

Wearing stuffy masks and working hard

I did enjoy how lax our time was. Most of the day (11 am - 4 pm) was spent making a wooden tissue box. The wood comes from Sitou Experimental Forest, where we'll be spending four days to research with our group. My teammates were the first to get together and though Baker doesn't feel that it's fair to have two fluent English speakers in one group, I wasn't aware of this when we decided to work together. He so badly wanted either Andria or myself in his group, but I just wanted to work on a team with people that I enjoyed being with and could collaborate well with. I'm sure every one's group will do just fine.

We also decided to clean our clothes, and with my luck and the age of the machine, it took us close to eight hours. My laundry experiences:

1. National Taiwan University - Andria showed me the laundry room in the basement of our dorm. Thanks girl! She told me, "here are the washers and here are the dryers." So I put my wash in a top load, poured detergent inside the bin, and started the machine. I should have known that when I removed lint from the tray and set the timer for forty minutes that it was a DRYER not a WASHER. I blame it on my tiredness. 
2. Shueili Wood Utilization Center - Jiling, Yinjie and I started around 1 pm and finished drying everything at 9 pm. Wow. Because the washer's writing was worn away, we picked a random setting to clean our clothes. Turns out that setting was Soak. So we came back for our clothing to find it soaking in dirty water. After a setting change and three hours working on our tissue boxes, it was ready for the dryer! Some clothes were hung dried, others put in the machine. Before going to bed we took some hanging clothes and added them to Richard and Vico's clothes in the dryer. Turns out this was a bad idea, because our clothes became more damp and theirs stayed wet. After separating the loads, we were able to collect our clothes. It probably would've been more efficient to hand wash and hang dry our clothes. No worries though.
3. Sitou Experimental Forest - My Taiwanese laundry record: 3 hours. The cold water took about an hour to fill the tub, which confused me when I arrived to it to the dryer. My shoes also went for round after I took a dip in the muddy puddles of the forest (aka research). 

After a quick dinner, trip the convenient store, and watching How Stuff Works: Wood Edition, we were ready for bed. By the way, there are countless 7-11 stores here. Even some across the street from each other. 

Starbucks:7-11::America:Taiwan

People are growing closer and it's easy to observe who likes to keep whose company. Talking with Jimmy, Kevin, and Jiling is enjoyable as ever. Now I am even spending more time with Vico. When he's not being teased, he has some nice things to say.

Ken & Baker take a break