My Corner for Education

After four days of walking around Taipei City, Da Pong and I finally got a day off. We decided to accompany my mother to visit one of the Tzu Chi Hospitals. My mother somehow travels far to this hospital every month for her monthly checkup. It is quite a distance for her to travel by bus from Sin Zhuan to Sin Dian! I wanted to tag along to see her health report. Plus, I really wanted to see this hospital and, furthermore, my donation dollars at work, I guess.

I don’t mind disclosing a little fact that I do donate to many charities regularly and Tzu Chi is one of them. A close friend of mine is an active member in the town I live, and I donate the money through her to Tzu Chi every month. I have heard many stories about how they helped build the hospital, but this would be my first time to visit one. Honestly, I was quite impressed with the size of the hospital and how orderly the process was wherever we went.

I never like hospitals because it always reminds me of the time when my dad was in and out of three hospitals. You would get to hate it as well if you had to visit the hospital everyday. Anyway, I was very impressed with what I saw at the Tzu Chi Hospital. I don’t know how the quality of the service is like for that size of a hospital though. The large number of patents and the number lights made the place look just like conveyer lines to me. Can a doctor really get to know a patient well at a big hospital? I don’t have the answer but, at least, I know they’ve got a happy patient- my mother. My mother obviously is happy enough to visit there on a monthly basis.

Other than the visit to the hospital with my mother, we actually had another plan for the day. We planned to have the first ET encounter. I am not talking about the alien ET but the blog friends on English Taiwan site(ET2). After the hospital visit, I called up my blog friend Carlito again to confirm the time of our date at lunch, which happened to be the day after his birthday. I had been looking forward to this day. For this trip to Taiwan, I did not really plan to meet up with anybody at first because my time was limited and the schedule was tight. However, the messages I had received from so many blog friends from ET2 and the other two blog sites (Wretch and Pixnet) were quite overwhelming. I was humbled by all the kindness and friendly gesture I had received. I am very sorry if I did not get to see all of you due to my time constraint.

Da Pong and I were quite excited and nervous about meeting up with the first blog friend on ET2! Well, it turned out to be blog “friends”. On the phone, Carlito mentioned that he would bring along another friend, Summerplayer. Excellent! It was even better to meet up with two at the same time. Da Pong felt a bit awkward at first because he knew nothing about my blog friends. All the information he heard about Carlito was all second hand information through me, so he was hesitant about going along to meet them. Well, if I was the tour organizer for Da Pong, he didn’t really have a choice, did he?

I was so happy to finally meet up with Carlito and Summerplayer. They were super friendly! We originally planned to have a coffee after lunch, but we ended up chatting through the afternoon. When you saw Da Pong get really talkative, that meant he was beginning to feel comfortable with the people he met. At least, now two people on ET2 know how serious and chatty I could be.

I would like to skip the details of our friendly ET encounter, and no photo will be posted here, either. I just want to say that it is my pleasure to know so many good friends on ET2. Thank you, Carlito and Summerplayer, for such a wonderful afternoon!

By the way, don’t ask me about what Carlito and Summerplayer are like. The same would apply to the others. I will not disclose any personal information to you. You just have to ask them or find out yourself.