Beitou District

And so the adventure began with an 11pm flight from Brisbane international to Taipei where we will be spending three weeks at the national Taipei university of nursing and health sciences. We are going to be learning about natural medicines, health systems in Taiwan and doing hospital observations which is going to be so exciting!
After a sleepless night on the plane where I watched the greatest showman, and red sparrow we arrived at 6.10am local time, got through customs (in like an hr!) and then got picked up in arrivals by four of our buddies with a big yellow sign saying 'welcome QUT students', and then we took a group picture with a massive TV screen on the wall.. So Weird. From the airport we were on a bus making our way through the centre of Taipei. The humidity and heat is exactly what I expected, but the old buildings and huge amounts of greenery were not. My immediate thought was Thailand VS Borneo, odd ... But very cool. The bus took us to our dorms where we got our room mates and dropped off our stuff. In my room is Nikki, Emily and sahama. From there we walked around to every bank in the city so that people could get cash out and then caught to the train two stops down and we went to the supermarket. Which is kinda like woolies, kmart and a bottle-o combined, interesting place with some fascinating objects lol. Then we jumped back on the train back to our near uni stop and had some lunch at a little store. I had chicken and noodles. It was ok, not much flavour but by this point I was starving, so it tasted awesome. From there we went to three different phone stores and ended up getting a sim card. $50 Australian for calls and unlimited 4G so I should be sweet for the trip now, especially because the dorms don't like my wifi log ins so I can't get access. After that was sorted we headed over to our first class, which was an introduction of Health in Taiwan. The teacher skipped over it pretty quick and we went across the road to the health building where they showed up a section of their lobby where you can go your own health checks, weight, height, bmi, muscle mass, BP, spo2, temp, grip strength and endurance. Which is very cool. Apparently anyone can come in and use their travel card (which we had to buy for the train) to complete your own check up. Something to the locals, especially the older population does regularly. Apparently in schools here this full complete health check is done every semester while registering for the classes, even in primary school. Then we had a chat about how they are implementing programs for the older population. The area has been divided into divisions and each group of 50 houses has one social working/health person that looks after that region and makes sure that the people get access to the facilities that they need. From what I understand, they don't have nursing homes everywhere like they do back home, and try to keep people people as healthy and independent as possible for as long as possible. With free vaccinations for kids, and vaccination being a pre-requisit for school admission and classes for older people to encourage exercise and on how to prepare healthy meals and maintain proper nutrition. They also have a little museum of the history of health in Taiwan with old blood machines and pharmaceutical equipment. But everything is on Chinese so we couldn't actually read anything lol.
Once finished at the health centre we went next door to the fire station. They have a large number of stations across each of the different devisions of Taiwan. And this one in Taipei is the largest with the most number of different speciality trucks. The station wasn't very big in size the trucks were parked close together and all squished in. They have a main dispatch call centre (119) and then the numbers get transferred to the different stations. The jobs they get called to the most are traffic accidents and snake catching. They have a number of venomous snakes in the area which they put in old 20L water containers and take to the animal sanctuary. They also have the ambulance run out of the same station. The ambulances are soo different then back home and their scope of practice is limited compared to us. They have no drugs or monitoring equipment. They literally just put people of the metal stretcher and drive them to the hospital. They do have cannulation equipment but they apparently very rarely every time. One cool thing is that they have a mechanical CPR machine. After we spent time going through all the kits and equipment, and one of the girls, Sam got dressed up in a full fire fighter gear we went back to the uni and up into the conference room. We got a copy of the week's itinerary, learnt some Chinese words and played snap using Chinese words that we wrote on card. After that we went back to the dorms and had a little down time before a bunch of girls went out and found some dinner. We walked around and checked out the streets and some of the food stalls and ended up eating hot pots. I had a chicken curry pot which they prepare and bring to the table and place them on a hot plate and you wait for it to cook. There were so many different things in the pot that I have no idea what I was eating, but it was pretty good. Then we headed back to the dorm, stopping at the 7-eleven on the way. I brought some tea to have in the dorm because we have hot and cold water. And then it was back to the dorm to shower and pass out. It's been a really long day but not too bad for a first day. Night xoもっと詳しく