Erin - CP 10

Although this is my last conversation partner blog, and summer C is ending, Antonia and I agreed to keep hanging out, and she is planning to take me to a Taiwanese restaurant when I get back into town. Today, we talked about basically everything, from her siblings and mine, to politics and religion in Taiwan. I was not very sure about the political system in Taiwan, especially after all I have heard about it not being represented the way it would like to be; so Antonia explained to me that there are two main political parties: the conservatives and the progressives. The conservatives apparently consider themselves to be the true China, but the progressives want to separate their identity from China and simply be known as Taiwan. Taiwan has a president, and elections every four years, and the president is allowed to serve two terms. She said that the first democratic elections were twenty years ago, and that everyone who is at least twenty years old is allowed to vote; I was also informed that the conservatives are currently in power. To further veer off from "polite" conversation topics, we also talked about religion. I learned that Buddhism is the largest religion in Taiwan, but that Christianity is also very popular. She didn't know the name of her parents' religion in English, but said that it was very similar to Buddhism and that they were vegetarian; I explained that my parents are Catholic (which, similarly to her family-religious explanation, I had to describe as being very close to Christianity)...yet funnily enough, we both discovered that we don't practice our parents' religions. When we got on the subject of food again, she asked if I liked sushi; I was told that sushi is very popular in Taiwan because they have a lot of Japanese restaurants there. Actually, they have all kinds of diverse restaurants there, not because the population is necessarily ethnically diverse, but because they are very open-minded, according to Antonia. I am grateful that she is open to talk about relatively controversial subjects in order to explain her culture, as many of the CIES students also seem to be, and I look forward to spending more time with her as the fall starts.