Blog Entry #4

September 04, 2026

Blog Entry #4

9/2/26~9/4/26

Hello :)

After leaving Taichung, we headed out for a two hour bus ride to Tainan. These past few days were our first three days in Tainan and so far it has been an amazing experience. Similar to Taichung, Tainan city is very calming and less busy compared to Taipei. While some aspects of the city were similar including the streets and food vendors, the overall atmosphere seems to be slower paced which I have enjoyed so far.

Day 11 - NCKU

For day 11, it was our first ever time arriving in Tainan and visiting the NCKU campus. Since we were unable to officially visit the main NTU campus in Taipei, it was very exciting to see the official NCKU campus where we will be working for the next few days.

After quickly dropping our things off at the hotel located next to the NCKU campus, we headed straight towards Dacheng Hall where the Industrial Design department of NCKU was located. The campus overall had an amazing landscape and I was highly impressed by how open the campus was. I really enjoyed seeing various artworks and sculptures scattered throughout the land. Witnessing so many different kinds of works and different architectures used at NCKU made me really like the campus a lot. Especially the Industrial Design department building! After our introduction and orientation, we had a small group campus tour led by our partnering NCKU students. Seeing the Industrial Design department building from the front was very intriguing and it was so cool to see how the design school had their own personal building. Since our design program at UW does not have its own building, it was a little bit envious to see such a wide and large building on the campus of NCKU dedicated to design.

NCKU famous tree!

Throughout the entire tour, we got to experience the wonderful weather of Tainan where it rained for around 10 minutes and then it became sunny immediately after. Since the weather and heat was very different to that of Taipei and Taichung, it was very hard to get used to. However, after a while I enjoyed the slight bit of rain and the sunshine that came after which created a very magical atmosphere. Additionally during the tour, we saw the campus’s famous sweetpotato birds! One of our NCKU student friends had told us about these birds that were nicknamed sweetpotato birds due to their shape. They had mentioned that NCKU campus had so many of them which they did! I was very excited to see one and was very happy to witness so many big round sweetpotato birds in the wild on campus.

SWEETPOTATO BIRD!!!

Day 12 - Circular economy workshop

On day 12, we woke up at 9am which was a little bit later than our usual meeting time for the program, and headed straight to Dacheng Hall for a Circular Economy workshop. The workshop overall consisted of explaining how the economy itself and the idea of sustainability circles around in a cycle and those cycles change depending on biological vs. technological items. The workshop itself was overall very interesting and since I did not have any understanding of the idea of circular economy previous to the workshop, I was very glad to be able to learn more about it. While the workshop did seem very long with multiple questionnaires and ideating stages that helped us with understanding circular economy, it did overall help me have a better understanding of it. Additionally, I felt that the workshop was perfect for our topic for the project which involves sustainability.

Circular Economy Workshop sheets

Day 13 - Free day (Shennong Street)

Day thirteen was officially our second ever free day of the program! After being able to sleep in, all of us felt very rested and ready to enjoy exploring Tainan. We first headed to a cafe near the NCKU campus and ate sandwiches and got some tea & coffee. The sandwich I purchased was one of the best sandwiches I had ever had with the most delicious piece of bread, juicy lettuce, and filled with smoked pork fillet, it was the perfect meal to start the day. After our delicious meal, we headed straight to Shennong Street! One of our NCKU friends had recommended them on the first day and we decided to visit for our free day.

The atmosphere of Shennong Street was wonderful and I enjoyed the buildings and lanterns very much. The structure and color that each building was designed in and also the small street made it very cute to walk around in. Each individual building had their own small shops selling unique gifts and accessories. We noticed that although the street itself almost encouraged photo taking, the majority of the stores inside restricted taking pictures inside of their stores which we found to be very interesting.

Shennong Street

Overall, exploring Shennong Street and also the NCKU campus made us love Tainan so much. These past few days have been an amazing experience and further strengthened our relationships with the NCKU students. It has been so fun and also so wholesome to hangout with our groupmates. Learning more about Taiwan culture especially with our partnering schools have been so fun and helped us learn so much more, helping us with our projects. I hope for the next few days, we will be able to spend more time with everyone and create many more fun memories!