[quote=“Satellite TV”][quote=“Skyfae”][color=#0040FF]I will be coming to Taiwan next month and I just wanted some opinions on adjustment. How long did it take you all to adjust to living in Taiwan? If at all…
Thank you!
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20 years give or take 
[/quote] How long did it take you to adjust? - #23 by Satellite_TV
If only Ms. Craig had hung in there for another nineteen years or so. Seriously, though, I think Satellite TV made a good point: At least for some of us, adjusting here is an ongoing thing, maybe a lifelong thing.
Ms. Craig left in the early stages of the adjustment process, and that experience is what she took home with her and eventually wrote about.
Also, different things affect us differently, depending on our specific culture (down to the neighborhood and even the family) and our complex individual makeups. A case in point (which is probably going to mark me for life as a deee-lux nutcake, if I ain’t already so marked): When I had been here four or five years, I’d gotten used to certain things, and that somehow seemed to make room for other things that had sort of been waiting in the wings. I noticed that in certain situations I was getting annoyed with people for no particular reason, just for being there. Because this baffled me, one day I tried to find out why, and the reason that I came up with surprised me: it’s crowded where I live and work. Now I already knew it was crowded: I could see that it was crowded, and I’d read about it on the board, and I’d probably read about it elsewhere, too. But what surprised me was that I had been acting as if I didn’t know it. I hadn’t really internalized the idea. In other words, it took me four or five years to realize that where I live and work, it’s pretty crowded. I guess my mind was too busy being baffled, worried, annoyed, angered, etc., by other things, and it couldn’t get around to registering the crowdedness until it had (more or less) digested those other things.
And by the way, I’m still adjusting to the crowdedness. And if I ever do adjust to it, there’ll probably be something new to adjust to.