Taipei Personality

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Dan Spinelli

Dan Spinelli

I'm a graduate student at Georgetown University who is spending the year in Taipei learning Mandarin. Expect posts about Taiwanese culture, expat life, and the Philadelphia Eagles.

#5 Five Things You Should Know About Taiwan

#5 Five Things You Should Know About Taiwan

It has been over a month since you've heard from me, which proves all the haters right! Yes, it was pretty close to impossible to maintain a steady newsletter while studying abroad. To be fair, these past few weeks have been eventful: I finished my final exams, celebrated

#4 When We Think About Distant Cities

#4 When We Think About Distant Cities

My experience of Taipei still feels like that of a tourist even as I return again and again to familiar places with the eye of a local.

#3 What Does It Mean to Sound "Taiwanese"?

#3 What Does It Mean to Sound "Taiwanese"?

I have a fun newsletter for you all today, which includes a far-too-long dissection of the Phillies' first few playoff games and some more music, movies, and travel thoughts. But first (!) I've long wanted to write about the way Mandarin Chinese is spoken in Taiwan and why

#2 Imagining Taipei

#2 Imagining Taipei

On my first day back in Taiwan, just hours after stepping off my flight, I made my way to Eslite Bookstore uptown. I wasn't planning on buying anything, but bookstores have a strange way of enacting a magnetic pull on my bank account. I pondered whether to buy

#1 We're All From Somewhere

#1 We're All From Somewhere

This newsletter will hopefully be many things—a diary of my time in Taiwan, a place for musings about Taiwan’s politics and culture, and a record of the amazing and often amazingly difficult experience of learning Chinese.