summer in the city

wow, is it july already?

so it's been about eight weeks since last i wrote anything. the summer term started in june and basically the time has just flown by. the only thing special i remember about june has been watching the world cup. although nothing beats matches broadcast in spanish, chinese is not bad either. the matches have been on here at 10:30 at night and 2:30 in the morning. i stayed up to watch the final and skipped class the next day.

school is going well. i can sort of skim though a simple chinese article now. that's quite surprising. for our last test, one part was to read a small article in five minutes and then summarize it in our own words. i had time to read it twice and still had a minute left.

so really i haven't written because i haven't been excited to write anything. the reason i'm writing now is because i want to relate an interesting dream i had the other night. i dreamt i was in mongolia near a huge lake. how do i know i was in mongolia? because i was looking at a map marked "mongolia". also marked on this map was a huge area surrounded by a dotted line labeled "chicken cop here". maybe it was supposed to read "coop", but i took it to mean that the area was so desolate a single chicken was sufficient to police it. at first, the lake was incredibly still, so still it perfectly mirrored the sky. then i saw a little movement. it was a fishing line being reeled in, although i couldn't see anyone around with a fishing rod. then i got hungry and all of a sudden i had my own fishing rod, but no bait. nearby was a 7-11 so i went in to buy bait because it seemed a reasonable thing to do, but no one was in there. i left without buying or taking anything and then just cast the line into the lake without anything on the hook. then i woke up. something else special about this dream, it was in black and white, like an ansel adams photo.

i don't usually remember my dreams, but this one stuck with me so that i could write a few details down while i was in class. anyway, that's about it for now. just a few more weeks and then i'm back home. what comes next? who can say? fishing in mongolia maybe.

three more months

so it's been quite a while since i've left any news here. last time i wrote, the weather was beautiful, school was just getting started again, and it seemed like a lot of activities were going on.

right now, the weather is pretty unbearable and only going to get worse. i still have no working camera. on the very positive side though, i just finished my third term here and i have a week of vacation. lately i've been pretty busy with school and with kung fu. i went to hualian last weekend to see taroko gorge and some other very beautiful places with my kung fu club. we had some fun at the beach and in one of the national parks. the park had a nice section where a stream formed a cool pool and there were all these boulders around. i climbed barefoot through them in a big circle from one side of the stream to the other. besides that my club mates and i spent about an hour skipping these beautiful smooth marble stones across the little pool. our arms were sore the next day.



my chinese is slowly improving. my last report in class was to tell everyone what i would do if i were president of the united states. new words are starting to stick more easily now since the grammar is pretty much finished.

in kung fu i finished learning my third set and have started learning two new sets: 二路埋伏 and a set using a staff. i hope i can finish them before i leave in august.

almost one year now... since coming here i've been pretty clueless as to what's happening anywhere else. i've been following the news about the oil spill in the gulf of mexico. i hear that unemployment is still quite high back home. in any case, life goes on, and for the next three months at least, my life is here.

spring is here

i'm not sure when the official first day of spring is/was, but it seems to be here. i've seen plenty of rain here in taipei, but friday morning was the first time i could recall hearing thunder in a long time, perhaps the first time in taipei. this weekend was the azalea festival at ntu. a lot of color all over the campus. it's a shame my camera has broken recently.

what else? a couple of weeks ago i was fortunate enough to catch the sky lantern festival in pingxi. my classmates and i even flew one of our own sky lanterns. it was a great sight, if not quite dangerous. every thirty minutes or so, a big group of sky lanterns would be released into the night sky. meanwhile, people were flying theirs wherever they could find enough space and whenever they wanted. many people tied firecrackers to their lanterns and lit the fuse as it was taking off. i saw more than one lantern catch fire and float down into a crowd of people, but fortunately it doesn't seem like anything major happened.

today i was part of a performance to promote our kung fu club during the azalea festival. our demo was quite short and went well. i spent the rest of the afternoon checking out the other clubs, watching some other performances, and taking a long planned walk through the side gate area of ntu.

since coming back from vacation, every day seems to be longer. it's true i have more homework these days. the other thing is that i can see the end of this little adventure in sight. i don't want to waste any days sleeping in. how many spring days have i seen in my life? how many more will i get to see? this sort of thing i never really thought about before, but really you don't get any days back.

lately in kung fu we've started sparring (對打，literally "opposite hit"). i didn't think i would enjoy it but it's kind of fun. i guess the best part is that at the moment i don't have to worry about anyone hitting me, hahaha. all that i'm doing is practicing combination attacks.

i played squash for the first time the other day. it cost $50NT for one hour with a racket rental. it's a pretty fun game. i was playing with a japanese girl i had met through my classmates. she has a friend in houston. the more people i meet here the smaller this world seems to get.

a little rest (休息一下）

it's been quite a while since i've written. since last time, i've finished my semester, gone back to america, and come back to taiwan to start school again. i've found that i feel much better after the break. i've also found that i experienced something like reverse culture shock in america.

i think it started on the plane from san francisco to houston. i was suddenly able to understand the people around me and my first thought was how obnoxious some of them were. i don't know why. they're probably not obnoxious, but i had grown accustomed to not understanding people around me, so maybe i felt they were being intrusive by speaking in a language i could understand.

the next point was how far apart everything is in america, especially houston. i think the nearest grocery store was a ten minute drive away. not practical to walk to at all. it was one mile from where i was staying to the entrance of the neighborhood, about a twenty minute walk. being in houston without a car was quite a contrast from the life i became used to in taipei.

finally i was surprised by how empty everything felt. even in san francisco on a saturday night, i felt like the roads were pretty empty. in neighborhoods i saw cars parked everywhere but no people.

it's interesting that i've only lived in taipei for six months but coming back to a place that has been my home for so long has seemed so alien. i'm not trying to complain about it. it's just strange.

all those things aside, it was really nice to see the people and places i've missed. six months doesn't seem that long while you're living it but things are happening all the time.

no spring chicken

i spent the last few days cramming for my final exam. after the end of this term, i should have learned just about all the chinese grammar. from here on out, it's a matter of building a better vocabulary and learning a whole bunch of idioms from thousands of years of chinese history, i think.... i met some students who've studied here for a year already. after one year, they've finished with the textbooks and have moved on to reading newspapers and chinese literature. i'm halfway though my year and i hope i can be as far along as they are in another six months.

i did a quick estimate of my vocabulary base. for our final exam, our teacher gave us a vocabulary list with 13 pages, each page with 40 words, roughly 500 words. removing duplicates, maybe about 450. from last term, maybe about 350. in total, there are something like 800 words that i am supposed to be able to read, write, and say. my head hurts just thinking about that.

this evening i spent about three hours going through the vocabulary list, picking out the characters that i had no idea about at all. maybe about 10% of them i had to practice writing again. it reminded me of the time i was in fifth grade and spent two or three months memorizing words for the spelling bee. pure memorization was hard enough then. now, my head is already full of other junk, my eyes are far worse, my hands are more stiff... in other words, i'm goddamn old, hahaha.

having an engineering education hasn't been helpful for my memorization ability either. the lovely thing about engineering is that if you understand the idea, you can just forget everything, conjuring the equations at will. language doesn't work that way at all. for instance, if i start programming in a language i haven't used in a long time, i have to google syntax for almost every line of code until it comes back to me, yet if i see a sophomore year circuit analysis problem, i think i could still solve it without a textbook (maybe)...

but, being old and slow is compensated by being old and stubborn. as long as your stubbornness is directed to growing and not directed to opposing change, i think things turn out fine.

i've sort of been out of contact with my friends back home since i came here. i wonder if they're seeing the same thing. i've noticed a definite difference in the last half year. i don't know if it's because i've been out of work for a year, if it's because i'm throwing myself at a new language, if it's because i worked so hard before, or if this is simply the way things go. where's the textbook on growing old?

quick update

how time flies... this is the last week of my second term studying chinese here. my final is on thursday. friday we're going to make some dumplings. this week the weather has been extraordinarily lovely. i went to a park with my taiwanese friends to take some pictures, hear some music, see some performances, and do some language exchange.

i've played some more pool with my classmates. the wagers have increased from $10NT to $30NT. so far, i've earned enough for a few good dinners from playing. maybe now is a good time to quit while the wagers are still "friendly".

what else? i saw a great exhibition of van gogh's artwork last week and a nice exhibition of animamix art at the museum of contemporary art the week before.

lots of fun, but i have a busy week to look forward to.

training camp

today after class, i attended the first day of kung fu training camp. most university students have finished their classes, so they were able to start at 8:30 this morning. i had to arrive after lunch because i have class for the next two weeks. when i arrived, we spent most of the afternoon doing some serious stretching. there was a whole set of stretches which required a partner. one that i did had me standing with my back to a wall while my partner slowly lifted my straightened leg to about an inch above my shoulder. most of the stretches were for a count of thirty and each count was probably about five seconds. my friend and i were wondering what we had done to deserve such punishment. maybe an hour or more afterward, we started something like our normal set at ntu. i noticed i was able to kick much much higher.

i left around 6 with my friend henry. he gave me a ride home on his scooter. i'm still a little wary of the things after my last scooter riding experience. now henry is a pretty calm soft spoken guy, but i've been led to believe that anyone who regularly rides a scooter drives crazier than a bank robber in a getaway. i've also been led to believe that people from kaohsiung are especially crazy. henry is from kaohsiung.

within seconds of pulling onto the street, we were tailgating a bus, about three feet behind it. coming to the first red light, henry steered into the oncoming traffic lane, passed three slowing buses, and pulled back in to the right side of the road stopping at the box marked for scooters. another exciting maneuver was trying to beat a semi through a right turn with the semi to our left and parked cars to the right. henry decided to let the semi go first, but not before squeezing far enough ahead that i could spread my arms and touch both the semi and the parked car. another new experience on the ride was that my eyes teared up, maybe because my eyes were being blasted with air pollution.

well, all's well that ends well. i made it home, had some dinner, and finished my homework. tomorrow is day two of the training camp. looking forward to it.

happy anniversary

i have a spare moment, and i'm too excited to wait... two days from now will be the one year anniversary of the last day i was a gainfully employed contestant in the corporate rat race. how to celebrate?

in recent days, the weather's been a little better, but i'm not sure where all the time goes. i haven't been out in taipei that much. i haven't been reading too much. swimming maybe... laying around daydreaming... i played pool for the first time in taipei last saturday. i won about $200NT that day. today i played again and lost about $80NT. not that i like gambling or anything. my classmates like to play for $10NT a game, which doesn't seem like much, until i realized each game was going faster and faster. i'm not in any hurry to play again. besides being stingy, the two places we went to have ten years of cigarette smoke hanging around in them, despite taipei being a no smoking city.

in a couple weeks, i'll have finished my second term studying chinese and will have a nice three week vacation in february. for the time being i'm not planning anything too ambitious. i'm planning to do a nice trip after i'm done studying. i just hope it won't turn out like last year in colorado where i was too tired to do anything except get home. maybe what's different this time is that there's not really any home to go back to.

i've been listening to a lot of new order lately. it takes me back almost ten years. i've been thinking about how i got here from there. some people are still in my life. others are long gone. still more i've just met. where will i be in another ten years? busy, busy, busy.

anyway, 2010 is off to a different start than 2009. no major plans. things aren't rapidly becoming worse, they're already pretty bad, hahaha. the only thing to do is finish what i started last year. maybe think about 2011...

pace of life

it's a saturday evening. as i write this, i'm eating seaweed and sea salt seasoned potato chips for the first time. they're quite delicious. i had a very late breakfast/lunch so i suppose these will suffice for my dinner.

i spent the last hour and a half in the library reading vonnegut's "slaughterhouse five". before that, i made a trip to taipei 101 to buy this book along with an english translation of "dream of the red chamber". in total, i spent almost $30US, about the same as what my chinese textbooks for a term cost.

i recently learned that taipei 101 is no longer the world's tallest building, dwarfed by some building, whose name i've forgotten, in dubai. i've also learned that the sears tower in chicago is no longer named the sears tower, having been renamed as if it were a sports stadium. so, perhaps names aren't really important.

we finally had a break from the rain in taipei today. the afternoon sky was bright blue. my clothes which had been hanging on the clothesline all week finished drying today. i've been living here for some five months now, yet i continue to see new things in places i would think should be pretty familiar by now. there's an apartment building on the next block with a not so interesting entrance which has trees growing on the roof. i just noticed them this evening. as i was walking down the alley, i noticed that somewhere there is a family who loves eating curry for dinner. i smell it at least twice a week. i also know there is a family somewhere, probably on the third floor of a building, who plays mahjong on the balcony after dinner, if i judge the sound of mixing tiles right.

i'm still surprised by how i feel at home here in a sea of people i can barely communicate with. yet, we humans are resourceful things. i managed to have a very nice haircut using broken chinese and hand gestures to describe what i wanted. my teacher has been teaching without using english all month. yesterday, i had lunch with my classmate and spoke continuous, if not always correct, chinese for almost an hour. i was practicing kung fu by myself this week and find i can't keep count unless i count in chinese.

not many exciting things going on. instead, life seems to be moving inch by inch, unnoticeable until i look at some substantial stretch of time and see i've done quite a lot here. it feels like just the right pace.

happy new year

happy new year!

it's been an exciting ride. i started my blogging project exactly one year ago on the floor of a tiny studio in colorado springs. one year later, i'm in an even smaller studio on the other side of the earth, but at least i have furniture now. i'm very thankful for the family and friends who have supported me, especially this last year. 2009 has been fantastic, but it had the potential to be disastrous. so, to whoever is reading this, and to many more who aren't, thank you.

i spent the last evening of 2009 in the warmth of my apartment, watching the fireworks at taipei 101 on tv instead of watching them in person. maybe this sounds lazy... it was. i don't regret it. out of all the places i've lived over the last few years, this one has really started to feel like home. maybe because i no longer have a true home in texas anymore. maybe i haven't had a true home in years.... now i no longer have a true house in texas either.

although this will be my home for the next eight months or so, in recent days i've started to think about what comes next. after being out of work, every day doing exactly what you want for the better part of a year, how do you fit yourself back into that monstrous machine of the 40-hour work week?

who knows? maybe it's not as bad as i remember it. maybe with a little bit more wisdom now, i'll be able to find some harmonious balance between work and real life. i hope such a thing exists.

fall in taipei

the days have really started to fly by. fall has arrived in taipei and it's been surprisingly lovely. a few days ago i went out sightseeing on a sunny afternoon to the confucius temple near yuanshan station. it was a quiet, green space and having gone on a weekday, there were only a few other people there.





a little way down the street was the livelier baoan temple. here there were many more people visiting the gods, carrying sticks of burning incense. i wish i knew more about the traditions in visiting these temples. i only know that you're supposed to enter from the right door and walk counterclockwise.

i've started to try more of the restaurants around my studio. i had my first slice of pizza in taipei yesterday at a restaurant nearby. not bad. better than the spaghetti i've had here. my appetite continues to get better, especially now that i've started to swim more. i'm happy that i've been able to resume some of the routine i had while still in houston.

there's one more month left of the fall term with a one week break before the winter term starts. i'm pretty satisfied with how my chinese is going. i've noticed within the last two weeks or so that things are just starting to click. yesterday i was in a taxi and after going the wrong way a bit, i explained to the driver that we wanted to go in the other direction. speaking was the easy part and i did it without hesitation, but when he replied, i didn't really catch it all. luckily amanda was able to figure out what he was trying to say. listening and understanding are the slowest things in coming, but i can definitely tell that i've made some progress. kung fu club has been pretty good too. i've learned how to say a few useful words related to body parts, but haven't learned the characters for them.

this week has been pretty good for firsts. tomorrow i'll be going to my first club in taipei for a halloween party being thrown by the ntu school of management. i still haven't bought a costume, but neither have my friends. i'm not sure how late i'll stay as the last mrt train leaves at midnight, but in any case, it ought to be a fun night out. i missed out on halloween last year, so maybe i ought to make up for it tomorrow...

getting lost

the weather was very nice today for the first time in about a week. instead of eating the cafeteria food, my classmates and i bought some lunch boxes and sat at the field behind the main library to enjoy the weather.

following that, i went home for a little rest and then took a nice walk this afternoon. when i say walk, maybe trek might be more accurate, at least by my standards. i made my way to daan park for the first time today. it's a very nice place, reminding me of hermann park back home, in that it's this big quiet place in the middle of the busy city. some people were playing croquet, others were just out for a stroll. it would have been a nice day to fly a kite. there's a little pond and an amphitheatre with a view of taipei 101 from the top of a small hill. the walk from the south end to the north end was probably around twenty minutes.

after leaving the park, i headed west down xinyi rd. towards yongkang st., where both din tai fung and the lamian place are at. i got there a little early, around 4:30, so i bummed around the small park there and took some time to write a postcard. i had my dinner at the lamian place. the food is delicious and i thought i would treat myself after being sick all week.

after that, i started walking back through daan park towards school for my kung fu class this evening. i came out of daan park at a different spot and ended up going the wrong way. i walked all the way to national taiwan normal university, before realizing my mistake. fortunately, mrt guting station was close by and i was able to get to taida from there. in all, i think i walked close to 6km this afternoon. not too bad i guess.

our kung fu club is pretty small, with maybe 5-7 people showing up at any particular meeting. i did the best i could although i'm not completely over my cold yet. i learned another stance, two new sets, and another section for the liu he quan set. i wish i could remember all the names in chinese, but it's slow going. the sounds don't map to anything i can see in my head. i know 馬步 is the horse stance, simply because i know the word for horse. 弓步 is the bow stance, and then the other two i don't remember the names yet.

i've also found out that the club isn't free but has a very affordable fee. $300 for the club, plus $250 for pants, and $300 for shoes, for a grand total of $850NT (about $26USD). pretty good i think.

it's been a long day. time to get some rest.

daily life

i was pleased to find out a few days ago that my dad is reading this and i think he'd be pleased to know that the most exciting thing i did today was to do my laundry and sweep the dust off the floor in my apartment.

i'm in my sixth week here and daily life has slowly transformed from running around, getting setup, into the kind of quiet days i had back home. yesterday i went shopping for a usb drive (4GB for $350NT) and a new set of drumsticks ($330 NT). eventually i'm going to find a night market to buy some new jeans. maybe i'm getting old, or more practically i don't have much money, but i don't mind staying home these days.

i learned on friday where there are free music practice rooms on campus. they have a whole bunch of rooms with pianos and two rooms with a set of drums in them. at the moment, the drums are in need of repair, but i'm going to make it a habit of playing in there when i'm not in the library or swimming. i suppose i ought to find out where i can buy earplugs...

this wednesday is the first meeting of the ntu jazz club which coincides with the first meeting of the ntu rock club. they're even next door to each other so i can drop in on both of them. i'm hoping to be able to play with other people and have more opportunity for practicing my chinese.

that's about it for now i suppose, except for this:



yes, they have busch in taiwan. they also have miller high life, but i didn't get any pics of that one.

rooftop party

i've just come back from hanging out on the rooftop of some mid-rise in taipei with my classmates and two new friends, alex and denise. i wasn't expecting to meet them today, but i was hanging around starbucks reading sherlock holmes thinking about what i was going to do for dinner when i got a text rescheduling our little party for tonight instead of tomorrow. i don't have a very demanding schedule so meeting tonight was just fine and it solved my problem about what to do for dinner.

so, dinner included a tallboy of heineken, half a six pack of essential beer (from korea), and a bag of popcorn on the roof. the roof was pretty cool. i wish the sky had been more clear tonight. there's a bunch of roaches on this roof. i was sitting on a chair chit chatting when my friend reached over for some popcorn and pointed out that there was a roach on my knee. i think there were two other roaches on my pants, but i just sort of stamped the ground and they all jumped off and ran for cover. this sort of thing might have bothered me before, but somehow i've been desensitized to a lot of things since arriving here. i figure all the sort of things that might have bothered me at home are just part of the culture here so i've been pretty accepting of all that's come my way so far. this includes bad service at the bank, shady landlords showing me studios, and poor treatment at the hostel.

i was kind of early for my meeting tonight, so i went to the taipei main station area to kill some time. i successfully ordered a pearl tea, with some kind language assistance from the cashier, and i even bought a book titled "the true story of ah q" which i seem to have forgotten at sebastian's apartment as we were leaving.

let me see if i can recap the week. i've been given a ton of homework every night. all the homework has to be completed with chinese characters. it's kind of amazing that after two weeks, i'm able to write some simple sentences with characters.

i had dinner at i-shuan's house last night which was my first home cooked meal in taiwan. it was beef stewed in a meat stock that's been used for ten years with fresh homemade noodles and some greens. very delicious. 很好吃 (hen hao chi)。i also tried "thousand year egg" 千年皮蛋 (qian nian pi dan) for the first time with two different preparations. one was with tofu, soy sauce, and green onions i think, and the other a dipping sauce made with some herbs from her mom's garden. both were pretty good. when i first heard about "thousand year egg" and encouraged to try it with a suspicious smile, i was pretty wary of it but it turned out to be much tamer than i expected. i would definitely eat it again.

i've also had a lot of good noodle dishes this week. one was 拉麵 (lamian) in an area kind of away from the nearest mrt station. i'm still sort of exploring the areas close to the mrt stations and haven't really ventured far away from them.



i also had a good noodle dish near the main gate at ntu. for the life of me, i can't even remember what it was called, but the dish was with flat, slippery noodles and beef. after that meal, i-shuan and i went back to the witch house cafe for late night coffee and some games. we played one called "ninja vs. ninja" which is entirely dice based, and another one called "carcassonne" where you build some fortified towns and try to control as much area as possible.

the ninja vs. ninja game had rules in english whereas the carcassone game we picked only had rules in german. eventually, we were able to get another set with rules in chinese that i-shuan was able to explain to me.

i've been out late every night and so i haven't been around to take out the trash. tomorrow i'm not sure if they pick it up even. it's either tomorrow or sunday that they take off. my apartment has gotten dusty very quickly. i think living near a major street and running the a/c all the time doesn't help much, but my asthma has not really been a problem.

so far, i'm having a pretty good time. i have a test on monday. there's also a thing on sunday where all the student organizations recruit members for their clubs. i'm hoping to find a music club so that i can play some drums. i heard from denise that there are plenty of clubs at ntu, so i'm sure that i'll find at least one that will be to my taste.

first week of school wrapup

it's saturday right around lunch time. i caught up on a lot of sleep last night and this morning i went for my first swim here. ntu has a very nice athletic center and it's really right across the street from where i live.

they have a bunch of boxes where you put your shoes before you even walk into the locker room, sort of like the things kids put their shoes in before getting into the ball pit at chucky cheese. the locker room has these raised plastic grid things which lets water drain to the floor beneath so you're not walking around in nasty puddles. same goes for the shower.

the requirement to swim here is that you wear skin tight clothing so i bought some swim shorts and a swim cap yesterday. i discovered that the shorts already have a tear in them so i'm going to find a sewing kit to patch them today. my swim was nice. either i've gotten stronger, thinner, or more likely, the swim shorts are pretty effective, because i noticed i was swimming a lot easier than i'm used to.

later this evening i'm meeting with my classmates at 龍山寺站 (longshan temple mrt station) for some fun at the nearby night market. there's a particularly famous section of it called "snake alley" where you can have snake soup, snake venom, and some exotic, expensive dishes. not sure what we'll end up doing but it will be hilarious trying to order food because the stands most likely won't have any pictures and maybe not have menus at all. i suppose we can just point at the dishes as they're being cooked or as people walk away with them.

the first week of class has gone pretty well. i was worried we'd be going slow, but after the first week, we're already writing our homework with characters. this week i think we've learned 40 characters and a handful of useful sentences. i get the feeling that my classmates are doing a lot of extra work outside of class too because we're moving along at such a good rate.

anyway, i'm happy things are starting to settle. it's such a nice luxury to just have a place to lay around. i'm using a whole lot of electricity at the moment, but i can't figure out how to reduce it except to stay out all day or to just open the window onto the busy road below. thankfully, fall is coming and it won't be so hot.

one other thing i've seen around the city is a lot of fires on the sidewalk. i think the other day was the first day of ghost month. it's been described to me as summer vacation for all the ghosts in hell. the gates are opened and they wander around with the living. the fires are burning "ghost money" as offerings to the ghosts so that they don't cause trouble. in an effort to minimize air pollution, these burnings are grouped together in front of large buildings instead of every family having their own fire. i don't know how often this is going to happen in the month, but i've only seen it the other day.

here's a picture of the delicious beef noodle soup i had the other night. the meat didn't look all that tender, but it just fell apart in my mouth. it was so good i-shuan and i ate half of it before i could get the picture. missing from the picture is the stewed tofu we had as an appetizer. this too was incredibly tasty. the place started as a small shop with only five seats. since it's done so well, they rented some more space in a taiwan lottery shop next door.





follow your nose, it always knows.

a little routine would be nice

third day of school and i seem to be jet lagging or at least sleeping like i'm jet lagging. i can't sleep until well past midnight and i feel very sleepy right around 2pm. school is pretty fun so far. i have a good teacher and good classmates. i'm having trouble though getting used to a regular schedule so that i feel as though i'm not getting as much done as i could during the day. today i applied for my library card. afterwards, i wandered around upstairs and found a section with movable shelves. then i found the study area and took a little nap.

i ate in the school cafeteria with my new classmates for the first time yesterday. the food is much cheaper than eating outside, although on the greasy side. there's a buffet area and they charge by the weight of your tray. my tray cost $39 today and i had more food than i really needed.

i finally put up some pictures around my room today. i still have one suitcase to unpack, but i need more hangers to put things on. more shopping to do. so far, i've bought bedsheets, dishes, stuff to organize the bathroom... my latest purchase that i'm sort of excited about has been a washbin to do dishes in instead of the tiny sink. it reminds me of the filipinos i saw last year squatting by the river washing their clothes or dishes or both, except my waste water is going into the sewer.

i got soaking wet this afternoon because of a storm. i've heard we're having a typhoon this weekend. that ought to be exciting, or at least it will encourage me to stay home and study.

what else? i had my first chance to throw out the trash last night. the trash truck played fur elise when it pulled up. i nearly fell down the stairs in the dark as i rushed out to get to it. it's pretty inconvenient when you're used to just throwing things in a dumpster or a trashcan at any time of day. i guess this will either encourage people to minimize their trash at home, or encourage people to throw their trash in places they shouldn't, like bicycle baskets according to a forum post on forumosa.com. well, i'm being a good citizen, so instead i'll either minimize what i have to throw out or else leave it at starbucks.

first day of school

i had my first class this morning. when i walked in, there were already two guys sitting in there, speaking spanish. although i don't know much spanish, the sound of something familiar was pretty nice. three more students came in, and then our teacher, 劉老師 (liu laoshi). we're a very international class. i have classmates from honduras, paraguay, japan, germany, and new zealand. some are here on scholarship to do their undergraduate degree, some are here for a short time, and then some are sort of in between, like me. oh, and i finally got to use my chinese name 雷翔之 (lei xiangzhi).

we did a lot of work in three hours. a lot of what we went over today i've already seen before, but the thing i think will improve the most is my pronunciation. class is three hours a day, monday through friday. it looks like we're going to cover a substantial amount of material.

i spent the weekend cleaning up my place and buying little things here and there. i went to daiso last night and picked up a whole bunch of organizational things, like stacking racks for dishes and towel hangers. there's not a lot of space here. my bathroom is toilet, shower, and kitchen sink rolled into one. just walking around daiso last night was like watching humans dancing like tetris blocks. little rotations and sidesteps are needed to get down each aisle.

i also picked up my student id today, which means i can sign up for a library card and a gym membership. the indoor pool at ntu is supposed to be really nice. the only thing is that you have to wear skintight stuff to swim. not really what i'm used to but that's okay.

clean up after yourself

in at least two places i've showered here in taiwan, they don't have any use for shower curtains or bathtubs. at the hostel, the shower was a section of the floor partitioned off from the rest of the floor with a raised section of tile about two inches high. using a hand held shower head, you can bathe yourself and depending on your level of care, minimize the amount of water you let out of the partitioned area by meticulously aiming the shower head towards the corner, or if you're like me, let water go everywhere intending to mop it up later.

in my new place, there isn't even a partitioned section of the bathroom floor. the whole bathroom is the shower stall with a raised section of tile preventing water from running out into the rest of the apartment. this suits me just fine because shower curtains get nasty and water is easily mopped into a drain.

tonight i witnessed my first trash pickup in taipei. it looked like a block party. back home, ice cream trucks play music to summon little kids to spend their parents' money on candy cigarettes and overpriced ice cream cones. here, garbage trucks play music, fur elise among other selections, to summon everyone to take out their trash and whatever is the recyclable item of the day.

one thing i've noticed is that public trash cans are almost non-existent. instead, everyone is responsible for keeping their trash until the trucks come at night. all trash has to be bagged in special blue bags which are sold by the government to finance trash collection. since people have to pay for these bags, they do their best to limit how many of these things they need to use, which brings me to recycling. they are very systematic about recycling. my landlord gave me the weekly schedule for what items are picked up on what night. from what i've read, the collection workers give you a hard time if you don't sort and clean your recyclables very well. so, you can keep paying for blue trash bags, or you can recycle as much of your stuff as you can, or even better, minimize how much trash you have to haul down the block every night. you can see the results around the city. there's no stinking rotting garbage on the sidewalks. now if they could tackle the air pollution...

can i unpack now?

happy chinese valentines day!

after almost two weeks of hunting, i settled on the first studio i looked at. i signed a lease today for a place just across the street from the ntu language center. tomorrow i get to check out of the hostel and move into my new place. i have to say that two weeks is about the limit of tolerance i have for living out of my suitcase. there is something to be said for having furniture and a door with a lock. a trip to ikea and a few other places should be enough to make the place feel like home.

tonight i had a delicious meal although i can't really name the dishes i had. one dish was some kind of chewy cake-like bean sauteed with vegetables. another dish was tofu, intestine, and liver in an oily sauce. the last dish was homemade noodles in sesame sauce. all of this was complimented with a delicious bottle of carlsberg beer. the shop was loud and vibrant with old military songs playing. the flirty girl selling beer was disappointed that i didn't speak mandarin. everyone there was really enjoying themselves.

last night i attended my first toastmasters meeting. isn't it strange that i would attend a public speaking club in english while in a foreign country? after going though, i'm tempted to join them. everyone i met was very friendly with a good sense of humor. i had a good time at the meeting. next time they're going to have a joke telling contest.

i'm exhausted, but it looks like next week i'll be able to concentrate on school. can't wait to get started.

flatfoot

so i've been here a little over a week and it seems i've been trudging along all over the city. apartment hunting is kinda hit and miss. i saw a bunch of overpriced dumps yesterday. lots of foreigners getting sucked into overpriced rooms and then trashing the place. today i saw a nice suite and room in a shared apartment with a girl named uki. i met her at the guting mrt stop. the place was far enough away from the station that she came over on her scooter. so, i had my first experience riding a scooter in taipei rush hour traffic, with my laptop strapped to my back even. five minutes later, we arrived at the apartment. much cleaner than the ones yesterday. i liked it a lot except it's so far from the mrt. it took me about twenty minutes to walk back. fifteen if i hadn't gotten lost.

this weekend i went back to taipei city hall to check out the mitsukoshi department store. it's a collection of four separate buildings with a lot of stuff on all floors that i can't afford. the nice thing is that there are some street performers in the walkway between the buildings. i saw a performer do some acrobatic thing involving a metal hoop. imagine that dude da vinci drew in a circle rolling around and doing a lot of graceful tricks.



i registered for class today. after handing over almost 35K NT in cash, i tried to take the placement test. i took one look at the written part and got up to return it, saying "no need", hahaha. i couldn't read a single thing on the page. looks like i'm starting from scratch. well, at least the placement test wasn't elementary. i'd be upset to be spending so much money to learn numbers again.

after paying my registration, i was left with about $3 in my pocket, so my plans for not eating at 7-11 for lunch were foiled. i walked to my bank to get some more money and 7-11 just happened to be nearby... i did order some food tonight in a cafe. i pointed at a sandwich but the cashier didn't understand what i wanted. the man behind me in line had to translate. later on, i ordered a water. i at least know how to say that.