Getting in the Groove

A lot has happened in the last 5 or so days, and it feels like I've been here much longer than I really have.  I guess I'm already starting to get used to life in Taipei!  My mom said that I needed to post a more upbeat entry than my last one, so here's an overview of these past few days:

On Thursday, my friends Eva, Elaine, Mami, Austin and I headed over to the campus to register for the semester and receive our student ID cards.  The line was really long, so we ended up going to get lunch and beat the crowd when the office opened back up.

Registration did not take long, but was kind of frustrating for me because I got scolded for not having a photo on my health form (apparently they need about 5 passport photos to be satisfied) and not having a local phone number.  Once we were all finished, we walked around the streets for a while doing some window shopping.  When our feet were too sore to continue, we returned to the dorm to rest a while, but met back up for dinner.  On my way to the lobby I met Xuan, an exchange student from Singapore, and invited her to dinner.  The fact that she reads Mandarin was a big help when ordering dinner, which we got at a "bao" shop in a small local street market. 

Yu, an exchanger from the 13th floor, was also at the restaurant and ended up joining us for the rest of the evening.  After dinner we explored some more, ordered some bubble tea and checked out a really cool underground book shop.

Friday we went to lunch with a large group of other exchange students (mostly Europeans) at a really nice Dim Sum restaurant called Din Tai Fung.  Apparently Tom Cruise has visited it.  The food was amazing and plentiful, and the group very lively (cheering loudly everytime the waitress poured our tea), so it was a lot of fun.  It was quite expensive, $450 each, but I feel that it was definitely worth it.  After lunch, most of the exchangers took the MRT to Pingxi for the lantern festival, which I really wanted to go to, but it was pretty far away and there was a possibility that we might not get back until extremely late, and with the Chinese placement test the next morning, Mami and I decided to go to a closer lantern fair in Yuanshan instead.  It was a huge display of handmade lanterns at the Taipei Expo park, and they looked really beautiful once the sun set and the lanterns were lit.  We explored the surrounding streets as well, but there wasn't much to be found, so we returned to the dorm around 7 pm.

On Saturday, Eva, Elaine, Mami and I all got up pretty early to go register for the Chinese placement test.  The first written part was pretty difficult, focusing on grammar and writing, and I missed ten (they graded them right in front of you), whereas eleven got you sent on directly to the oral part of the test. So since I missed ten I had to take a second test, which was a thousand times more difficult than the first. I probably only recognized about 15% of the characters.  The oral part didn't go too great, as I had no idea what to expect.  The instructor just asked my name and about where I was from, and then had me read a paragraph from a textbook.  I had to skip a lot of the traditional characters because I couldn't recognize them.  Luckily my placement here doesn't matter very much though, because I will have to take a placement test when I return to UNC anyways.  After we had all finished the test, we met up and got lunch together at some random restaurant nearby.  After that we window shopped, as is the norm, and then returned to the dorm as Elaine had to leave and Mami and Eva wanted to go for a run.  I am not nearly motivated enough for that, so I hung out in my room until they came back.  Mami went out, so Eva and I got on the MRT and headed to Shilin night market, meeting Elaine on the way.  The night market was incredibly crowded but incredibly interesting. There was so much food and merchandise that it was hard to take it all in, but somehow we seemed to visit every shop anyway (*cough* Elaine *cough*).  We walked around for hours, and I bought some nice souvenirs to bring back home (even though that's in the distant future), as well as some tasty snacks.  Unfortunately we shopped just a little too long and missed the subway back, and had to take a cab.

Sunday was a very lazy day as I slept until about noon after staying out at Shilin pretty late the night before.  I got up and and then had a chance to FaceTime with my friends Sarah and Amanda back at UNC for about an hour, before they went to bed (the time difference is hard to wrap your head around).  When we hung up it was about 2:00, so I just ran down to the 7-11 to grab some lunch as I was starving.  It was a pretty pathetic lunch, but I didn't know where my friends were or what they were up to, and desperately needed to do laundry, so it was a quick and easy fix.  I stayed around the dorm most of the day, cleaning and doing laundry, until about 8:00, when I went to meet Mami and her childhood friend at the MRT station.  We went to Ximending, where there is another (smaller and less crowded) night market. I scarfed down dinner, and when Mami and Shou finished (at a normal pace) we walked down the street a bit and eventually ended up in a dessert shop where they serve 雪花冰 (snow flower ice, pretty much), which is frozen condensed milk with toppings.  We ordered two, but I mostly ate the mango one, as the other was more traditional, with beans and yams on it, which was a little strange for me. 

This shop also allows people to write all over everything, so of course Mami and I added our mark so that a part of us would stay in Taiwan forever. 

When we got back to campus, I met up with Elaine and Eva to play some pool, but the rec room was closed, so we tried to figure out our course registration instead.  Registration at NTU is so complicated and stressful that it makes UNC's look like a piece of cake.

Today was the official first day of classes, but I don't have any scheduled until Thursday.  I will however be sitting in on some in the coming days to try to see if I can add them.  After I got up this morning I FaceTimed with my parents for the first time since I've been here, since they left on a cruise the day that I arrived.  I ask my parents for their advise very often, so it was stressful not having them available to bombard with questions all the time, but it was good for me as I was forced to figure things out on my own and make financial decisions, etc.  I was very happy to see them nonetheless.  I met my friends at 12:30, and we walked to campus to get lunch at the outdoor cafeteria.  I had 飯糰 (rice ball) and 鍋貼 (fried dumplings).  It wasn't great, but it's cheap and there are a lot of options.

We also got waffles from the campus waffle shop (why the heck we don't have these in the US, I don't know).  After eating we just made our way through campus trying to figure out where things are. 

We also checked out the sports center, which is pretty impressive.  Later, Mami, Eva and I took the MRT to the Social Science campus, which is quite far from the main campus, and very inconvenient as I have a class twenty minutes after that one on the main campus, and there is no way that I can make it back in time.  This area of Taipei seemed less crowded and was very pretty, with old historic looking buildings and a lot of trees lining the streets.  We got back to the dorm in time for the new student welcome party, where we did an ice-breaking activity, ate dinner, wrote calligraphy, made dumplings, and met lots of new people.