Taiwan Day 13 and 14

I've decided that since school started, I can't do a blog post every day, since I have no time to go to fun places and take fun pictures, and I don't think anyone wants to read extensively about my Chinese classes. That being said...

Monday was the first day of classes, which is weird, because after two weeks of playing in Taiwan, I kind of forgot that we were going to go to school eventually. But I LOVE IT. Chinese allll day. Not actually though, each class is only an hour. I have my class on 今日台湾 (Taiwan Today) first, and there are two other students. My other textbook 中国文化丛谈 (Talks on Chinese Culture) has two parts, the 合班 (group class, with three other students) and my 单班 (one on one class) so I think this textbook will be much harder, since I really don't know much of the vocabulary, as opposed to the Taiwan Today textbook. I love the small class sizes, especially the 单班, because I'm less scared to speak 哈哈.

In between my first and second class, we went to go get lunch, and I realized I have given up on menus that don't have pictures. Since I can't read anything, I end up just telling them what I want, based on what I see. So in today's case, I was like "can we just get noodles and pork?" since I saw noodles, and just like pork in general. This horribly backfired when she responded "this is a pork noodle place. All we have is pork and noodles. Can you be more specific?" HAHA. Unfortunately, I'm not exactly sure how to be more specific than that in Chinese, so I did what Connor does and just said "just pick your favorite dish." Again, good thing I have no food allergies/eating restrictions.

After class, went to the cafeteria to get bubble tea for a studying snack, then straight to ICLP's library to start the homework. I'm trying to at least learn to read traditional characters here, so it's twice as hard, since I have to look up every other character on Pleco. That, plus the fact that the workload is already huge, and I'm not sure I should be in 400-level aaaaaaaargh.

Bubble tea and cute 文具 - the best study motivators

For dinner, ICLP hosted a fancy dinner for the students and teachers, in a very nice hotel. 

Cute desserts!!

They had a pasta bar where they had almost every kind of pasta, and you just put it in a bowl and told them what you wanted in your dish and they just made it for you in a pan right away. It was so cool. I pointed at a lot of things and was like "what is this?" but since all of the answers were pretty specific, like "scallops" and "Chinese watercress" and a bunch of other food vocab I don't know, I'm not too 清楚 on what was actually in my pasta, but it was good.

Mystery noodles, mmmm

This is a picture of me and my 指导教授 who also teaches my 中国文化丛谈合班 and my classmate Matthew. Of course I am eating ice cream, as always. The food was sooo good, especially the desserts.

This is a picture of my name tag which I included because 1) it made me feel official and 2) because multiple teachers have asked me my name, and they either say it is 很特别 (special) or 很好听 (sounds nice). I don't know if they just say that to make me feel special or they actually mean it, but it is nice of them regardless.

After studying for wayyy too long, I went out to the living room where Char was studying, and this conversation happens. This is pretty much verbatim.

Me: How's studying?

Char: Do you want some yogurt? There is no sweet.

Me: Wait. What?

Char: Look! *points at her mug* It's butter lion. It's but-ter-y. And lion.

Me: Charlotte...I think you need to go to sleep.

Char: I...yes. I...no. No. You BOTH need to go to sleep. I come in four minutes then you both sleep. You and I sleep.

OH MY GOD the sleep-deprivation delirium is already happening. It's the first day of school. What is life.

Photo for reference to our conversation. Courtesy of Char.

Char went to sleep. I went to bed at 4 and woke up around 9 to study some more. BLEH. This is probably not sustainable.

Tuesday, class is speaking based, so I didn't have to focus so much on characters, even though I have to know them eventually. Ate lunch by myself in the library to study some more Q___Q 

After dinner (which was at the Veggie Paradise, which has now become my most frequented restaurant despite the fact that I'm not a vegetarian?!?) I went to the ICLP dorms to study with Matthew which was very productive, especially because there was a Taiwanese student who could speak English who kept helping us when we were stuck, wahaha. 

Megamind reference, anyone?

Now more studying, because I would love to go to bed before 2 AM, seeing as it is only the second day of school -_____- Luckily my first class isn't until 11. Yeah!!