Taiwan Day 6

Today was the first day of orientation where we met a some of the faculty and and teachers, and also signed...the language pledge!! So we are now no longer allowed to speak anything but Chinese in the ICLP building, and preferably outside of it as well. 很可怕 :|

Had some reallllly good ramen for lunch! As can be seen from the following picture, I did not eat with Charlotte, Connor, Logan, or Eric for pretty much the first time ever, and THEY WILL NOT LET ME FORGET IT. Actually, mainly just the boys. Charlotte is an angel and is never mean to me. The boys, on the other hand... -___-

Afterwards, obviously got more bubble tea. I have a feeling this is a really unhealthy habit. But we walk it all off, so it's fine, right? And tea is healthy and stuff. At the very least, I will never forget how to say 珍珠奶茶 (bubble tea) again ever in my life. (Edit: Connor just found this off of Livestrong.com, "Bubble tea is not healthy if consumed daily." Oops. So I guess twice a day is fine, right? Ha.)

I've also been getting pretty quick with rattling off  对不起，我不是中国人，我是越南人， 请你在说一边？(Sorry, I'm not Chinese, I'm Vietnamese, can you say that again?) Whenever gives me a looooong complicated response in Chinese, because they assume I'm Taiwanese....oh the struggles.

Didn't feel like going on the campus tour after lunch because my directional senses are so bad it would just be them showing me where a bunch of things were that I would never remember. So instead, Khan and I went to check out a bunch of bookstores, because books are great <3 Except because, again, my directions are horrible, we were already on the right side of campus, near Gongguan, but I made Khan walk all the way to the other end of campus before realizing I didn't know where I was going, even though I had asked a security guard (but that had more to do with failure to understand Chinese), ahahah.

But I got some good pictures of campus!

And then we also got to see the campus bookstore, which Khan helped me find, but it was hidden in this really pretty courtyard.

And the nice lady in the bookstore helped us find the bookstore we were actually looking for. Today was actually a really good day for asking for directions, and figuring out things on my own, yay! On the second walk back across campus, we saw the tour group that we were not on taking a group picture, which I thought was hilarious, so here is a picture of them taking a picture, haha.

Also got some pictures of Gongguan which I never took the time to do before.

 The motorcyclists and bicyclists in this city literally have no fear. You'll be walking down an alley and then they just pop out of nowhere. I'm surprised I have not been hit yet (but I have come close...)

We eventually found two more bookstores, neither of which were the ones that I had originally wanted to go to, but it was still good.

This bookstore was really cool, and would be the type of bookstore I would go to if it were in America and the books were in English. Unfortunately, nothing was quite at my Chinese reading level ahahah.

This second store was much more kid-oriented, but what was weird was almost all of the books were in English, which was really annoying, because I definitely would have bought Harry Potter or Percy Jackson in Chinese even if it was too difficult for me to read. Ended up buying a copy of The Witches by Roald Dahl which used to be one of my favorite books, and hopefully I'll be able to read a lot of it by the end of the summer. 

So on my way back home...I didn't know where I was, even though I was SOMEWHERE in Gongguan. So I just walked to the nearest MRT station, which was Taipower station, and took the MRT back to Gongguan, because I knew how to get back from the Gongguan exit. So basically I was in the correct place, walked away from it, then took the MRT back. Yeah. Survival skills = nonexistent. What's important is that I got back eventually.

And now, because nothing that interesting happened for the rest of the day, I'm inserting an extra part that I forgot to write about before. So because the tap water isn't necessarily safe to drink, everyone buys bottled water at the supermarket. So to save money we bought a really large case of water, but then we couldn't get it into the water bottles. So Charlotte and Connor cut up an old sports drink bottle to make a funnel. Ingenuity!

And they're not even pre-engineering, whaaat.