But onto the rest of the day after I got unpacked…
It took forever to get my internet up and working so I could contact friends and family. I’ve still even this morning on the second day only seen one of my three roommates. The one is very nice, she helped me get my internet working. I really need to try some of my Chinese with her, I think the language barrier between my student coordinator and I speaking English to her when we first arrived at like 6:30 was a bit overwhelming. We’re probably both kind of shy too.
So Kaitlin and I went and took some pictures together (they’re available on her and my facebook). I realize today I was more tired than I realized. I look more than half a derp as far as facial expressions in those pictures (lol). I didn’t see any geckos yet, but Kaitlin has a nice picture of one.
The bookstore was awesome. I was super tempted to buy a Taiwanese pop magazine, but the artists were Korean (Junsu was on the cover and Big Bang as well as others were listed). Korean pop music is very popular here like everywhere else. I heard Break Out! by DBSK while walking past a store (its mostly sung in English and I was so tired I just starting mumbling along while our the Chinese student with us looked around … herp derp). Jay Chou was the on the news, Miranda the Chinese student taking us around and I ended up talking music and actors for a while. Apparently, Fahrenheit is still pretty popular here. Nicholas Tse is known more for acting like I thought.
I bought a phone and toilet paper, the top items on my grocery list. I totally forgot about toothpaste and shampoo (borrowed some) among other things. We shopped at a department store called A Mart, the first floor is like Sam’s, and the second has a McDonalds and is more like Wal-Mart otherwise. The toilet paper is different it comes in like little napkin packages instead of rolls so you can take it with you. Miranda seemed to find it amusing that we were confused by it.
We saw so many places my head was kind of spinning, Miranda showed us the big bank that will exchange currency for us (if necessary), A mart, two different ways to go off campus, where to buy our phone, places to eat, the mountain that’s a national landmark (I’ll have to ask Miranda the name again), bus stops (warned not to take those until my Chinese is better and I know street names) saw the MRT station and saw part of the night market being set up among other things.
Dinner was interesting, it was sort of a buffet look. Where you picked your food from the buffet first and then paid for it. It was cheap and I ate a ton (didn’t think about food again until then, our student coordinator was not happy about that… ><). My eyes were bigger than my stomach, besides the heat and being tired. I felt bad and tried to keep eating. Miranda told me it was okay and not to worry about it. I always thought it was rude to waste food, so I was very relieved when she said something. Kaitlin learned not to stick her chopsticks in her rice (its for funeral rites), Miranda was very polite about telling her. She also told us that it was especially worse being that it’s the “Ghost month” right now, food is also on sale for the month because of it (offering to ancestors maybe? I’ll have to ask).
So it was a big day. I had a hard time staying awake at 6pm when we returned to the dorm. Luckily my roommate returned with some friends and although I didn’t really say anything I was happy just to have some distraction to keep me awake and I talked to my parents about my day a little. Bedtime ended up being ten. I slept like a rock until 9am. So adjusting to time was that hard, though I didn’t realize until today that yesterday was rougher than I thought (don’t usually sleep that deeply).
Oh I almost forgot to mention, they had club tables out, just like we do in the US. There was a lot of music clubs (choir, guitar, jazz, etc), karate, cosplay it looked like (a girl dressed as Miku and a book with tradional costumes on the table behind her), manga (the girl drawing was really good, her art was beautiful), a table top gaming (saw some magic cards and a war game with characters I didn’t recognize, but Wu Xia by the looks of it) and others I couldn’t identify. The school newspaper stood and talked to us for a little while, got a copy of the newspaper and they were handing out tomato juice (which I’ve always avoided, but its actually pretty good.
