Jubilance

That moment when, standing on the beach, watching the best band in Taiwan perform on a twinkling and distant stage, surrounded by friends who were made slowly but surely, I realized I had surpassed goals I didn't know I made.

Kending

An interesting photo for an interesting day at the beach!

At long last

Today was by far the best day I've had in my five weeks in Taipei. I met up with a guy I met at the batting cage last week, and all of us (his friends and my friend Wendy) went to play baseball again. It was really funny because we immediately got McDonald's and batted and chatted--how American haha!

It was so much fun hanging out with Gabriel. We cheered one another on as we batted, and tried to give advice about batting that I'm pretty sure neither of us knew.

After that, we went to watch some of the kids dance (a very strange, pagan-esque dance!) and sat on the steps for hours taking in the cool breeze and talking about politics and culture and college life and ghosts (yes, Gloria was part of the conversation!). It really was amazing just to connect with someone from another culture like that, and all in Chinese! It was hard to understand (in BOTH directions, cause I'm pretty sure I don't make sense in Chinese half the time). I've already been lucky enough to be good friends with Valerie, Henry, Jasmine, and Angela, but tonight is really the first time I felt that I have true friends and a welcoming community in Taipei--at long last.

我愛台灣。

When in Rome...

Random Realization

The thought occurred to me when my teacher was explaining a classical Chinese term. This is impossible, I thought to myself grumpily. I wish she would just speak English like we usually do. 

Then I realized: I don't remember my teacher ever speaking more than a few difficult words in English. Everything we had discussed, from idioms to petty gossip, had been in Chinese. She spoke one full sentence in English once, and I freaked at how weird it sounded. My other teacher has never spoken one word of English as far as I can remember. 

I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here. I make horribly stupid mistakes and am still working on what they say the total price is at the cash register...even numbers can throw me if said fast! It's just amazing at how far I've come in the past months. I feel like it has gone by so quickly and that I haven't really learned anything, but when I look back to where I was in my days at Notre Dame, to Beijing, where the teacher sometimes used excessive English (much to the dismay of some Kygers among us) to here, where I have been challenged to the point of brain-mushing by full Chinese classes teaching philosophy normally taught to us in our native language. Throw in the major differences between Taiwanese Chinese and Beijing Chinese, and it becomes quite the challenge. 

It's not that Chinese has suddenly become easy to me in entirety. It's sort of like driving around a city without a GPS. At first, going anywhere is stressful and challenging because you often have no idea where you are apart from your front door. Everything is a blur. But over time, you get used to your own street. After that, maybe you can navigate a few blocks. After months and months of driving, you know many parts like the back of your hand--this is here, that is there, and then comes this. You are comfortable here. You zone out to the "Call Me Maybe" or Adele playing for the seventieth time on the radio because the wheel practically steers itself. But there are always parts--neighborhoods, districts--that are still completely foreign. That is the best way I can explain learning Chinese. Many topics are comfortable. Others are mind-boggling in their unfamiliarity. But you just have to take a deep breath and look around--the only way to learn is to keep on driving.

So I may feel like the fumbling fool in my newspaper class. The white boy who can't read the sentences as perfectly as the Japanese girls. That idiot kid who spent more time writing a blog post than studying for his test. But looking back, and looking hard, I can see anyone, even yours truly, can really get used to a language. 

Yeah! We can dooo it!

Taiwanese Friends

I've been terrible at keeping this up. Surprise surprise. I try to tie together themes, but recently I've been terrible at writing them down.


SO starting today, I'm going to be posting something--a thought, a picture, or maybe a full-fledged novel--every day. I know people like my blog because it's not just a "here's what I did and when I did it" type of format, so I'll still try to keep it theme-based and reflective on Taiwan and studying abroad.


Today: Taiwanese Friends

Making friends abroad is tough, especially when there's a language barrier. They're not in your classes. They're not in your cultural activities. They aren't in your classroom building, and you definitely can't just go up to them and ask to be friends! Asian culture is a lot less extroverted than Western culture, so it's even harder to strike up a conversation.


For the first four weeks here, we didn't have any Taiwanese friends. Take it from me: it sucked. There's nothing worse than being in the country and not being connected to it. You can live in the land and see what is to be seen, but for me, a place is all about the people who live there. When I look back on my experience in Beijing, it's not China I really miss--it's my friends who live there and are tied to it. I know if I go back, they will still be there. It was distressing to have no Taiwanese friends, because I felt like it would forever feel like a tourist run-through for me, not an experience of living abroad.


BUT--just when hope was dying, the planets aligned. We were asked to help out at Fu Jen's "English Camp" for incoming freshman, and it was there we met Valerie, one of the TAs, Henry, one of the campers, Mark, the photographer, and several other characters who have really made us feel at home here. The weekend after the camp, we went around the city and nommed the best food I've had here! We also got iced lemon green tea. Anyone who knows me knows I like tea. But this...this was SOMETHING ELSE! I'll spare the intimate details, but I'm going back to that shop. For. Sure.


The next day, our language partner, Jasmine, and her friend, Angela (nicknamed "Jellyfish" in Chinese) took us to an AMAZING hotpot buffet. It was absolutely incredible, and led to some hardcore bonding through conversation. I'm so glad they took us out...it seems the locals definitely know where to eat around here!


For the first time, I felt as though I was digging my heels into Taipei--the people we have met along the way are really making me fond of this place and giving me a reason to come back. Every time we've hung out, my face has hurt from laughing so much. From subway ninja to batting cages and arcades, I'm lucky to have made the friends I have. I really hope I can strengthen these ties before I leave, and maybe even make a couple new friends!

Summer at It's Finest

Kiwi, strawberry, and mango make good companions in summer.

Callibration

The last couple of weeks have been both challenging and rewarding. For the most part, I have been attempting to adapt to life in the Fu Jen program after CIEE's Peking University program. Many assume Taiwan and China, or all of Asia, for that matter, are very similar. This could not be further from the truth!

The strangest part of my experience here is the size of the program: there are five of us here from Notre Dame. Aside from a few foreigners, mostly from Japan or Indonesia, there are no other foreigners in our classes. It's a little daunting to me after the sheer size of Beijing Daxue's program: there were almost fifty of us spread out across the levels, all American students, put together with several thousand other international students. Needless to say, there was always someone to hang out with. Here, there are five of us. Luckily, we've gotten on pretty well, but it can be a bit lonely when the four other people are busy, tired, etc.

Classes are also kind of odd at the moment. There are only four levels of Chinese instruction at Fu Jen as opposed to the 35 at PKU. There was no placement test, but I somehow ended up in the most advanced classes, after coming from a solidly intermediate class in Beijing. This makes me a little nervous, for obvious reasons. The classes I'm in are extremely small. For two of the three classes, it is just Wendy(also from ND), myself, and the teacher. The main class has a few Japanese, Indonesian, and Vietnamese kids who are akin to Chinese-speaking robots--they never make mistakes. On every single test, no matter how badly Wendy and I have done, they have all gotten perfect scores. Intimidating? Yeah.

I have three classes--the first is one centered around reading the newspaper, the second around Confucian Philosophy, and the third on ancient history. The topics seem to be a handful in English, but these are in Chinese all the way. The teacher for two of them is awesome, super nice and always up for a detour to talk about something else. I often steer the conversation to something more useful, like, say politics! <junkie!> Honestly though, Confucian ethics is useful, but sometimes I just want to practice speaking regular Chinese...

My brain pretty much turns to mush every afternoon after four to six hours of full language immersion, but I'm beginning to think I can hold my own if I prepare enough. We go so fast! There are no activities really, it's just vocab-news article-next chapter vocab-article...etc.  The history one is this old lady who wears a back brace and is quite Catholic school in terms of personality and strictness, if you catch my drift! I'm totally scared of her, but we'll see if I can't get on her good side. If there is one. She will blab on for about twenty minutes at a stretch and then quickly say "understand?!" Needless to say, it's a little tough to tell her you had no idea what she said...I also kind of like teasing her though! Sometimes I tell her I can't understand her Taiwanese accent, which makes her really flustered. "WHAT TAIWANESE ACCENT?!" she moans at me. I tell her Beijing is the standard and Taiwanese is way different. That usually prompts a smack with the dictionary, hahaha!

Overall, though, I am rising to the challenge. It may require a lot more work than Beida, but I feel like the rewards will be much greater!