A Note to Worrying Relatives

(and my many other fans)

I'll probably be posting nearer to the end of the week, because tomorrow after class I'm going to Danshui with the fam: I've got a ton that I want to write about but I'm currently having to put some more intensity into my studying to make up for all of the relaxing I'll be doing tomorrow. (Sorry about all of the gerunds there.)

One quick health note: Last night I did mercilessly slaughter all of the mold I could get my hands on, though. There was way more than I expected, I cut some corners/did some stuff wrong, and it was not the best experience overall, but what's done is done, and the point is that I now feel like I'm living in a much healthier environment. Though that may just be psychological.

~Ethan

Classes and the Weekend

An update on classes and the language:

Still extremely difficult. I feel like we're starting a new lesson just as I'm beginning to grasp the last one. And I'm putting in a solid 6 hours of studying per day. I guess I could spend more time on the weekend (I only put in about ten hours in total throughout Fri/Sat/Sun), but I also want to live a little. Which brings me to my next point:

I feel that I'm speaking much less Chinese now that classes have started. Because I spend the vast majority of my day in class, studying, or eating, and because I've for the most part settled into Taipei (e.g., I don't have to go buy a SIM card, etc), on weekdays my real-life Chinese interactions are limited to the buying of food every night - and even that's easy, because I've found the places I like best at the nearby night market. I should probably put myself out there a bit and go on some sort of adventure, but I just don't have the time to justify it.

Also, the language pledge here is very weak (only applicable in the building, and even then often ignored). Say what you will about personal perseverance; when a group of people are speaking English and you're quite bad at Chinese, no one really has the patience to include you in a conversation unless you're willing to speak English too. So in those situations, I alternate between English and... not talking. I've also been keeping up on "news &cet" via my favorite podcasts, and while I'm not willing to give up my newfound joy at being informed, that infusion of English isn't helping either.

At any rate, I hope that once I start meeting with my language exchange partner again - he begged off last week and this, because the hugely important national college exams are this Thursday and Friday - as well as with that elusive third language exchange partner (this Wednesday! It's happening!), I'll be able to actually use some of the things I'm cramming into my head right now.

On Saturday we went on an ICLP-arranged trip to the Lin Yu Tang family mansion (not the most exciting few hours of my life), and then to GuGong, the National Palace Museum. It holds that name because many of its holdings were taken from the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing. From my incomplete understanding, most of them were removed 1) during the first Sino-Japanese War [around 1900, I think] or 2) when Chiang Kai-Shek and his Nationalist troops were forced to flee the Maoist forces [late 1940s, I think]. I'm sure someone will mention if I've made any glaring factual errors. Anyway, we were very fortunate in that we had as a guide a former ICLP student and current art history student, who has spent many many class and independent hours in the museum and seemed to know everything there was to know about everything inside. We only saw a small part of the museum: its jade, its bronze, its ceramics, its porcelain, and some of its paintings. Museums only tend to hold mild interest for me, especially if I spend a lot of time in them - I'm quite uncultured, I suppose - and this was no exception. That being said, there were certainly some beautiful pieces with lots of history behind them, and here were some of the things that I thought were especially cool:

- The jade, particularly the weapons. Did you know that "jade" is actually a term that describes two different minerals, both of which are some of the hardest in the world? It is believed that the only way the Chinese could have cut and shaped jade would have been to use quartz, and each piece probably took years.

- The question of how two of the 95-ish pieces of the most precious set of porcelain in the world, of which the vast majority is in Taiwan/China/Korea/Japan, ended up in Saint Louis. (Michael Rauschenbach, weigh in please. I'm sure you were behind this.)

- Despite all of our modern science and years of refinement, some ancient techniques used in making ceramics are either a) still used today, or b) visible on museum artifacts but lost to the modern age.

Lin Yu Tang House scenery; ICLP students on the balcony; trimming the lawn; Dr. Lin's tomb.

From there I went to... the Zhangs' house! Which was tons of fun as always, and here I shall bore you with some details and observations. First we ate a delicious dinner, almost identical to the last one I had there, and then off to the night market where Dai Ling and Xiao Qi work selling shirts. The Zhang family seems incredibly welcoming: some friends - and cousins - stopped by (or didn't), not all with appointments; some ate; some slept over. It was all very fluid and easygoing; I'm also struck by how the sisters' friends seem to also be friends with the entire family; while Raphael does refer to them as "Dai Ling's friend" or "Li Wei's friend," I tend to forget which is which, I don't really see the "age gap" that often exists between American youth of even one or two years' difference. Their 15-year-old cousin was also very much a part of all of the conversation at dinner from what I could tell. I may be getting a slanted view, though, because I've never met any of Raphael's or his brother's friends (the two of them seem much more solitary), and Raphael hasn't been with us for the majority of the time I've spent with a larger group of them. Xuan Xuan, a friend who speaks English reasonably well, also told me that she thinks the sisters really are out-of-the-ordinary in how laid-back and friendly they are. Which is surprising, because their mom always seems a little bit nervous.

On the communication front, they all said I've improved a lot in two weeks. It's possible - I feel a small but noticeable improvement in my listening comprehension - but I think it might also be because I was lazy and relied on Raphael to translate pretty much everything last time. Sadly, Li Wei seems to have lost patience in trying to communicate with me in Chinese; now, she usually either just gestures or asks a friend to translate. Dai Ling, on the other hand, is starting to talk to me more - but she has a tendency to mistake my lack of vocabulary for a speed problem and lapse into really. slow. sentences., which I always find hilarious.

Dai Ling insisted on giving me a t-shirt, and it was kind of a problematic moment because 1) I didn't really like any of them - too girly or too "I'm a hip Taiwanese guy" ish, or both - and 2) she doesn't make much money selling shirts in the first place, so she certainly shouldn't be giving them away. But after I had refused almost the point of rudeness (or maybe slightly beyond), I gave in; I am now the proud owner of a thick black t-shirt shirt with a set of large buttons near the shoulder (I haven't yet checked to see whether they're superfluous or not), and perhaps I'll wear it next time I see them to make her happy. (The shirt could look cool as part of a certain kind of outfit, which I'm not sure I own and definitely don't have with me.)

What really interests me is her job, though. I'm hoping it's a microcosm of the clothing/accessories portion of the night market itself, because I'm always wondering how that whole system works. According to Xuan Xuan, Dai Ling and Xiao Qi took the initiative to rent a spot in the night market (and also another spot to leave their clothes overnight, it looks like). They found a place near the domestic airport, about 30 minutes away by scooter, where they could buy shirts on the cheap. Originally they had to buy in bulk, but now that they're regular customers they can buy smaller amounts, and they pick and choose what they think will sell. As I mentioned, they don't seem to make much a night - 600-some NTD on a Saturday night (about $20 US, though remember that money goes farther here), isn't exactly a huge profit, especially when you're splitting it - but then, the way they do it, the job itself basically involves hanging out with friends by a clothes rack for three hours a night. I'm not sure if Dai Ling has another job or not, and I want to ask her or Xuan Xuan a lot more about the night market, so hopefully I'll get back to you with some better information in a few weeks.

To get back to my exciting life: Two other friends and I slept over. I woke up early, because Raphael woke up early (bah), and learned how to order another common street-vendor breakfast. Xiao Qi and Li Wei went to church, but I wasn't invited this time (which kind of worries me, but hopefully it's nothing), so we just hung out for a little while, and then I headed back. Had an unlikely and creepster day on the subway - twice ran into a girl I knew from the hostel, and twice found myself conspicuously right behind the same group of French people - and did some studying. Some hostel friends also got together for Peking duck and then hung out at the bar for a bit, which was a great time all around.

In other news:

1. The Taipei International Film Festival started this past Friday, apparently. The theme is Germany, since this is the 20th anniversary of the Wall coming down; 30 or so films are German, but I'm not sure if there are any criteria for the other hundred or so. I hear that tickets for the most popular movies are sold out, and I can't really figure out how to get tickets right now, but maybe I can find some time to go see one of them this coming weekend.

2. I'm spending much less money than I did during the first two weeks, and I'm no longer all that worried.

3. I'm definitely going to Penghu with the fam in early August. It's a questionable move: I'll be missing Thursday and Friday of the second-to-last week of class, and I don't know how I'm going to break it to/slip it past my teachers. But I'm told that Penghu is very much worth it, and I can't possibly pass up this golden opportunity to spend time with the Zhangs and about 15 relatives/friends.

4. I've settled into a daily routine:

- 8:00 AM: get up. Wash face/brush teeth/etc; breakfast of corn flakes, milk, and fruit (trying to add some nuts, but all of the almonds I've bought turn out to be sugared and gross); walk to school and listen to a podcast or my lesson; class at 9:10.

- 12:00 PM: finish classes. Relax a bit; facebook/e-mails/etc; walk and take subway to SoGo, a large department store, buying lunch along the way. Buy an amazingly delicious but ridiculously overpriced scoop of dark chocolate ice cream, so that I can feel justified in taking a seat in the food court for the next 4+ hours.

- 6:30 PM: Leave SoGo; come back to ICLP (more podcasts in transit); look things up or do any homework that requires internet in the ICLP student lounge.

- 8:30 PM: go to ShiDa night market and eat a version of hot pot with mushrooms, carrots, noodles, and some surprisingly great tofu. If I feel like my stomach still has room, I then go to get guabao. Guabao is my favorite Taiwanese snack - a delicious treat/partial meal that looks like a hamburger made of fluffy white dough, stuffed with meat and greens and finished off with a sweet peanut-based powder. Dinner is a little sad because I eat it alone, but the food is perfect, so it's all good. (Gotta get those food groups in! Good-tasting protein is especially hard to come by in a night market, at least as far as I can tell.)

- 9:30/10:00 PM: return to the apartment, do some work, shower.

- 12:30 PM: ideally, bedtime.

And that's it for this week, I think. I'll add some pictures of my apartment to this post in the next few days, but you probably won't hear from me til after the weekend. Tomorrow I'll be meeting that last language exchange partner, and one of the Yale folks is planning a 4th of July/"America Day" party; I'm hoping to bring Raphael along for part of the latter, which should be fun.

Signing out,

~Ethan

Update: Photos!

1. My buddy and me.

I got this fella from a random girl in a coffee/tea shop when I was passing by one evening. Carried him with me through the night market and got plenty of strange looks.

1b. Mr. Giraffe finds a home and a job: greeting visitors to my room. (Job's easy; there are few.)

2. The rest of the room: a fairly spartan sleeping space.

3. My response to the fact that there was a hole in my wall: mosquito netting and tape. Lots of it.

4. On ICLP campus. "Falling leaves? That's silly!"

4b. "On second thought, I'll keep an eye out."

Ethan goes to church. And lunch. And some class.

I'll start with some bad news, because I didn't know where else to put it:

1. Raphael won't be meeting with me for language exchange for another week and a half; instead, he's spending his days at the library studying for the upcoming national college entrance exams.

2. I'm still sick-ish. I'm functional, and I can't say this is too unusual for me - illnesses tend to hang around for a while when they find me. But what I'm afraid of is that it'll turn out that I'm allergic to mold in my apartment or something (I only got sick 3 days in, after all), and that I'll be constantly slightly under the weather for the next few months.

Now to the real stuff:

On Sunday morning, I met up with the two Zhang sisters and three of their friends - Xiao Qi, Yu San, and Wen Hui - for a Christian service at the New Life Church, the second biggest Christian church in Taipei. First things first, though: at the gates, staff members put a device up to everyone's forehead, to check their temperature and find out whether they might have H1n1/swine flu. I didn't have very many expectations for the church itself, but I guess I must have expected it to look or feel vaguely similar to the few services I've been to back home.

Not at all.

I hadn't been paying a lot of attention to where we were going (speaking Chinese takes a certain amount of focus), so I was caught off-guard when I found myself in a massive, packed high school auditorium of over 2,000 people. We had to split up despite being 20 minutes early, and I managed to end up separated from the rest of them because the church staff thought it important that they assign one of their several English-speaking members to sit next to me. Thus I ended up sitting in the back balcony next to "Jackie," a big guy in his thirties(?) who - naturally - really wants me to speak English with me, be my friend, and convince me to become a Christian. I couldn't find it within myself to refuse to give him my e-mail address, so we're now facebook friends and he's sent me an e-mail urging me to come to next week's events.

The church membership looked to be was at least 60% youths, all in their (very hip) street clothes; I stood out a bit because of that, though I was only in cargo slacks and a semi-nice collared t-shirt. (Being the only westerner there might also have made me a bit conspicuous.) Several of them wanted to introduce themselves - and practice their English - and for a minute I felt like a minor celebrity.

Then the service started. Those of you who have been to a U.S. "megachurch" might not be surprised by my description, but for me, the service was like nothing I had seen before.

The first hour was devoted to standing and to singing, led by the "worship team" - basically a modern rock band plus backup singers, specializing in poppy songs about Jesus. With their guitars, dyed mohawks, they could easily have driven straight to a club to play their next gig. I tried my best to "do as the Romans do," relieved that I had been separated from the group because I could now feel (slightly) less self-conscious about it all. So what were the Romans doing? Clapping our hands on 2 and 4 for a while (loudly; Jackie clearly had no sense of beat), and leaving off during certain sections in the tune to raise one hand, arm slightly crooked, in a vaguely praising gesture. A well-equipped camera crew provided live feed to the three large screens in the front of the stage, alternating between shots of the audience and close-ups of the "worship team."

When we were all rocked out, we sat down to hear a few speeches - but not before the first-time attendees had been asked to stand up (Jackie insisted that I join them). I didn't see how the others were treated; all I know is that after a thunderous applause, everyone around me wanted to shake my hand, and I was actually given a gift (which turned out to be - surprise - a Taiwanese pop CD) by a member of the church staff. One of the speakers apparently said something about the importance of giving to the church, at which point at least half of the folks around me put bills into the envelopes that had been placed on our chairs before we sat down. I saw a lot of $1000s - about $32 US, though that goes much farther in Taiwan.

Then a man who looked to be in his late 40s stood up and walked to the podium, and the band left the stage. I recognized him from earlier: when he had passed by my seat before the singing started, I had remarked to myself that he was probably the hippest middle-aged guy around, somewhat reminiscent of a more conservatively dressed Elton John. Elton turned out to be today's main preacher, delivering a passionate, 90-minute sermon, complete with jokes and exhortation, that according to Jackie focused on purification and baptism. But I could only catch a word or phrase here and there ("I tell you!" was popular), plus the obligatory English terms: "amen" and "hallelujah," so it all went over my head. The guy was definitely engaging anyway, though, so despite the lack of help - Jackie didn't really do any other translating and was instead doing something, hopefully church-related, on his cell phone most of the time - I wasn't as bored as I might have been.

After the sermon, we all got up for some more singing; I was then ushered out by Jackie, and some other members of the congregation who were very determined to be helpful, and brought to where the Zhangs and friends were hanging out. We circled up for a brief prayer in Chinese, and on our way to the car Li Wei explained to me that she just comes because it's a fun time - but that this service wasn't - so of course now I'm wondering what constitutes "fun."

To make a long story short, lunch/hanging out with the gang lasted forever and consisted of expensive but delicious Italian food, random Taiwanese kids' games (e.g., rock-paper-scissors redux), a lot of jokingly inappropriate questions and body language - I can't think of another situation in which I will have a cute Taiwanese girl offer to feed me - and plenty of laughing. Raphael joined us after a little while and translated, which was good because I wouldn't have understood a lot of things otherwise, but bad because I was actually having a great time struggling to communicate in Chinese on our way there. I left with some photos on my camera and a new task: coming up with English names for the five girls. I've only done one so far - for the oldest sister, Dai Ling - but it's perfect.

Us:

The contrast between the friends is significant, at least at an initial level. The two sisters, Li Wei [second from right] and Dai Ling [left], are both tiny but loud and fierce, and a little masculine; Xiao Qi [right] is slightly masculine too, but also extremely quiet, self-effacing, and tends to look pretty Goth; Yu San [center] is noticeably taller than the rest of them but doesn't walk tall and stayed almost completely silent (she wasn't feeling so well, they said); and Wen Hui [second from left] is the epitome of the cute, beauty-obsessed Taiwanese girl: if you look closely you'll notice the short skirt, the lipstick, the designer purse, the perfectly straight hair, the blouse, the made-up face, and the umbrella. (It is not an uncommon practice for girls here to carry one everywhere, especially on sunny days, to keep their skin paler and therefore "prettier.")

A word on typhoons: I know I mentioned them earlier as something I should maybe look into/prepare for, but I never really followed up on that. Apparently they're not quite as rare as I thought - two serious ones hit Taiwan last year - and the guy online who was talking about keeping extra food, water, and lamps with batteries on hand wasn't just being an alarmist. I also found out from Li Wei and Raphael that a typhoon had been forecasted for Sunday night, but the latest news was that it would miss us. (It did, mostly, though the southern half of the island got hit a bit.) I shouldn't really be missing a day of Taiwanese news podcasts, but just in case I do I've asked Raphael to call me if he hears anything about another one.

These past three days have seen my first real ICLP classes. I have three classes a day (about 2.5 hours): an individual and then 4-person class both built around a textbook of dialogues; and one 3-person class in which we read from a book of "Chinese Moral Tales." Ideally I think I should be spending about five hours per night studying, though more is always better.

The textbook seems to be at about my level, I have my individual and at first it seemed by far the easier of the two, but it turns out I was very wrong. The speed at which we're ripping through it is ridiculous: for me, there were 50 new words in the first lesson, plus sentence patterns/grammar that I'm struggling with, and tomorrow we're already starting on the second. Needless to say, I've spent a lot of time preparing, but I'm already behind and I'm only just realizing it.

The book of moral tales seemed extremely difficult at first - I barely understood the topic of the story after listening to it thrice, let alone what was actually going on - but once I slogged through the vocabulary it wasn't bad. Its sentences are pretty simple in their structure, and the teacher isn't at all concerned with us learning to write the characters, so it's very much a verbal/audio class. Also, we go slower than I feared (maybe too slow, even), because I happen to be better at it than my two classmates: one is better at writing but a little bit worse at speaking, and another is significantly worse at speaking/comprehension, with the most abominable Chinese accent (very French!) I've ever heard in my life.

The strange thing about this whole thing is that I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be doing. Besides the schedule for material to be covered in the classes themselves, the most I've gotten from any teacher so far has been a directive to prepare answers to a few questions and a suggestion on how to study the new vocabulary; for example, I only knew that I didn't need to learn how to write the Moral Tales characters because I asked. ICLP doesn't give grades per se, and there will be a large "mid-term quiz" but I have no idea what it will be on. It's also hard to really ask because everyone has different classes and we're not allowed to speak English here, but the idea seems to be that beyond certain requirements (e.g., the questions; being prepared to discuss in class), we'll go through a ton of material and get out of it... whatever we want.

Upon reflection, I think I like that a lot and I've already formulated a vague idea of what I do want to get out of it: from Moral Tales, I want purely aural/oral vocabulary, both the set that the teacher highlights as important and the ones that seem most useful to me; from the textbook, I want a lot of new sentence patterns and vocabulary (including character recognition, and writing ability when feasible), as well as the ability to read (and, again, write when feasible) traditional characters. What I want from the textbook is a very tall order, though, considering the speed at which we're moving through it; I may have to set some more feasible goals in a week or so.

This is wildly different from the Yale method of teaching, in which we were given very specific classwork and homework each day and night, with a quiz every day and a larger exam about every week. I was really happy with the Yale formula, though, which I think is kind of a strange paradox considering my enthusiasm for the diametrically opposed method that (I think) I'm currently working with at ICLP. I suppose that both can have merits; maybe they're even best used to complement each other. Either way, although it's early in the game, it seems to me that the classes that I'm taking could use two pretty key changes:

1. Slow down on the textbook! Independent or no, there's no way I can fully absorb what I want out of it in the time we're being given.

2. More rote learning! When you're talking about full sentences, rote memorization of common patterns is key to speaking Chinese and not sounding like an idiot. I think this is an aspect where the Yale system shines. Then again, I guess I could and should be doing rote memorization on my own without being quizzed on it - so maybe it's really just a subset of #1, and I'm just finding that I can't cram the many new sentence patterns of this first lesson into my head in a mere three days.

ICLP students playing Ma Jiang in the student lounge:

I again apologize for the length of these posts. My next update will probably be on Monday. I'll hopefully have some good stuff to tell you about: a visit to the National Palace Museum on Saturday (I'm not a big museum fan, but this is purportedly one of the best art museums in Asia and indeed the world), dinner at the Zhangs' (and then maybe church and lunch again on Sunday?!). I was reading the bit of Madison's blog about rude Beijing people, and I thought again about how ridiculously lucky I am to 1) have come to Taiwan, 2) gone to the right hostel, and 3) been semi-adopted by the Zhangs; I can't describe how great it feels to have something like Saturday night dinner to look forward to all week.

May you find good company wherever you are,

~Ethan

Skyscrapers, Hiking, and Other Things

Daily highlights since my last update:

- Tuesday afternoon/evening: I moved into my cheap but not-so-shipshape apartment. In my first few days there I discovered that 1) my internet is dial-up (so that's what those characters before "internet" meant!), 2) I can't connect to it anyway, and 3) that hole in the wall next to my air conditioning is actually not screened in. The internet isn't a huge deal, but the hole in the wall probably accounted for the spiders, the large moth, and possibly the two dead cockroaches under the closet, so I bought some mosquito netting and tape and effected some very makeshift/removable repairs. It's fine now, though I use Raid around the premises every few days (the cockroaches live elsewhere in the basement too, it seems), and I think that in the end it was the right choice. After all, I'm building character and saving money at the same time! Also, I like living with lower-middle-class Taiwanese flatmates; the girl next door, Ya Ya, is my fave because 1) she only speaks Chinese, and 2) she bought (or made?) me delicious mushroom soup after I killed a cockroach for her.

[Apartment pictures forthcoming.]

- Wednesday: ICLP orientation. More importantly, I finally visited Taipei 101, the tallest functional building in the world. [Addendum 1/17/10: As of this month, 101 is no longer the tallest in the world, having recently been supplanted by the opening of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, UAE. Height measured by "architectural feature"; only occupied buildings included.]

The outside view, from a few blocks and then from 2 miles away:

I went at nearly the perfect time: a clear day (and, more rarely, a clear afternoon!), at around 6:00. Thus I saw Taipei during the day, and Taipei at twilight. I even had my camera with me, together with my newly bought SIM card! Needless to say, I went a little crazy with the photos.

Some selections:

Basically, it was gorgeous. Although I'd say that at least a quarter of the visitors were Taiwanese, the lower floors are made up of fancy restaurants and shops like Gucci and De Beers, exclusively targeting rich foreign tourists. There is a food court in the basement, though, where I found a somewhat overpriced but delicious dinner of shrimp, egg, pork, cabbage, some things I didn't quite recognize, and of course rice:

- Thursday: ICLP took us on a trip to Maokong, a Taipei mountain suburb well known for its beautiful scenery and especially its tea. There, I learned the right way to pour tea in a classy establishment and basically ate a meal's worth of "tea snacks" - green bean cake, almond cookies, dessert wafers, and tiny, tea-candied plums. Scenery and the traditional tea setting:

- Friday: Morgan, a friend from the hostel (you may remember her from my post about Fulong beach) and I hiked the mountainous Caoling Historic Trail - the long version, which amounted to about 18 km. The first half was beautiful (sweeping views, anybody?) and I hope to add photos as soon as she uploads them; the second half was mostly just full of mist and slippery stone steps until near the end. Both halves, though, were epic - not as intense as the Whites, but longer and with a more than respectable amount of mountain-summiting. The trail as we hiked it runs from Fulong on the northern coast to Dasi on the northeast coast, cutting through the mountains to get there. In retrospect it would have been smarter to end at the beach: the humidity can get oppressive, and parts of the trail look positively tropical. Besides the times when we saw - or reached - pavilions on mountain peaks, we also had this really cool experience at one point where we lost the barely visible trail on a hilltop and wandered through our own little world in the mist for a while, knowing that if we got lost we could just follow the cliff's edge back. We also saw plenty of water buffalo - four herds, I think - and passed some fellow travellers and picnickers.

- Saturday: I slept in, bought some necessaries, wandered around, and re-discovered the weekend version of the aforementioned Da'An Park and its accompanying weekend craft tent. It's like a flea market back home, but with a much higher percentage of worthwhile things for sale. A lot of the artwork has been handmade by the sellers, a surprising (though still low) proportion of whom happen to be deaf. I was particularly enthralled by a set of gorgeous scrolls, pictured below:

I was a little bit in love with the tiger; it's quite expensive, but if 1) it's still there, 2) I happen to end up with a bunch of extra money at the end of this, and 3) I don't find a scroll that's just as beautiful for cheaper in the interim (the glass here was definitely overpriced compared to what I bought at Shilin), I just might buy it.

- Sunday and Monday: a service at the Taiwanese version of the megachurch; hanging out with the Zhang family and friends; first day of real classes at ICLP. More description - and some photos - forthcoming; right now it's time to do some studying.

Oh, one final note... Where I'll be less than a month from now:

The IMAX.

Until next time,

~Ethan

Recently

I've managed to get myself sick - probably the late nights and early mornings catching up with me - and I still can't access the internet at my apartment, so you may not hear from me for a bit. When I post again, though, I'll be telling you about:

 - my trip to the top of Taipei 101, currently the tallest functional building in the world

 - my 20-km hike through the mountains today, from one part of the coast to another (trying to sweat out the cold I felt coming on, I guess... I don't think it worked)

 - fighting the good fight to get the new apartment ship-shape

 - ICLP orientation: classes, trip to Maokong, placement

 - PHOTOS! I have a camera, and have been using it.

Until later,

~Ethan