reflections

yesterday there were 2 more earthquakes. earthquakes are more fun on the 10th floor, but i bet the top of 101 is better. the first one was last week or so, and i had just seen Drag Me to Hell, so waking up to that was interesting to say the least

no typhoons yet

everything smells weirder after rain. not in a good way

everything translated from American 'culture' to Chinese is soooooooo corny. Taiwanese television, as far as I can remember (which is 15 years), has always been super cheesy - think that awful competition thing on ABC where people have to jump around on big floats and stuff (i've only seen comercials) but dorkier and lower budget. and more noises (waaaaaaaaaaa! 哇！)

my uncle has a great sound system, every retired American's dream, right? but uses it to blast these absolutely awful, karaoke-quality covers of classics like "American Pie" or Beach boys. It's like listening Weird Al, if his second language were English, but without the tongue in cheek quality and without being funny on purpose. I can't listen or even think about it without cringing. My whole soul is cringing right now. 真受不了！

eating really unhealthy frozen food is also just so much more morally objectionable when there are so many delicious, cheap food shops everywhere. sometimes i feel like the more 'modern' households are absorbing only the worst parts of modernity. that's until i remember the joys of toilet paper (http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/07/07/mf.toilet.paper.history/index.html)

my other uncle's apt is a lot older and a lot more 亂. there is a Buddhist shrine that constantly plays a recording of a prayer at a volume just low enough for you always to be aware of it...this used to drive me totally nuts but i really am starting to like it, much more than the Taiwanese version of "Roxanne" in any case (bet you didn't know that song could get any cheesier)

the Taiwanese are kind of half-way between the U.S. and Mainland in everything. i feel like i'm jostled a lot less than in Beijing but there's still not so much of a sense of personal space. The brown line MRT has these big blue bucket seats that are much too wide for the average Asian, but still they are only meant to seat one person, there is a large and uncomfortable-to-perch-upon ridge meant to separate your butt from the butt of the person next to you. No one seems to get this, people will just squeeze right in there with you. It's nowhere near as bad as the DR or Beijing but still so weird

Another example, one of the first weeks here I was riding the MRT with some girls from ICLP. Anyway one girl was sitting in a 'priority' seat for the eldery, pregnant, handicapped, etc. Being a 老外 she didn't really get it and kept talking to us when an elderly woman and her husband got on. The woman sat down, stared at her, and when she didn't get up, hip checked her so that there was room for her husband to sit, 3 people to 2 seats. Anyway the 老外 finally got it but what an awkward way of handling things...

Older people here expect younger people to give up their seats for them, even when it's not a 'priority' seat. This happens a lot on my bus ride, someone old will get on and stare down their target until they are (usually very quickly) guilted into offering their seat.

This reminds me of something I studied in my east asian studies course back at UofI - the abnormally high suicide rate among the older demographic in Asia. Because Confucian doctrine and Chinese culture dictate that you take care of your parents when they age, often the elderly who are taken care of commit suicide because they don't want to be a burden. Or, if they aren't well cared for, they kill themselves out of shame that they have such ungrateful children. The worst kind of Catch-22

Whining is definitely easier and more fun in Chinese. I don't know if the words for 'terrible', 'boring', 'awful' are actually more expressive or if they're just fresher to me, but they are 很有用。

Also if you know anything about Chinese you know there are a lot of cool idioms that are really untranslateable. When you turn them into English they just sound like fortune cookies (cf. my cousin's resume, which has a section translated from the Chinese: “positive attitude”, “efficient execution”, etc. - actually in quotes。 and completely unfixable).

finally, if you are too young to be considered Generation X - get off the internet! but first enjoy this gem from my textbook:

草莓族：this class of people are like strawberries, good-looking but cannot endure any stress/pressure

picture dump

'desert' of sugar cane with mayonnaise and sprinkles...do not recommend

Falun gong demonstration

random intersection

making xiao long bao

開夜車

ok so half way there and mid-terms coming up.

my 'don't study at all on the weekends' policy is once again not working very well. with tests on wednesday i really could have benefited from starting earlier than..well, now.

in my defense, i've been feeling weirdly lazy and sleepy lately. this could partially be appreciation of the climate and culture but i reserve all blame for the lack of fresh vegetables. i am seriously dying for a salad.

it's not that there's any shortage of vegetables, the taiwanese love their qingcai, but they are all soooo greasy. eating uncooked vegetables is uncommon because they are often dirty. according to the women of my family (who, let's be clear, have a tendency to exaggerate), eating a salad that's prepared anywhere but home is asking for food poisoning or some weird asian virus. my aunt occasionally makes salad (for my benefit, i gather...i'm the only one who eats any at dinner. awkward) - she washes it three times. with boiled water. making salad an uncommon dish at dinner.

if you are reading this in america and munching on a fresh carrot stick...think of me. better yet mail me some veggies

some notes on the program at the half-way point:

immediately after i whined to you, the Internet, about my one-on-one class, my teacher figured out that i was bored out my mind with the green book, said something like 'o well, i'm sure you know this lesson already', and spent our entire class talking about completely unrelated things. so now we've talked about japanese fashion, our dislike of skinny and feminine asian men, scary movies, prejudice against people with country accents, our favorite TV shows...yea pretty much everything except the lesson.

this beats mindlessly repeating sentences, though again i'm not really sure how much i'm learning. guess i'll find out in three days.

iclp really emphasizes speaking/listening over reading/writing. this is so unique in Taiwan, where everyone 'knows' English, can read and has a huge vocabularly, but can't speak a word without a heavy accent and ignoring all rules of grammar. i really like this approach but it makes the time right before exams cram time. we haven't been tested on writing whatsoever thus far and the several papers i've written i haven't gotten back (iclp's strong point is not administrative details), and suddenly i'm supposed to write a composition for my midterm?

another example is my blue book class, which has a workbook. well we haven't touched the workbook since chapter 2 and suddenly the teacher remembered that we were supposed to be reading and writing as well - guess what our assignment is this weekend? chapters 3-6 of the workbook and some kind of quiz tomorrow. ridiculous!

but instead of starting those chapters ahead of time, this weekend i spent a lot of time exploring. will upload pictures later. saturday went to longshan with boin and cameron, but of course i would forget my camera, so hopefully i'll get them from boin and put them up soon. we wandered a little far from the tourist area around longshan and ended up in the old (and seedy) part of taipei - cam and i are pretty sure we met some nice Taiwanese prostitutes. anyway story later with pictures (not of the prostitutes. sorry)

off to study. feeling sleepy already ~~

In which Katie discovers her latent superpowers

I absolutely love the weather here. I know that sounds nuts, I am in a bowl of moistness and humidity and stifling heat but I love it. Right now I am sitting in my 10th floor room with the breeze blowing in and looking out over the lights of the city…beautiful

I also realized the other day how conveniently located NTU is. And this is coming from someone that spends 90-120 minutes a day commuting. Not only does NTU have wonderful facilities for exercising (gym! Oh how I love you), eating (student activity center. Complete with bakery and yummy smoothies and drinks), and napping (the library. It’s like being at Yale again – I can’t study for more than 10 minutes before falling asleep. Never fear, Kelly, this is in fact just me experiencing Taiwanese culture, a national pastime even, as dozens of overworked Taiwanese college students doze nearby) – BUT, it has waffles. In bags.

Another BUT, slightly more serious (I'm pretty serious about the waffles) - BUT, it is right next to Gongguan. Gongguan has tons of bus routes, a subway station, a super famous milk-tea stand, bookstores, shopping, AND – MY FAVORITE FOOD EVER. Guotie. Long, skinny, fried dumplings. Beautiful, yummy, scrumptious guotie with kimchi in them. So spicy. So greasy. So delicious.

While I sit in class I think constantly about how I want to go eat them, how I shouldn’t go eat them (they can’t be very good for you…), how I absolutely must not go eat them – and then I go. Three times this week. After the gym. But still very bad of me.

Friends, you likely know that I can never get enough of spicy food at home. In fact, I usually can’t tell that the ‘spicy food’ available in America is actually spicy. Maybe it hopes to be spicy when it grows up, but it never actually is spicy. I am completely utterly addicted to this guotie place and will likely eat them as often as possible until they make me physically ill. (It’s a 20 minute walk. That’s how much I like them).

There is also really nothing more empowering than successfully ordering Chinese food in Chinese (and nothing more crushing than having absolutely no idea how to communicate to the lady at Starbucks that you want a mug, not a ‘to-go’ cup. Yes, I do want a cup. Oh 'tall' is 'medium'. No not that kind of cup. I have a seat upstairs already. Yes I know it's very full, but I already have a seat. Isn't there another kind of cup? Like a...harder cup? It's not made of paper? And is hard? Ugh).

Also of note is that I have had infinity mess ups with units of measurement. Such as when I told my aunt that it cost around $500,000 a year to go to Yale instead of $50,000. Even though I’ve known how to count for a really, really long time, using numbers is still really unnatural to me. Also time. And directions. (When I was in preschool I could not for the life of me figure out the difference between before and after, in English. Ah hah, say friends who have known me for a long time, so that’s why she can’t even remember where she lives. And I still can't tell time...)

Anyway maybe Chinese directions will take me 15 years to figure out as well…but I hope not.

I have also been setting the A.C. to 28 degrees Celsius. I use it mostly because the city is just too loud to listen to all the time, not because I think it’s that hot, and a lot of times I wake up freezing. So we are learning about climate in class this week and it finally occurred to me to look up how cold 28 C actually is. Well, I have been setting the air conditioning to the low, low temperature of…82.4 degrees Fahrenheit. I have seriously adjusted to the weather here.

Also found out I’ve been lifting in kgs .This is good, good news.

罵人

This is going to be a short post because I haven't really started my homework for tomorrow yet (oops). I figure if I'm going to work so hard during the week I might as well take the weekend to relax and just learn the words that come up during daily conversation. I can now quite confidently describe someone as the Chinese equivalent of 'hot' depending on if they're male or female, tell someone in Cantonese slang that they will "die on the street", as well as understand several other unpostable but useful phrases. That's still learning, right?

This is the view from my 10th story room - what I'll be looking at for several more hours as I finish my essay. (Depending on how difficult this turns out to be, may end up using some of my newly learned phrases...). Coming from Illinois I really appreciate how Taipei is basically a city in the mountains. Humidity is terrible but it's so beautiful!

It's been two weeks and I still haven't really figured out how to approach my classes. The book I'm supposed to be focusing on is way too easy. It is the book used in my one-on-one and core class and contains a lot of important vocabularly, but I know most of the vocab and the sentence structures are way easy. Furthermore, the class doesn't test us on reading/writing at all and the speaking/listening level of some of the other students in the class is relatively low. Finally, I had to switch one-on-one teachers because someone else had a scheduling conflict, and my new teacher is super nice and cool but 1) does not strike the fear of God in me as the last one did 2) unlike the other teacher who forced me to use the vocab in meaningful ways, teaches class by saying really long sentences and having me repeat them. Nearly the entire class is me repeating sentences that she thinks up. It not only does not feel very helpful but also makes it very hard to concentrate for the entire hour. By the end of class I doubt I could accurately repeat an English sentence.

Anyway I'm still confused as to why this is my core class when the other book is much much more interesting. The other book has more difficult vocab ('plastic surgery' instead of 'pineapple', 'fellowship' instead of 'soap') and more interesting sentence patterns that I haven't seen before. I want to spend most of my time on this book, especially since the only other student in the class is much better than me (already speaks Cantonese and has been going to Chinese school since he was little) and the teacher came into the class with a new faster-paced syllabus. But I'm supposed to spend most of it on the core class? Or something. And end up feeling pretty bored in my core class and like I'm drowning in my other class.

Anyway I have no clue why I'm supposed to be spending most of my time on the easy and slow moving class and not the challenging and interesting one. It makes sense to me to build a base but the very low expectations of listening/speaking in this class are not helping me improve very quickly. I've tried to talk to the teachers about it but my Chinese isn't good enough to explain my confusion. Or rather, it is but it's not good enough to pursue the issue after they blow me off once...

Anyway off to study until I feel like these poor fish:

Hope everyone had a happy July 4th! Some Yale kids and I had a successful America Day complete with bacon and salad, but I missed the fireworks :(

Post about frequent weekend activities, favorite foods, and Cool Asians coming up soon.