Despite long term radio silence, I am in fact alive. I use the excuse "I'm an exchange student" for everything now, so I'm just going to apply it here too: I'm an exchange student; we often forget we have blogs on account of all the things we are doing and forgetting (accidentally or on purpose) to write about.
So it's been what, a month? Over a month? I wanted to be quick about this, but that's not going to happen unless I omit a bunch of stuff. So, looks like I'll just have to omit a bunch of stuff. Again.
About a week ago was my 3-month mark, the point at which the culture shock "experts" told us that everything starts to go downhill for a while. You're supposed to miss home, miss the holidays, miss the comfort of being somewhere familiar. I should know by now that things that apply to most people don't usually apply to me, but I still expected some sort of drop in mood, circumstances, etc. around this time.
Not so. Not even a smidgen of a dip. The opposite, in fact.
Now, I'm not saying problems never ever crop up. When you enjoy excitement in your life, they are inevitable. What matters is how you react to them - with solutions, instead of stress and sulking. Once you make the solution your focus, things mysteriously start to work in your favor again. Or at least, that's my experience so far. For every problem, there is a solution - it's just a matter of finding it. And that is not as difficult as it used to sound.
Okay, here's something that might be interesting to some people: all of us exchange students had the opportunity to experience a traditional Taiwanese coming of age ceremony a couple weekends ago. When I first came here, I had this mental image in my head of traditional clothing, fancy temples, complicated rituals, and all these things I just mentally associate with ancient Eastern cultures. You don't really see that in everyday life, or at least most people don't, but this special ceremony was a way to experience it anyway. We were taken to a huge, fancy temple in Taipei with some of the most striking architecture I've ever seen and given traditional clothing to wear for the ceremony. I don't want to know how much the clothes cost, but we got to keep them for free!
Honestly, I've never been one to derive meaning from rituals; it's just not my thing. And I have to admit, I definitely didn't agree with a lot of the ideas presented to us in the script of the ceremony. However, I did enjoy experiencing something that other people find significant in their lives. That is representative of my general mental attitude towards Taiwan: I want to learn to understand and live with this culture, even if I don't want to be fully assimilated into it. Now that I think about it, I feel very much the same about the culture of my own country.
By the way, the reason I have time to do this right now is because I'm home from school with an infection and I already gave in and watched all the episodes of the Office I missed because I didn't feel like studying. What can I say, being sick makes me lazy.
Earlier today I went to see a rather questionable Taiwanese doctor who basically had me diagnose myself. He literally asked me what I thought I had, then gave me an ultrasound (?!?!?!) and prescribed medication for the condition I suggested (good thing I'm pretty sure I'm right). While in America I would just be given a simple antibiotic pill to take twice a day, here I am given a holy ton of different medications (7 pills twice a day, I think?) that I can't find on ANY pill identifier website. Bottoms up, hope I don't die.
Well, that's all for now I think. I have so many things going on that I don't even know where to begin to write anything else. Time to go catch up on another random TV show... I'm thinking House. Illnesses seem less depressing when you watch people who are pretending to have something worse.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Words from a Stranger
Why am I okay?
I shouldn't be okay.
I should be in culture shock. I should be missing home. I should be sad - not all of the time, but at least sometimes. This isn't normal.
When I was a kid, my parents sent me to camp for a week. I absolutely despised it. I missed home, and all I wanted to do was leave. Even if we were doing something that could have been fun, I was depressed and just couldn't get past it. So I faked heatstroke so I could go home early. I always did enjoy acting.
Every time I travel, there's always a moment when I seem to break down and miss my room, or my kitty, or my friends so much that I would give almost anything to go home. Sometimes I get past it rather quickly, like in Scotland or Washington. Sometimes I don't, like at that camp or in Texas. It's easier to bear when I'm surrounded by friends, but it's always, always there. Until now.
This time, that moment hasn't come. I keep expecting it to creep up on me, but even if I try to miss home enough to make myself cry or at least get a lump in my throat I can't do it. This is the longest period of time I've ever been away from the familiar, and I don't even think about home most of the time. When I do miss things - my friends, my cat, being able to drive legally - I miss them in a different way than I ever have before. I miss them in a way that makes me smile. I get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside instead of a hole in my stomach or a lump in my throat.
Truth be told, I have felt myself start to come down from the "high" that I was riding when I first got here. I feel like I've adapted so quickly that the novelty of things is starting to wear off, so I've begun to actually develop likes and dislikes again. For the first month or so (I've been here for over TWO months now, can you believe that?) everything was so new that I just completely went with the flow and was happy about everything. Now that I've gotten used to my surroundings, it's actually possible for me to become dully annoyed with certain things every once and a while (especially when I haven't had my coffee). But the difference between now and the way I used to get irritated is that now I don't bother dwelling on it. I haven't ranted about anything in ages (sorry Michaela...) because I've noticed that that only blows my irritation out of proportion. So I usually just take a minute to put it in perspective or figure out how to ignore it, then move on.
In contrast to those little things that irritate me, the little things that make me happy make me way too happy. Maybe it's because I'm sleeping better; I cut even more time out of my school schedule this week with the help of my chill counselors who don't make me have class all the time. On Mondays I don't go to school until 1, on Tuesdays it's 10, and on Fridays I still have no school whatsoever. This means that I have more time to do things my way: get enough sleep, study Chinese at home instead of blankly staring at a whiteboard in school, and go out and have fun when my friends are free too. Yay freedom!! :D
Anyway, despite the fact that I felt myself come down a little bit, that feeling of excitement I initially had is never far out of reach. All I have to do is keep busy, which I do naturally. I find it hard not to be busy, actually, because I have so many different groups of friends I am always wanting to hang out with. It's hard to make time for everyone!
Speaking of my friends, here are some of the funniest language mishaps that have happened between us so far... on both sides!
Me (in Chinese): Hey, Fanny, could you watch my foreskin? (I was trying to say "purse" but I switched the syllables around and said foreskin instead).
Taiwanese Abby: I'm fool. (She meant to say "full." This was doubly funny because her friends endearingly call her "shabi" which roughly translates to "idiot").
Winnie: Do you want some skin tofu? (Meant to say stinky tofu).
A children's book I found in a book store: "The little girl happily slept with her parents."
And, of course, I can't forget the best question I've ever been asked by a school official: "Can you explain to me what shit means?"
Okay, I know there are more, but I'm tired and can't think of them right now so I'll post them later when I do.
By now I think I've struck a nice balance between work and play. I can switch back and forth from the diligent student to the absolute wild card and hit everything in between on the way, so that even though I love to have fun and get crazy I still make sure that I stay on top of my goals. I've always liked balance, and it feels good to know how to bring it into my exchange.
Finally, I just have to mention that this week was excellent. I feel on top of the world right now. When I came here I expected to grow, and to change, but nevertheless growth keeps surprising me. Some things I change consciously, when I realize I could be doing something better or working harder to meet certain goals. Others just seem to happen automatically, on their own, like a natural by-product of being on exchange. When I finally notice what has happened, it's like Christmas comes early. I am so unashamedly self-aware and comfortable with myself that it just keeps making me smile. When I return to America, I may very well seem like a different person - but it's not like I expected the girl who went to Taiwan to ever come back anyway. I feel like she's already gone.
I shouldn't be okay.
I should be in culture shock. I should be missing home. I should be sad - not all of the time, but at least sometimes. This isn't normal.
When I was a kid, my parents sent me to camp for a week. I absolutely despised it. I missed home, and all I wanted to do was leave. Even if we were doing something that could have been fun, I was depressed and just couldn't get past it. So I faked heatstroke so I could go home early. I always did enjoy acting.
Every time I travel, there's always a moment when I seem to break down and miss my room, or my kitty, or my friends so much that I would give almost anything to go home. Sometimes I get past it rather quickly, like in Scotland or Washington. Sometimes I don't, like at that camp or in Texas. It's easier to bear when I'm surrounded by friends, but it's always, always there. Until now.
This time, that moment hasn't come. I keep expecting it to creep up on me, but even if I try to miss home enough to make myself cry or at least get a lump in my throat I can't do it. This is the longest period of time I've ever been away from the familiar, and I don't even think about home most of the time. When I do miss things - my friends, my cat, being able to drive legally - I miss them in a different way than I ever have before. I miss them in a way that makes me smile. I get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside instead of a hole in my stomach or a lump in my throat.
Truth be told, I have felt myself start to come down from the "high" that I was riding when I first got here. I feel like I've adapted so quickly that the novelty of things is starting to wear off, so I've begun to actually develop likes and dislikes again. For the first month or so (I've been here for over TWO months now, can you believe that?) everything was so new that I just completely went with the flow and was happy about everything. Now that I've gotten used to my surroundings, it's actually possible for me to become dully annoyed with certain things every once and a while (especially when I haven't had my coffee). But the difference between now and the way I used to get irritated is that now I don't bother dwelling on it. I haven't ranted about anything in ages (sorry Michaela...) because I've noticed that that only blows my irritation out of proportion. So I usually just take a minute to put it in perspective or figure out how to ignore it, then move on.
In contrast to those little things that irritate me, the little things that make me happy make me way too happy. Maybe it's because I'm sleeping better; I cut even more time out of my school schedule this week with the help of my chill counselors who don't make me have class all the time. On Mondays I don't go to school until 1, on Tuesdays it's 10, and on Fridays I still have no school whatsoever. This means that I have more time to do things my way: get enough sleep, study Chinese at home instead of blankly staring at a whiteboard in school, and go out and have fun when my friends are free too. Yay freedom!! :D
Anyway, despite the fact that I felt myself come down a little bit, that feeling of excitement I initially had is never far out of reach. All I have to do is keep busy, which I do naturally. I find it hard not to be busy, actually, because I have so many different groups of friends I am always wanting to hang out with. It's hard to make time for everyone!
Speaking of my friends, here are some of the funniest language mishaps that have happened between us so far... on both sides!
Me (in Chinese): Hey, Fanny, could you watch my foreskin? (I was trying to say "purse" but I switched the syllables around and said foreskin instead).
Taiwanese Abby: I'm fool. (She meant to say "full." This was doubly funny because her friends endearingly call her "shabi" which roughly translates to "idiot").
Winnie: Do you want some skin tofu? (Meant to say stinky tofu).
A children's book I found in a book store: "The little girl happily slept with her parents."
And, of course, I can't forget the best question I've ever been asked by a school official: "Can you explain to me what shit means?"
Okay, I know there are more, but I'm tired and can't think of them right now so I'll post them later when I do.
By now I think I've struck a nice balance between work and play. I can switch back and forth from the diligent student to the absolute wild card and hit everything in between on the way, so that even though I love to have fun and get crazy I still make sure that I stay on top of my goals. I've always liked balance, and it feels good to know how to bring it into my exchange.
Finally, I just have to mention that this week was excellent. I feel on top of the world right now. When I came here I expected to grow, and to change, but nevertheless growth keeps surprising me. Some things I change consciously, when I realize I could be doing something better or working harder to meet certain goals. Others just seem to happen automatically, on their own, like a natural by-product of being on exchange. When I finally notice what has happened, it's like Christmas comes early. I am so unashamedly self-aware and comfortable with myself that it just keeps making me smile. When I return to America, I may very well seem like a different person - but it's not like I expected the girl who went to Taiwan to ever come back anyway. I feel like she's already gone.
Friday, October 14, 2011
The Taiwan Times
It's been a while, hasn't it? I keep forgetting I have a blog. My mom remembers though, and if I don't update for a while she becomes upset... and an upset mother equals a frugal mother equals a sad and broke exchange student.
Just kidding. For the record, as of right now I haven't written home for spending money once. So there.
Anyway, enjoy this (very) edited list of what I did the past few weeks.
In food news...
My school sells chocolate and strawberry sandwiches during breakfast.
Chocolate and strawberry sandwiches. Three of my favorite things, all in one.
My life is complete.
I went to a "hot pots" restaurant a couple of times last week, which is basically a buffet except you can cook some of the food yourself. You just pick what you want, drop it in your personal cooking pot, wait a minute, and eat. They also had the only American-style ice cream I've encountered so far (needless to say you don't put that in the pot before eating) and I put away about six or seven scoops of it.
Two weekends ago, my friends and I went to Taipei. We ate lunch at this Italian restaurant, and guess what they had?
FREAKING MACARONI AND CHEESE!!!!
My life is even more complete. Taipei also has a Pizza Hut buffet, which I got way too excited about. And the night market food is varied and delicious, so I almost always eat something new when I go out. By now I can usually tell what's going to be good and what's going to be icky, so I tend to eat more (and my host aunt still says I don't eat enough). I avoid anything with tofu and spices (still not a fan of spicy here, never have been) and go for things with fruit, bread, chicken, etc. It's still a bit of a risk but I'm getting good at it.
By the way, I now like McDonald's. Seriously? The American doesn't like McDonald's in America, but she goes to Taiwan and becomes a stereotype? Something is very wrong. I still don't like french fries though, so maybe the world isn't ending just yet.
In the Bug Wars...
Never tickle a sleeping dragon. Especially if you are an ant, and the dragon is a cranky human armed with sticky vanilla body spray.
It went something like this: the dragon Abby, while sleeping peacefully on her pile of treasure, awoke to find a single ant sneaking suspiciously across her mound of gold. We will call this scout Bilbo the ant. Bilbo, having been dared by his friends to enter the chamber of the dragon in search of treasure, was immediately insulted with an impressive collection of Chinese, English, and French swear words, then incapacitated by the deadly vanilla-scented breath of the very grumpy dragon.
The dragon, having seen one intruder already, suspected that more tiny little thieves were lurking nearby. Bilbo's greedy little companions were found in a tight little group by the wall, scurrying around and looking scared. Perhaps they heard Bilbo's screams of agony as he was being insulted and murdered. But don't worry - they won't be missing Bilbo anymore. They can all say hello to Saint Peter together - or whoever has his job, but in hell. Goodbye Thorin, Dori, Nori, etc....
Feel free to roll your eyes at my nerdy Lord of the Rings analogies at any time.
So remember that spider who lives under the floor in my shower room? Turns out it's just a big phony. Sure, it looks big and scary, but really it's about as dangerous as a kitten. Maybe even less, because angry kittens can be hazardous (*cough* *cough* Ginger *cough*). The spider won't bite me, and even if it wanted to its bite isn't poisonous to humans. Since being ugly is not a crime, I have no real excuse to kill it. So, there is only one thing left to do: name it!
I don't know what it is about giving things names, but it automatically makes them less creepy and/or annoying than before. So now, my shower is home to Gladys the spider. I thought about naming it Shelob, but that seemed counterproductive.
Speaking of spiders, I went hiking with my host dad and saw a giant golden orb-weaver spider. They're pretty, but I'm not going near them because they do bite. They won't land you in the hospital, but still... AVOID.
In Recent Excursions...
Hmmm, let's just make this a list.
1. Taipei zoo! I freaking love the zoo. I go crazy over animals (with the exception of most things that have more than four legs). For once I took tons of pictures, and so did my friends, so I'll share some of the more interesting ones. Several of the animals were asleep, but others would obligingly pose (or fight) for pictures.
2. Taipei night markets. Yes - the food is delicious, the wares are unique, and the people stare at me less than usual. But what really gets me is - you guessed it - the clothes.
Can I control my consumerist whims? Of course. Do I want to? I don't see why I would. Shopping is quick and unbelievably cheap. Quick, because no one tries on clothes before buying and many are one size fits most. Cheap, because... well I don't know why, but I don't care so long as it stays cheap. Of course, there is some risk involved, because you can't know exactly what something will look like without trying it on. But most of the clothes are made for someone about my size (like many Taiwanese girls are) so with a little bit of visualization I can usually tell. I haven't made any mistakes yet, but if I do it's no big deal because most single pieces of clothing cost less than ten US dollars. Mom, you can thank the cheapness of the night markets for the fact that I haven't asked for more spending money yet.
3. Other places in Taipei. The vagueness is on purpose. Let's just say that Taipei is the place to go if you want to have some... fun.
Actually, that's been pretty much it the past couple of weeks: school during the week, Taipei on the weekends. I see further adventures in the near future though... constant three day weekends make having adventures easy.
In What I Learned Recently...
Disclaimer: I'm not putting everything I learned on my blog.
Disclaimer #2: I enjoy being vague. Humor me, because there are actually some practical reasons for ambiguity.
1. I keep getting things I used to wish for when I was a kid but have long since given up on. Maybe I don't really have them - I just get to borrow them for a while. But it's like I get a chance to experience something I never felt I had before, just so I can know it exists. I will treasure that forever - and who knows? Maybe I'll bring a little bit of it back to the United States with me.
See what I mean about being ambiguous? It's like a riddle, isn't it? Oh, I just love confusing people. Assuming anyone even reads this. :S
Moving on.
2. I'm dreaming. Really, I feel like being here is one long lucid dream. I even treat it that way sometimes, to assure that when I wake up back in the United States I will remember it as a good and exciting one. It's like a break from school, a break from boredom, a break from everything. As an exchange student, school is beyond easy, boredom is easily curable, and everything else is good so long as you want it to be. The fact that it is finite just makes it that much more exciting, because I only have so much time to do everything I want to do before I have to get back to work. I have the feeling that the college workload is going to hit me like a semi, but I'm trying not to think about that yet.
3. I should be living like this in the United States. Why am I only now squeezing as much fun as possible out of every day? Why am I only now taking risks and reaping the benefits? Just because the clock (presumably) has more time on it back home doesn't mean it isn't there... and I know I don't want it to catch up with me before I'm ready.
4. Constantly analyzing people and the motivations for their actions, though it comes naturally to me, isn't something I've really put to use... until now. And I really wish I'd discovered this earlier, because now I know how to counter-manipulate people. Meaning, of course, that if someone tries to play me I can recognize what they're doing and make sure it doesn't work. Naturally, manipulating innocent people is not very nice, but if they're asking for it... I can adapt to their actions, let's just say.
5. Lastly, I had a little thought today. It's maybe somewhat strange, but I want to share.
I feel like I'm mountain climbing. As I go higher, I perceive more. The picture gets bigger, patterns emerge and become more obvious, and puzzle pieces start to fit together. It seems ludicrous to me that some people stay on the ground and never even try to climb up, and it seems equally strange that they choose to see so little of the world around them. It's easy to forget what it felt like before I climbed the mountain, even though I know I wasn't always headed upward. Certain worldviews, certain ways of thinking that I was surrounded by in the United States, seem even more unbelievably, mind-blowingly ignorant now than they did to me then. I think it's because I've been away from it for so long, so now I'm thinking, "Wait - people still actually do that? People still believe that? Aren't we past this by now?"
But I can't talk about it to those people. I can never talk about it, because I'm on the mountain, too far away for them to hear anyway. All I can do - and from now on, all I will do - is climb the mountain, and quietly hope some people will wonder what I'm doing up there and come see. I'm not going to drag anyone up here if they don't want to come. All that will do is make them run further back down, and waste time for both of us. Instead, I climb steadily and happily, sometimes with companions and sometimes alone, willing to give what help I can to those who want it and willing to leave in peace those who do not.
I know I'm not at the top yet. I can feel the clouds above my head, blocking parts of the mountain from view, and they will bother me until I rise above them. I know I'm still missing something. I know there are probably people looking down at me from higher up the mountain. But at least I'm climbing, and if all goes well I have years and years to make my journey.
I'm not just talking about exchange anymore. It's about exchange, and world travel, but it's also intellectual, spiritual, and whatever other interpretation you want to give it. This isn't the first time I've felt this way, but it's the first time I've really taken the time to think about it. There's a lot of time for thinking when you're sitting in class not understanding anything that's happening.
Hmmm, I know there's more, but that's all that comes to the top of my head right now. Next!
In Other Random News...
At school some guy I don't know told me he loved me, in English.
The word "Facebook" sounds very similar the Chinese phrase "You must die," (Fēi sǐ bùkě) especially if said slowly. The other day must have been a slow news day because there was a story on it.
I no longer have class on Fridays. I literally just asked my counselor if it was okay, he said yes, and now I can sleep in. It was that easy. So now, as my host dad put it, my friends and I can go do bad things together. >:D
The you-know-whos are after me again, worse than in America, and I find the irony almost unbearable. (Who are the you-know-whos? You know who. And if you don't, it wouldn't be funny, so don't worry about it! :P) The good part is, I can laugh about it, and I've learned to let them down easy without being cynical anymore.
My self-esteem is thriving. People literally stop me on the street and tell me how beautiful they think I am. Yeah, yeah - I know they mostly just notice me because I'm the only white person for miles, but let a girl be flattered. People are constantly staring at me, especially in Jaoxi, and sometimes they will literally turned their heads to look behind them while driving because I happen to be walking behind their car (or motorcycle). My bestie Kaitlin and I have a joke about how some girls turn heads, but we're the ones who break necks. That may just turn out to be the case, because every day I almost cause a car accident.
The other day I had to explain to my confused classmates the subtle differences in pronunciation between the words "taxis," "taxes," and "Texas." O.O
Taiwan has been overrun by 7-11 convenience stores. I swear, sometimes I feel like there's one on every block. It's convenient, sure, but also a little scary. Taiwanese love 7-11 like Americans love McDonald's.
That's all folks! Once again, sorry for writing a book... when it rains it pours.
Just kidding. For the record, as of right now I haven't written home for spending money once. So there.
Anyway, enjoy this (very) edited list of what I did the past few weeks.
In food news...
My school sells chocolate and strawberry sandwiches during breakfast.
Chocolate and strawberry sandwiches. Three of my favorite things, all in one.
My life is complete.
I went to a "hot pots" restaurant a couple of times last week, which is basically a buffet except you can cook some of the food yourself. You just pick what you want, drop it in your personal cooking pot, wait a minute, and eat. They also had the only American-style ice cream I've encountered so far (needless to say you don't put that in the pot before eating) and I put away about six or seven scoops of it.
Two weekends ago, my friends and I went to Taipei. We ate lunch at this Italian restaurant, and guess what they had?
FREAKING MACARONI AND CHEESE!!!!
My life is even more complete. Taipei also has a Pizza Hut buffet, which I got way too excited about. And the night market food is varied and delicious, so I almost always eat something new when I go out. By now I can usually tell what's going to be good and what's going to be icky, so I tend to eat more (and my host aunt still says I don't eat enough). I avoid anything with tofu and spices (still not a fan of spicy here, never have been) and go for things with fruit, bread, chicken, etc. It's still a bit of a risk but I'm getting good at it.
By the way, I now like McDonald's. Seriously? The American doesn't like McDonald's in America, but she goes to Taiwan and becomes a stereotype? Something is very wrong. I still don't like french fries though, so maybe the world isn't ending just yet.
In the Bug Wars...
Never tickle a sleeping dragon. Especially if you are an ant, and the dragon is a cranky human armed with sticky vanilla body spray.
It went something like this: the dragon Abby, while sleeping peacefully on her pile of treasure, awoke to find a single ant sneaking suspiciously across her mound of gold. We will call this scout Bilbo the ant. Bilbo, having been dared by his friends to enter the chamber of the dragon in search of treasure, was immediately insulted with an impressive collection of Chinese, English, and French swear words, then incapacitated by the deadly vanilla-scented breath of the very grumpy dragon.
The dragon, having seen one intruder already, suspected that more tiny little thieves were lurking nearby. Bilbo's greedy little companions were found in a tight little group by the wall, scurrying around and looking scared. Perhaps they heard Bilbo's screams of agony as he was being insulted and murdered. But don't worry - they won't be missing Bilbo anymore. They can all say hello to Saint Peter together - or whoever has his job, but in hell. Goodbye Thorin, Dori, Nori, etc....
Feel free to roll your eyes at my nerdy Lord of the Rings analogies at any time.
So remember that spider who lives under the floor in my shower room? Turns out it's just a big phony. Sure, it looks big and scary, but really it's about as dangerous as a kitten. Maybe even less, because angry kittens can be hazardous (*cough* *cough* Ginger *cough*). The spider won't bite me, and even if it wanted to its bite isn't poisonous to humans. Since being ugly is not a crime, I have no real excuse to kill it. So, there is only one thing left to do: name it!
I don't know what it is about giving things names, but it automatically makes them less creepy and/or annoying than before. So now, my shower is home to Gladys the spider. I thought about naming it Shelob, but that seemed counterproductive.
Speaking of spiders, I went hiking with my host dad and saw a giant golden orb-weaver spider. They're pretty, but I'm not going near them because they do bite. They won't land you in the hospital, but still... AVOID.
In Recent Excursions...
Hmmm, let's just make this a list.
1. Taipei zoo! I freaking love the zoo. I go crazy over animals (with the exception of most things that have more than four legs). For once I took tons of pictures, and so did my friends, so I'll share some of the more interesting ones. Several of the animals were asleep, but others would obligingly pose (or fight) for pictures.
 |
| Silly penguin |
 |
| Zzzzzzz........... |
 |
| Staring contest with an elephant. |
 |
| Lurking... we all got chills when we spotted him under there. He's just waiting for a tourist to fall in the water so he can have a snack. |
 |
| Cat fight! Reminded me of Ginger and Jade. I don't know what it was about; they were on opposite sides of the cage and then suddenly they were together in the middle and going at it. |
 |
| Lastly, please enjoy these colorful mounds of poop. |
2. Taipei night markets. Yes - the food is delicious, the wares are unique, and the people stare at me less than usual. But what really gets me is - you guessed it - the clothes.
Can I control my consumerist whims? Of course. Do I want to? I don't see why I would. Shopping is quick and unbelievably cheap. Quick, because no one tries on clothes before buying and many are one size fits most. Cheap, because... well I don't know why, but I don't care so long as it stays cheap. Of course, there is some risk involved, because you can't know exactly what something will look like without trying it on. But most of the clothes are made for someone about my size (like many Taiwanese girls are) so with a little bit of visualization I can usually tell. I haven't made any mistakes yet, but if I do it's no big deal because most single pieces of clothing cost less than ten US dollars. Mom, you can thank the cheapness of the night markets for the fact that I haven't asked for more spending money yet.
3. Other places in Taipei. The vagueness is on purpose. Let's just say that Taipei is the place to go if you want to have some... fun.
Actually, that's been pretty much it the past couple of weeks: school during the week, Taipei on the weekends. I see further adventures in the near future though... constant three day weekends make having adventures easy.
In What I Learned Recently...
Disclaimer: I'm not putting everything I learned on my blog.
Disclaimer #2: I enjoy being vague. Humor me, because there are actually some practical reasons for ambiguity.
1. I keep getting things I used to wish for when I was a kid but have long since given up on. Maybe I don't really have them - I just get to borrow them for a while. But it's like I get a chance to experience something I never felt I had before, just so I can know it exists. I will treasure that forever - and who knows? Maybe I'll bring a little bit of it back to the United States with me.
See what I mean about being ambiguous? It's like a riddle, isn't it? Oh, I just love confusing people. Assuming anyone even reads this. :S
Moving on.
2. I'm dreaming. Really, I feel like being here is one long lucid dream. I even treat it that way sometimes, to assure that when I wake up back in the United States I will remember it as a good and exciting one. It's like a break from school, a break from boredom, a break from everything. As an exchange student, school is beyond easy, boredom is easily curable, and everything else is good so long as you want it to be. The fact that it is finite just makes it that much more exciting, because I only have so much time to do everything I want to do before I have to get back to work. I have the feeling that the college workload is going to hit me like a semi, but I'm trying not to think about that yet.
3. I should be living like this in the United States. Why am I only now squeezing as much fun as possible out of every day? Why am I only now taking risks and reaping the benefits? Just because the clock (presumably) has more time on it back home doesn't mean it isn't there... and I know I don't want it to catch up with me before I'm ready.
4. Constantly analyzing people and the motivations for their actions, though it comes naturally to me, isn't something I've really put to use... until now. And I really wish I'd discovered this earlier, because now I know how to counter-manipulate people. Meaning, of course, that if someone tries to play me I can recognize what they're doing and make sure it doesn't work. Naturally, manipulating innocent people is not very nice, but if they're asking for it... I can adapt to their actions, let's just say.
5. Lastly, I had a little thought today. It's maybe somewhat strange, but I want to share.
I feel like I'm mountain climbing. As I go higher, I perceive more. The picture gets bigger, patterns emerge and become more obvious, and puzzle pieces start to fit together. It seems ludicrous to me that some people stay on the ground and never even try to climb up, and it seems equally strange that they choose to see so little of the world around them. It's easy to forget what it felt like before I climbed the mountain, even though I know I wasn't always headed upward. Certain worldviews, certain ways of thinking that I was surrounded by in the United States, seem even more unbelievably, mind-blowingly ignorant now than they did to me then. I think it's because I've been away from it for so long, so now I'm thinking, "Wait - people still actually do that? People still believe that? Aren't we past this by now?"
But I can't talk about it to those people. I can never talk about it, because I'm on the mountain, too far away for them to hear anyway. All I can do - and from now on, all I will do - is climb the mountain, and quietly hope some people will wonder what I'm doing up there and come see. I'm not going to drag anyone up here if they don't want to come. All that will do is make them run further back down, and waste time for both of us. Instead, I climb steadily and happily, sometimes with companions and sometimes alone, willing to give what help I can to those who want it and willing to leave in peace those who do not.
I know I'm not at the top yet. I can feel the clouds above my head, blocking parts of the mountain from view, and they will bother me until I rise above them. I know I'm still missing something. I know there are probably people looking down at me from higher up the mountain. But at least I'm climbing, and if all goes well I have years and years to make my journey.
I'm not just talking about exchange anymore. It's about exchange, and world travel, but it's also intellectual, spiritual, and whatever other interpretation you want to give it. This isn't the first time I've felt this way, but it's the first time I've really taken the time to think about it. There's a lot of time for thinking when you're sitting in class not understanding anything that's happening.
Hmmm, I know there's more, but that's all that comes to the top of my head right now. Next!
In Other Random News...
At school some guy I don't know told me he loved me, in English.
The word "Facebook" sounds very similar the Chinese phrase "You must die," (Fēi sǐ bùkě) especially if said slowly. The other day must have been a slow news day because there was a story on it.
I no longer have class on Fridays. I literally just asked my counselor if it was okay, he said yes, and now I can sleep in. It was that easy. So now, as my host dad put it, my friends and I can go do bad things together. >:D
The you-know-whos are after me again, worse than in America, and I find the irony almost unbearable. (Who are the you-know-whos? You know who. And if you don't, it wouldn't be funny, so don't worry about it! :P) The good part is, I can laugh about it, and I've learned to let them down easy without being cynical anymore.
My self-esteem is thriving. People literally stop me on the street and tell me how beautiful they think I am. Yeah, yeah - I know they mostly just notice me because I'm the only white person for miles, but let a girl be flattered. People are constantly staring at me, especially in Jaoxi, and sometimes they will literally turned their heads to look behind them while driving because I happen to be walking behind their car (or motorcycle). My bestie Kaitlin and I have a joke about how some girls turn heads, but we're the ones who break necks. That may just turn out to be the case, because every day I almost cause a car accident.
The other day I had to explain to my confused classmates the subtle differences in pronunciation between the words "taxis," "taxes," and "Texas." O.O
Taiwan has been overrun by 7-11 convenience stores. I swear, sometimes I feel like there's one on every block. It's convenient, sure, but also a little scary. Taiwanese love 7-11 like Americans love McDonald's.
That's all folks! Once again, sorry for writing a book... when it rains it pours.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
We Meet Again
I really, really hate spiders.
That brown huntsman is back in my shower. This time I ran and got my camera, and it obligingly let me take some pictures....
They're a little shaky because my camera's shutter speed is a full one second, but I think you get the idea. I also took a couple of videos, but it startled me by running away while I was filming so I'm not going to embarrass myself by uploading it. :S
And, since it ran away, I now have no idea where it is. Am I showering today? What do you think?
The good news is that this spider has a tendency to sit still so long as I don't make any loud noises or big movements, so next time I see it I'm going to run for a big textbook instead of my camera. My Rotary binder should do the trick. XD I will upload pictures of the mess I make for your cruel amusement.
On a side note, I FOUND ROLLS!!!! :D The buffet my friends and I visited yesterday had them, and I ate at least four! I swear it made my day.
Now I am going to take this opportunity to go to bed early for once, so good night and good bye.
That brown huntsman is back in my shower. This time I ran and got my camera, and it obligingly let me take some pictures....
And, since it ran away, I now have no idea where it is. Am I showering today? What do you think?
The good news is that this spider has a tendency to sit still so long as I don't make any loud noises or big movements, so next time I see it I'm going to run for a big textbook instead of my camera. My Rotary binder should do the trick. XD I will upload pictures of the mess I make for your cruel amusement.
On a side note, I FOUND ROLLS!!!! :D The buffet my friends and I visited yesterday had them, and I ate at least four! I swear it made my day.
Now I am going to take this opportunity to go to bed early for once, so good night and good bye.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Creepy Crawlies
Who's staying up late to update her blog?
I am.
Who's going to regret it in the morning?
I am.
Who doesn't care because she knows she can just get coffee?
Me! Besides, there's plenty of time to sleep when you're dead.
That's right - I, the queen of going to bed early and getting up late, just said that. Prepare for the Apocalypse, everyone.
Anyway...
If you have been reading all my blog entries (and I salute you if you managed to get through all the books I wrote) you may remember the little fiasco with the ants that happened a couple weeks back. But the truth is that ants, while being the most annoying little @#%$&*$%^*#&@!*$%^@#&&#*$s on the planet, are neither the creepiest nor the most vile critters I have had the misfortune to encounter.
Firstly, there are the mosquitoes. To put it mildly, I would like them to all please just drop dead. I AM NOT FOOD! Stop hovering suspiciously by my leg! Happily, it is starting to get colder here, and they are all dying off. Muahahahahahaha...
Next... I have lizards in my house. They're really little - about five inches long or so - and sometimes they make loud and shrill chirping noises that you can hear across the house. But they're not annoying, because I named them and that automatically makes them adorable. :D The one who lives in my room is Haixiu (Hai-shoo), which in Chinese means shy. Every time he sees me or anyone else he disappears in a split second. Neither he nor any of the other lizards bother anyone simply because they are so shy (aka terrified) of people.
Bats, however, are a different story. There are a couple of rooms in the house where the wall doesn't go all the way up to the ceiling (I think it's for ventilation, because it gets so hot here in the summer), so bats can just fly in whenever they want. Of course, having incredibly bad memories, they often cannot figure out how to get back out. Every once and a while I will walk in the door and have a random "brown scary" whiz past my head. The first time it happened I couldn't figure out what it was because it was flying so fast.
Okay, so there's a bat flying up by the ceiling. He can be dumb all by himself; he's not bothering me. No big deal, right?
Right....
The other night I was in the big room my family uses for showers, and I had just finished washing my hair. I go to get my towel, happen to look up, and see that there is a confused looking bat flying in frantic circles up by the ceiling. Great, there's a bat in my shower. That's the second worst place in the house a bat could be.
But still, no big deal, right? They're more scared of us than we are of them.
Wrong.
As soon as I had reassured myself with the though that bats are afraid of the big bad humans, the thing freaking nosedived at me. I instinctively threw my towel up to block it, but it still managed to fly around the towel and come at me from the other side. I flailed around until it flew back up to the ceiling... and of course, I had a few choice words to say. Luckily I was the only one home so no one was around to hear me. And the first swear out of my mouth was a Chinese one, so I guess that means the language is starting to become automatic. But that bat owes me money for watching me shower.
Bats aren't the only nasty thing I've found in the shower room though. One evening I walked in to find the biggest spider I have ever seen just calmly sitting on the floor next to the water bucket. It was maybe three quarters as big as your average tarantula. I'm not even kidding. I wanted to take a picture, but for some odd reason I didn't have my camera in the shower that day (you know, I usually bring it, but this time I forgot). Besides, I was slightly more focused on getting rid of this giant thing than preserving the memory of it. But instead of doing the smart thing and spraying it with water from the showerhead, which was completely within reach, I grabbed a stool and tried to hit it with that. The spider was wicked fast and it disappeared before I could kill it, which was utterly fantastic because then I knew there was a huge spider in the room but I had no idea where. Luckily, spiders are apparently more scared of me than bats are, so it didn't show itself again. But it's still somewhere in the house... O.O
I did some research, and the brown huntsman spider fits the description - it's common in Taiwan, it likes to come indoors, it's incredibly fast, and it's the right size and color. According to the all-knowing Internet, it will bite if provoked, and it can actually jump out at people. The bites aren't fatal to humans, but that's still enough to make me seriously consider skipping showers. Or at least taking a firearm with me when I do take them.
This is a picture of a brown huntsman from the Internet, and it looks very much like the one I saw:
Gahhhh. :S On the bright side, huntsman spiders are expert cockroach killers, and despite the presence of so many other critters I haven't seen any roaches in my house since I got here.... And they must be doing some fighting, because I saw a smaller one in my shower just today that only had five legs.
I'm literally getting chills right now, so let's talk about something else. I haven't made a list in a while, so it's about time I do one.
Things I Discovered Recently, Mostly By Accident
1. Two wrongs may not make a right, but two stupids apparently make a smart. I had a little adventure after school last Friday. I won't go into details though, because I'm pretty sure my mom reads my blog and I don't want to give her a heart attack.
2. I'm starting to get cravings for American food. Don't get me wrong - Taiwanese food is delicious. But I would kill for some macaroni and cheese... or a taco... or even just a roll. That's all I want - a dinner roll. But try as hard as I might, I cannot find one in any store or supermarket in town. They just don't do rolls here, I guess. Luckily, Taiwan has pizza, fried chicken, and waffles... so there's that. But I still want a roll, and I am determined to find one somewhere on the island before I leave. And if I ever see a bag of Tostitos in the supermarket, they are MINE.
3. The world is so much brighter when I've had my coffee. There is a 7-11 across from my school that sells really cheap cafe mochas, and they are freaking delicious. I never drink coffee back home, but now for some reason I can't seem to stay awake in my morning classes without it. It's probably because I mostly have no idea what's going on, so there's nothing to pay attention to. And I don't get enough sleep during the week anyway because of my schedule. Regardless of the reason, at least there is coffee.
4. I go to a B.Y.O.T.P. college. Once you figure out what that means, you can understand my feelings of chagrin and surprise at a critical moment on the first day of class. :S
5. Ghost photos are very easily faked. Here's mine:
Tell me, how many people do you think I could get to believe this is a ghost? If I (theoretically) posted it on some Internet forum site, and said it was a picture of one, how many people would be that gullible? I'm halfway tempted to do it just to find out.... Social experiment, anyone? :D
6. Time flies. Not like a bird - more like an F-14. I just realized yesterday that I've already been here for a month. My exchange is about 10% over, and that's blowing my mind. Of course, it also means that I still have 90% left to enjoy!
7. Taiwanese boys are really, really shy. Here's what happens at school on a daily basis: I'm walking to class, or maybe to lunch, and I see a group of anywhere from three to ten guys all looking at me and giggling (giggling). One of them will get brave and yell "Hello!" after a couple seconds of staring. I smile, say "Hi!", and wave. They then collapse into more fits of laughter and giggling, and every time I catch one of them looking at me he will turn his face away and get really red. It's kind of cute, actually, but I still don't understand why they are so shy!
8. Taiwanese girls are not nearly as shy. Almost overnight, I've become part of a great group of friends. <3 They're all English majors, so they can practice their English on me and I can practice my Chinese on them. Plus they can teach me more vocabulary, because my Chinese is way worse than their English! They're so eager to help me out, and I feel like school is already starting to be very comfortable because of them. We went to the beach the other day, and the night market the day after that, and I haven't had that great of a time in a while. We took lots of pictures (correction: we passed around Winnie's camera, because she's the one who's good about that sort of thing) and they're all over Facebook because I'm too lazy to upload them here. Trust me though, it was fun!
In conclusion, enjoy this photo of Lisa's latest escape attempt. My host sister and I both have minor injuries from having to catch him today. This cat is vicious when he smells freedom.
I am.
Who's going to regret it in the morning?
I am.
Who doesn't care because she knows she can just get coffee?
Me! Besides, there's plenty of time to sleep when you're dead.
That's right - I, the queen of going to bed early and getting up late, just said that. Prepare for the Apocalypse, everyone.
Anyway...
If you have been reading all my blog entries (and I salute you if you managed to get through all the books I wrote) you may remember the little fiasco with the ants that happened a couple weeks back. But the truth is that ants, while being the most annoying little @#%$&*$%^*#&@!*$%^@#&&#*$s on the planet, are neither the creepiest nor the most vile critters I have had the misfortune to encounter.
Firstly, there are the mosquitoes. To put it mildly, I would like them to all please just drop dead. I AM NOT FOOD! Stop hovering suspiciously by my leg! Happily, it is starting to get colder here, and they are all dying off. Muahahahahahaha...
Next... I have lizards in my house. They're really little - about five inches long or so - and sometimes they make loud and shrill chirping noises that you can hear across the house. But they're not annoying, because I named them and that automatically makes them adorable. :D The one who lives in my room is Haixiu (Hai-shoo), which in Chinese means shy. Every time he sees me or anyone else he disappears in a split second. Neither he nor any of the other lizards bother anyone simply because they are so shy (aka terrified) of people.
Bats, however, are a different story. There are a couple of rooms in the house where the wall doesn't go all the way up to the ceiling (I think it's for ventilation, because it gets so hot here in the summer), so bats can just fly in whenever they want. Of course, having incredibly bad memories, they often cannot figure out how to get back out. Every once and a while I will walk in the door and have a random "brown scary" whiz past my head. The first time it happened I couldn't figure out what it was because it was flying so fast.
Okay, so there's a bat flying up by the ceiling. He can be dumb all by himself; he's not bothering me. No big deal, right?
Right....
The other night I was in the big room my family uses for showers, and I had just finished washing my hair. I go to get my towel, happen to look up, and see that there is a confused looking bat flying in frantic circles up by the ceiling. Great, there's a bat in my shower. That's the second worst place in the house a bat could be.
But still, no big deal, right? They're more scared of us than we are of them.
Wrong.
As soon as I had reassured myself with the though that bats are afraid of the big bad humans, the thing freaking nosedived at me. I instinctively threw my towel up to block it, but it still managed to fly around the towel and come at me from the other side. I flailed around until it flew back up to the ceiling... and of course, I had a few choice words to say. Luckily I was the only one home so no one was around to hear me. And the first swear out of my mouth was a Chinese one, so I guess that means the language is starting to become automatic. But that bat owes me money for watching me shower.
Bats aren't the only nasty thing I've found in the shower room though. One evening I walked in to find the biggest spider I have ever seen just calmly sitting on the floor next to the water bucket. It was maybe three quarters as big as your average tarantula. I'm not even kidding. I wanted to take a picture, but for some odd reason I didn't have my camera in the shower that day (you know, I usually bring it, but this time I forgot). Besides, I was slightly more focused on getting rid of this giant thing than preserving the memory of it. But instead of doing the smart thing and spraying it with water from the showerhead, which was completely within reach, I grabbed a stool and tried to hit it with that. The spider was wicked fast and it disappeared before I could kill it, which was utterly fantastic because then I knew there was a huge spider in the room but I had no idea where. Luckily, spiders are apparently more scared of me than bats are, so it didn't show itself again. But it's still somewhere in the house... O.O
I did some research, and the brown huntsman spider fits the description - it's common in Taiwan, it likes to come indoors, it's incredibly fast, and it's the right size and color. According to the all-knowing Internet, it will bite if provoked, and it can actually jump out at people. The bites aren't fatal to humans, but that's still enough to make me seriously consider skipping showers. Or at least taking a firearm with me when I do take them.
This is a picture of a brown huntsman from the Internet, and it looks very much like the one I saw:
Gahhhh. :S On the bright side, huntsman spiders are expert cockroach killers, and despite the presence of so many other critters I haven't seen any roaches in my house since I got here.... And they must be doing some fighting, because I saw a smaller one in my shower just today that only had five legs.
I'm literally getting chills right now, so let's talk about something else. I haven't made a list in a while, so it's about time I do one.
Things I Discovered Recently, Mostly By Accident
1. Two wrongs may not make a right, but two stupids apparently make a smart. I had a little adventure after school last Friday. I won't go into details though, because I'm pretty sure my mom reads my blog and I don't want to give her a heart attack.
2. I'm starting to get cravings for American food. Don't get me wrong - Taiwanese food is delicious. But I would kill for some macaroni and cheese... or a taco... or even just a roll. That's all I want - a dinner roll. But try as hard as I might, I cannot find one in any store or supermarket in town. They just don't do rolls here, I guess. Luckily, Taiwan has pizza, fried chicken, and waffles... so there's that. But I still want a roll, and I am determined to find one somewhere on the island before I leave. And if I ever see a bag of Tostitos in the supermarket, they are MINE.
3. The world is so much brighter when I've had my coffee. There is a 7-11 across from my school that sells really cheap cafe mochas, and they are freaking delicious. I never drink coffee back home, but now for some reason I can't seem to stay awake in my morning classes without it. It's probably because I mostly have no idea what's going on, so there's nothing to pay attention to. And I don't get enough sleep during the week anyway because of my schedule. Regardless of the reason, at least there is coffee.
4. I go to a B.Y.O.T.P. college. Once you figure out what that means, you can understand my feelings of chagrin and surprise at a critical moment on the first day of class. :S
5. Ghost photos are very easily faked. Here's mine:
Tell me, how many people do you think I could get to believe this is a ghost? If I (theoretically) posted it on some Internet forum site, and said it was a picture of one, how many people would be that gullible? I'm halfway tempted to do it just to find out.... Social experiment, anyone? :D
6. Time flies. Not like a bird - more like an F-14. I just realized yesterday that I've already been here for a month. My exchange is about 10% over, and that's blowing my mind. Of course, it also means that I still have 90% left to enjoy!
7. Taiwanese boys are really, really shy. Here's what happens at school on a daily basis: I'm walking to class, or maybe to lunch, and I see a group of anywhere from three to ten guys all looking at me and giggling (giggling). One of them will get brave and yell "Hello!" after a couple seconds of staring. I smile, say "Hi!", and wave. They then collapse into more fits of laughter and giggling, and every time I catch one of them looking at me he will turn his face away and get really red. It's kind of cute, actually, but I still don't understand why they are so shy!
8. Taiwanese girls are not nearly as shy. Almost overnight, I've become part of a great group of friends. <3 They're all English majors, so they can practice their English on me and I can practice my Chinese on them. Plus they can teach me more vocabulary, because my Chinese is way worse than their English! They're so eager to help me out, and I feel like school is already starting to be very comfortable because of them. We went to the beach the other day, and the night market the day after that, and I haven't had that great of a time in a while. We took lots of pictures (correction: we passed around Winnie's camera, because she's the one who's good about that sort of thing) and they're all over Facebook because I'm too lazy to upload them here. Trust me though, it was fun!
In conclusion, enjoy this photo of Lisa's latest escape attempt. My host sister and I both have minor injuries from having to catch him today. This cat is vicious when he smells freedom.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Psychology, Tartarus, and Peanuts
I am proud and rather relieved to announce that I have survived my first (half) week of school.
This weekend all I really want to do is sleep. I get up at 6:30 on weekday mornings, and somehow I managed to end up going to bed late every night this week. Being that tired is like self-sabotage for me, but I think I did okay in spite of it... and there is a 7-11 across from my school that sells lots of cheap coffee, in case of emergency.
This week I learned that whether or not I have a good time at school almost always depends on me. I think I already knew that, but theoretically knowing and actually realizing something are completely different things.
So let me just walk you through my first three days of school... forgive me if this is really long.
On the first day, I rode the bus (as I will do every day) and was pleasantly surprised to see that my school bus is, in fact, awesome. It's nothing like the standard yellow school buses they have in America. This bus has seats like first class airline seats: they're big enough to fit two of me, really cushy, and very, very easy to fall asleep in. As if that weren't enough, there is a big flat screen TV in the front, as well as several smaller TVs throughout the rest of the bus. In the morning they usually show the news, and in the afternoon it's soap operas (or at least I think it is - I can't always tell because they're in Chinese). So yeah, I basically take a charter bus to school. That's right American school children - be jealous. >:)
Once I got to school, a really sweet and helpful teacher named Tiffany was waiting to show me to my first class. My school has never had exchange students before, so everyone is really eager to make everything go smoothly for me and the other exchange student (he's from Germany; his name is Felix). Tiffany showed me to my Chinese class, which is basically just me and Felix in the Anglo-American Culture Room with a private tutor name Sophie. It's called the Anglo-American Culture Room because it's set up to look like a typical European or American living room. There's even a Christmas tree in there all year round (and there are Christmas decorations in the main office all the time... I don't get what it is with Christmas here). Chinese is going to be one of my favorite classes I think, because it's something I can apply right away. I'm always trying to learn more, more, more. My host sister tells me I'm a good student... but I think I'm just an obsessive one. :P
After Chinese class was over, a bunch of other students came into the room and said hello to us. They are all our classmates, and they were very friendly and happy to talk to us (and to try and understand our broken Chinese). It was great to be welcomed to school that way on the first day; it really made me feel a lot more comfortable. Thank you Sophie for arranging that. :)
Tiffany came to find us again at lunch time, and was nice enough to show us the cafeteria and let us eat lunch in her fancy office. After once again being stuffed like a dead animal at the taxidermist, I went to business psychology with Felix. It's called business psychology, but it's more like stare-blankly-at-the-Chinese-on-the-board class. We had no idea what the teacher was talking about for the second half of class. For the first half, though, it was basically about us. Our teacher asked us a bunch of questions, and some of the students got brave about half an hour into it and started asking us things too.
Speaking of being asked questions, here are some of the more common ones I get:
Question: Why aren't you fat? And why is America fat? (I get this a LOT)
Answer: I am a mythical creature known as the American who doesn't like McDonald's. And two-thirds of America is fat because two-thirds of America is simultaneously hungry and sedentary.
Question: Why didn't you go to China if you wanted to learn Chinese?
Answer: I wanted to learn Chinese without being arrested or asked for money because I'm American. Just kidding.
Question: Why don't you eat more?
Answer: You want me to eat more? O.O
Anyway, on to my second day of school. Wake up, feed the fish, go to the bus, watch the news, sleepwalk to 7-11, decide it's too early for breakfast, go find Tiffany... Oh, cool. Cosmetics class. In Chinese. For four hours.
In all honesty, my cosmetics teacher is pretty legit. He doesn't speak very much English, but he's really nice and he dresses pretty bad ass for a teacher. I think he must be really laid back, because he let someone bring their dog to class. Yeah, you read that right - this guy walked in with a little white dog and the teacher didn't give him a second glance. I wish I could bring pets to class in the States, because I totally would bring my attack cat and set her on someone I didn't like. All I would have to do is throw catnip at them... >:)
Ahem. Anyway. We took a break halfway through the class, and I got to meet some of my classmates. About four girls came over to me to say hi and see what I was doing in my little notebook I pulled out partway through class because I wasn't understanding anything the teacher was saying. When they saw that I was practicing Chinese writing, they started laughing and telling me I was "hǎo kě'ài" (very cute). I was writing random sentences like "The white cat is noisy" and "I really love waffles," so it must have looked really funny. Plus, it was probably all wrong - I'm surprised and encouraged that they could actually read any of it in the first place! Before you get all impressed, though, I wasn't using actual Chinese characters. I was using Chinese phonetic writing, which is basically like an alphabet for Westerners who are trying to learn to speak Chinese. Baby steps, baby steps.
After the break, I sat through another hour and a half of Chinese speech that I didn't understand. I can pick out words and phrases, but that gets old after four hours of sitting and doing nothing else. Luckily, I am an incredibly skilled daydreamer so I was able to pass the time in Imaginationland.
When class was over I went to have lunch with Tiffany again - but not before losing my phone. I think that was the low point of my day. I was already feeling like I failed myself a little bit because of the fact that I didn't take very much initiative to meet people in class; I was being shy until they came to me. I was thinking about why I was behaving that way (and how to fix it) when I realized I didn't have my phone and felt doubly incompetent. Tiffany helped me look for it, and I got it back eventually (it had fallen out of my pocket in class), but the little things can really get you down sometimes. I felt like a loser because I wasn't eating lunch with my peers, and I was frustrated because I don't know why I am so nervous about taking the initiative with people. But as I will explain in a moment, when I get introspective (which is very frequently) I don't stop until I reach a solid conclusion.
After lunch I went to English Communications class, which has got to be the single easiest class I will have. I'm in there because my American school requires me to take an English class (everyone here agrees that is dumb) but I'm actually glad they require it now because I think it's where I will make a lot of my friends. Since the class is about English, and taken by people who can already speak pretty good English, it's actually taught in English by a really funny Australian guy named Peter. Felix and I are in this class together too, and both the teacher and the students made us feel really welcome. I have been trying to choose my seats strategically when first coming to class so that I will end up sitting by Taiwanese people instead of empty chairs, and this is one of the few classes in which it has worked. I'm in the middle of the class in the second row, surrounded by a bunch of very friendly girls (plus Felix). One of them gave me a wasabi cracker without telling me what it was... so we got some laughs out of that, as well as some pain. XD I think English class will be really good for me because it's one of the few classes I'm actually somewhat comfortable with. I felt myself automatically becoming more outgoing and breaking free from the little spell of depression I had at lunch.
I had time to kill after class was over, since the bus didn't leave for another two hours, so Felix and I went out to explore Toucheng (the town our school is in). We wanted to find the train station for future reference, and to my surprise we were actually successful. On the way, we decided we wanted to go to the Luodong night market that night, so I called my host dad to make sure it was okay and off we went.
Actually, the story is more complicated than that. I really could have been a lot smarter about this and wasted a lot less time. What we did was go back to school, get on my bus (he usually takes a different one), walk from the bus station to my aunt's house to ask her if I could go to the night market, find out that no one was home, then call my host dad and walk a long way to the train station in my town to go to Luodong. We probably wasted a grand total of two hours, but we did get to go to the night market for a while and I think it was worth it.
Once we actually found the night market (which was easier than I thought it would be) I felt like a kid in a candy store - both literally and figuratively. Night markets have everything, including candy. I've been being very frugal with money because I'm paranoid about running out, but I can already tell that night markets are going to make my wallet suffer massive internal injuries.
Firstly, there is the food. I figured out long ago that Taiwanese people are in love with food even more than Americans are (and they're still thinner by a gargantuan margin, because they're just awesome like that). I couldn't name everything I saw there if I tried. They sell a million different kinds of fruit, tons of chicken (all parts of the chicken), fried food (including pig's blood), various kinds of tea, etc. etc. etc. One vendor gave us free samples of this strawberry fruit juice he was selling, which turned out to be a great marketing strategy because we immediately bought some.
Secondly, there are the clothes.
You do not understand until you've seen them.
Picture the types of clothes you like to wear - the clothes that you just have to have the moment you spy them in the store.
Then imagine that you see them everywhere.
Then imagine that they are half the price they are in America.
By now you may have some understanding of what I was going through. I wanted to buy all of them. But we were short on time, and I told Felix I wasn't going to take him clothes shopping with me because I would be trying on everything and he would probably start to hate me. He kept telling me to just keep looking forward, ignore the clothes, ignore the clothes....
Not possible. I think I know what Tantalus feels like now - seeing, but not being able to buy, buy, buy.... Buy all the things, buy all the things, BUY ALL THE THINGS!!!!!!
I really need to calm down, and then get some girlfriends that I can go shopping with or I'm going to go (even more) crazy. Or maybe I could just fly my bestest shopping buddy ever over here... Kaitlin, come visit me! :D
Anyway...
Besides food and clothes (*sniff*), there are night market vendors who sell all sorts of little trinkets made of glass, beads, and everything else under the Sun. They are exactly like the kinds of things I decorate my American bedroom with, so it's not just the clothes that are going to suck all of my money away. I already have a little glass penguin that my aunt bought for me when we went to a night market in Jaoxi (and I just discovered that it GLOWS IN THE DARK!!!) and I will probably come home with a hell of a lot more than that. Everything is so skillfully handmade and so damn beautiful. Seriously - buy all the things, that's what I want to do. This is what I save my money for.
After we finished at the night market, we took the train home and I slept like a (dead) baby. Taking the train is a little hectic without someone who can speak and read Chinese because only the most basic information is written in Western characters (basic information does not include which train you get on for which destination), but thankfully we happened to meet one of our classmates at the train station and she helped us get home. And of course, by the time I actually got to sleep, it was really late again.
Okay, two thirds done! Next morning - wake up, lay there, try to bargain with the powers that be for more sleep, realize it's not going to work, sleepwalk to the bus, sleepwalk to 7-11, sleepwalk to school... And now it's time to sleep-kick.
I have a classmate named Joyce who has very graciously agreed to teach me and Felix some martial arts before school on Fridays. I think she said she was teaching us Shaolin Kung Fu, but I could be wrong about that. :S Anyway, we met her on the basketball court and she taught us some of the basic kicking styles and a little bit of one of the forms. Maybe I'm still technically a tae kwon do black belt, but having not practiced in over three years, I'm a little out of it. I can't kick quite as high as I could when I was fourteen, but we have all year to improve so maybe I can get some of my flexibility back. Unfortunately for us, the air did not seem to appreciate how much it was being kicked. It got really, really hot while we were practicing - it is so warm and humid here; there is nothing like it in the US as far as I know.
After getting our butts kicked by the heat, Felix and I headed for digital photography. We seem to have ended up in a lot of each other's classes, which is cool because we have a way of encouraging each other to be more social. Digital photography was (no surprise here) all in Chinese, and since we were the first people in the room we weren't able to just walk in and go sit by our classmates. I've noticed that we seem to have this opposite magnet effect on the people in our classes; they don't know how to talk to us so they tend to sit at different tables or at least several seats away. We're used to getting to class five minutes early, but here everyone walks in at the last minute after we've already sat down so we have the pleasure (not) of observing how they react to foreigners. Like I think I've said before, everyone is really shy.
We took a break halfway through class, however, and Felix suggested that we roll our wheelie chairs over to the table where everyone else was sitting and say hi. I swallowed my nerves and just did it - and it turned out great. I introduced myself in Chinese, and everyone warmed up pretty quickly (although it was soon discovered that my Chinese is, in fact, deplorable at best). We all added each other on Facebook, and I felt a lot more optimistic about school after those two minutes of positive social interaction. It just takes one or two nice people to make the new kid feel more welcome, I am discovering. I swear on all that is holy that if I ever see a struggling foreigner at school again, I will not hesitate to go over and say hello.
Class ended, we had lunch with Joyce at this Korean restaurant across the street, and then we went to... dun dun dun... gym class. Insert high-pitched string music here.
How did I end up taking gym class, of all things? Good question. I'm not entirely sure. But the bright side is that it's perfectly acceptable to just sit out and talk, especially when you're the foreigners and there are kids in the class who want to practice their English. Our gym teacher introduced me and Felix to two Taiwanese girls and told us to practice our second languages on each other. "Taiwanese are very shy about speaking English," he said. "You just have to take the initiative." Something about that one little statement really made me feel a lot better. It was like he was telling me, "They're not ignoring you, they're not indifferent, they're not mean - they're just a little shy. When you just go up to them and say hello, they will talk to you, and you will find they are very friendly." So far, that has universally been the case. Once we started talking to these girls, they were really, really nice and it wasn't awkward at all. I just kept smiling and laughing (mostly at myself and my Chinese mistakes) to dispel the nerves. Once some of the other students saw that we were friendly, they came over and said hello as well. One guy told us that his English is really bad because (and I quote) "I only know how to say 'fuck you' and 'fuck your mother.'" And then, of course, it turned into let's-teach-the-exchange-students-how-to-swear-in-Chinese class. XD As Felix put it, people come and talk to us once they realize that "We don't bite... yet." I had to hit him for that one, but since I was laughing so hard it probably wasn't very effective. :P
One hour and several Catholic jokes later, I took the bus home and went to sleep. Finally!
So what did I learn this week?
I have a huge tendency to intensely psychoanalyze people's behavior, especially my own, and while I was sitting in class not understanding anything that was being said I got to thinking about what makes me so shy around my peers.
When I was a little kid, there was no sign of this behavior. Everyone was a potential friend, and I didn't hesitate to go up to anyone my age and say hello. And yet now, I have to push past a barrier of nerves and actually work up some courage just to go introduce myself. So what happened in between?
I can remember countless times in elementary school, and even more in junior high, when I would find myself in a situation where I didn't know anyone. I would try to approach someone or maybe a group of people, say hello, and just be totally ignored - or worse, rudely asked why I had approached in the first place. Maybe there was the occasional friendly classmate, but for the most part everyone already had a comfortable group of friends and they were reluctant - or even actively opposed - to letting anyone else join them, regardless of who they were. Several years of getting the same negative results, and I am now conditioned to fear social rejection when I try to get to know people.
The good part about this is that I'm not actually very shy at all. Not naturally, anyway - I only act shy because enough of the kids who went to the same schools as I did are jerks.
This realization made me feel a lot better, because once that fear of social rejection is realized and dismissed, I become very outgoing and eager to meet people. And there's no reason for fear here, because once I start talking to people they are as friendly as they can be. They're like peanuts: I just have to give their shells a tiny pinch to crack them open, then they're delicious (and by delicious I mean friendly). Consider my conditioned habit extinct- and thank you, psychology class.
This weekend all I really want to do is sleep. I get up at 6:30 on weekday mornings, and somehow I managed to end up going to bed late every night this week. Being that tired is like self-sabotage for me, but I think I did okay in spite of it... and there is a 7-11 across from my school that sells lots of cheap coffee, in case of emergency.
This week I learned that whether or not I have a good time at school almost always depends on me. I think I already knew that, but theoretically knowing and actually realizing something are completely different things.
So let me just walk you through my first three days of school... forgive me if this is really long.
On the first day, I rode the bus (as I will do every day) and was pleasantly surprised to see that my school bus is, in fact, awesome. It's nothing like the standard yellow school buses they have in America. This bus has seats like first class airline seats: they're big enough to fit two of me, really cushy, and very, very easy to fall asleep in. As if that weren't enough, there is a big flat screen TV in the front, as well as several smaller TVs throughout the rest of the bus. In the morning they usually show the news, and in the afternoon it's soap operas (or at least I think it is - I can't always tell because they're in Chinese). So yeah, I basically take a charter bus to school. That's right American school children - be jealous. >:)
Once I got to school, a really sweet and helpful teacher named Tiffany was waiting to show me to my first class. My school has never had exchange students before, so everyone is really eager to make everything go smoothly for me and the other exchange student (he's from Germany; his name is Felix). Tiffany showed me to my Chinese class, which is basically just me and Felix in the Anglo-American Culture Room with a private tutor name Sophie. It's called the Anglo-American Culture Room because it's set up to look like a typical European or American living room. There's even a Christmas tree in there all year round (and there are Christmas decorations in the main office all the time... I don't get what it is with Christmas here). Chinese is going to be one of my favorite classes I think, because it's something I can apply right away. I'm always trying to learn more, more, more. My host sister tells me I'm a good student... but I think I'm just an obsessive one. :P
After Chinese class was over, a bunch of other students came into the room and said hello to us. They are all our classmates, and they were very friendly and happy to talk to us (and to try and understand our broken Chinese). It was great to be welcomed to school that way on the first day; it really made me feel a lot more comfortable. Thank you Sophie for arranging that. :)
Tiffany came to find us again at lunch time, and was nice enough to show us the cafeteria and let us eat lunch in her fancy office. After once again being stuffed like a dead animal at the taxidermist, I went to business psychology with Felix. It's called business psychology, but it's more like stare-blankly-at-the-Chinese-on-the-board class. We had no idea what the teacher was talking about for the second half of class. For the first half, though, it was basically about us. Our teacher asked us a bunch of questions, and some of the students got brave about half an hour into it and started asking us things too.
Speaking of being asked questions, here are some of the more common ones I get:
Question: Why aren't you fat? And why is America fat? (I get this a LOT)
Answer: I am a mythical creature known as the American who doesn't like McDonald's. And two-thirds of America is fat because two-thirds of America is simultaneously hungry and sedentary.
Question: Why didn't you go to China if you wanted to learn Chinese?
Answer: I wanted to learn Chinese without being arrested or asked for money because I'm American. Just kidding.
Question: Why don't you eat more?
Answer: You want me to eat more? O.O
Anyway, on to my second day of school. Wake up, feed the fish, go to the bus, watch the news, sleepwalk to 7-11, decide it's too early for breakfast, go find Tiffany... Oh, cool. Cosmetics class. In Chinese. For four hours.
In all honesty, my cosmetics teacher is pretty legit. He doesn't speak very much English, but he's really nice and he dresses pretty bad ass for a teacher. I think he must be really laid back, because he let someone bring their dog to class. Yeah, you read that right - this guy walked in with a little white dog and the teacher didn't give him a second glance. I wish I could bring pets to class in the States, because I totally would bring my attack cat and set her on someone I didn't like. All I would have to do is throw catnip at them... >:)
Ahem. Anyway. We took a break halfway through the class, and I got to meet some of my classmates. About four girls came over to me to say hi and see what I was doing in my little notebook I pulled out partway through class because I wasn't understanding anything the teacher was saying. When they saw that I was practicing Chinese writing, they started laughing and telling me I was "hǎo kě'ài" (very cute). I was writing random sentences like "The white cat is noisy" and "I really love waffles," so it must have looked really funny. Plus, it was probably all wrong - I'm surprised and encouraged that they could actually read any of it in the first place! Before you get all impressed, though, I wasn't using actual Chinese characters. I was using Chinese phonetic writing, which is basically like an alphabet for Westerners who are trying to learn to speak Chinese. Baby steps, baby steps.
After the break, I sat through another hour and a half of Chinese speech that I didn't understand. I can pick out words and phrases, but that gets old after four hours of sitting and doing nothing else. Luckily, I am an incredibly skilled daydreamer so I was able to pass the time in Imaginationland.
When class was over I went to have lunch with Tiffany again - but not before losing my phone. I think that was the low point of my day. I was already feeling like I failed myself a little bit because of the fact that I didn't take very much initiative to meet people in class; I was being shy until they came to me. I was thinking about why I was behaving that way (and how to fix it) when I realized I didn't have my phone and felt doubly incompetent. Tiffany helped me look for it, and I got it back eventually (it had fallen out of my pocket in class), but the little things can really get you down sometimes. I felt like a loser because I wasn't eating lunch with my peers, and I was frustrated because I don't know why I am so nervous about taking the initiative with people. But as I will explain in a moment, when I get introspective (which is very frequently) I don't stop until I reach a solid conclusion.
After lunch I went to English Communications class, which has got to be the single easiest class I will have. I'm in there because my American school requires me to take an English class (everyone here agrees that is dumb) but I'm actually glad they require it now because I think it's where I will make a lot of my friends. Since the class is about English, and taken by people who can already speak pretty good English, it's actually taught in English by a really funny Australian guy named Peter. Felix and I are in this class together too, and both the teacher and the students made us feel really welcome. I have been trying to choose my seats strategically when first coming to class so that I will end up sitting by Taiwanese people instead of empty chairs, and this is one of the few classes in which it has worked. I'm in the middle of the class in the second row, surrounded by a bunch of very friendly girls (plus Felix). One of them gave me a wasabi cracker without telling me what it was... so we got some laughs out of that, as well as some pain. XD I think English class will be really good for me because it's one of the few classes I'm actually somewhat comfortable with. I felt myself automatically becoming more outgoing and breaking free from the little spell of depression I had at lunch.
I had time to kill after class was over, since the bus didn't leave for another two hours, so Felix and I went out to explore Toucheng (the town our school is in). We wanted to find the train station for future reference, and to my surprise we were actually successful. On the way, we decided we wanted to go to the Luodong night market that night, so I called my host dad to make sure it was okay and off we went.
Actually, the story is more complicated than that. I really could have been a lot smarter about this and wasted a lot less time. What we did was go back to school, get on my bus (he usually takes a different one), walk from the bus station to my aunt's house to ask her if I could go to the night market, find out that no one was home, then call my host dad and walk a long way to the train station in my town to go to Luodong. We probably wasted a grand total of two hours, but we did get to go to the night market for a while and I think it was worth it.
Once we actually found the night market (which was easier than I thought it would be) I felt like a kid in a candy store - both literally and figuratively. Night markets have everything, including candy. I've been being very frugal with money because I'm paranoid about running out, but I can already tell that night markets are going to make my wallet suffer massive internal injuries.
Firstly, there is the food. I figured out long ago that Taiwanese people are in love with food even more than Americans are (and they're still thinner by a gargantuan margin, because they're just awesome like that). I couldn't name everything I saw there if I tried. They sell a million different kinds of fruit, tons of chicken (all parts of the chicken), fried food (including pig's blood), various kinds of tea, etc. etc. etc. One vendor gave us free samples of this strawberry fruit juice he was selling, which turned out to be a great marketing strategy because we immediately bought some.
Secondly, there are the clothes.
You do not understand until you've seen them.
Picture the types of clothes you like to wear - the clothes that you just have to have the moment you spy them in the store.
Then imagine that you see them everywhere.
Then imagine that they are half the price they are in America.
By now you may have some understanding of what I was going through. I wanted to buy all of them. But we were short on time, and I told Felix I wasn't going to take him clothes shopping with me because I would be trying on everything and he would probably start to hate me. He kept telling me to just keep looking forward, ignore the clothes, ignore the clothes....
Not possible. I think I know what Tantalus feels like now - seeing, but not being able to buy, buy, buy.... Buy all the things, buy all the things, BUY ALL THE THINGS!!!!!!
I really need to calm down, and then get some girlfriends that I can go shopping with or I'm going to go (even more) crazy. Or maybe I could just fly my bestest shopping buddy ever over here... Kaitlin, come visit me! :D
Anyway...
Besides food and clothes (*sniff*), there are night market vendors who sell all sorts of little trinkets made of glass, beads, and everything else under the Sun. They are exactly like the kinds of things I decorate my American bedroom with, so it's not just the clothes that are going to suck all of my money away. I already have a little glass penguin that my aunt bought for me when we went to a night market in Jaoxi (and I just discovered that it GLOWS IN THE DARK!!!) and I will probably come home with a hell of a lot more than that. Everything is so skillfully handmade and so damn beautiful. Seriously - buy all the things, that's what I want to do. This is what I save my money for.
After we finished at the night market, we took the train home and I slept like a (dead) baby. Taking the train is a little hectic without someone who can speak and read Chinese because only the most basic information is written in Western characters (basic information does not include which train you get on for which destination), but thankfully we happened to meet one of our classmates at the train station and she helped us get home. And of course, by the time I actually got to sleep, it was really late again.
Okay, two thirds done! Next morning - wake up, lay there, try to bargain with the powers that be for more sleep, realize it's not going to work, sleepwalk to the bus, sleepwalk to 7-11, sleepwalk to school... And now it's time to sleep-kick.
I have a classmate named Joyce who has very graciously agreed to teach me and Felix some martial arts before school on Fridays. I think she said she was teaching us Shaolin Kung Fu, but I could be wrong about that. :S Anyway, we met her on the basketball court and she taught us some of the basic kicking styles and a little bit of one of the forms. Maybe I'm still technically a tae kwon do black belt, but having not practiced in over three years, I'm a little out of it. I can't kick quite as high as I could when I was fourteen, but we have all year to improve so maybe I can get some of my flexibility back. Unfortunately for us, the air did not seem to appreciate how much it was being kicked. It got really, really hot while we were practicing - it is so warm and humid here; there is nothing like it in the US as far as I know.
After getting our butts kicked by the heat, Felix and I headed for digital photography. We seem to have ended up in a lot of each other's classes, which is cool because we have a way of encouraging each other to be more social. Digital photography was (no surprise here) all in Chinese, and since we were the first people in the room we weren't able to just walk in and go sit by our classmates. I've noticed that we seem to have this opposite magnet effect on the people in our classes; they don't know how to talk to us so they tend to sit at different tables or at least several seats away. We're used to getting to class five minutes early, but here everyone walks in at the last minute after we've already sat down so we have the pleasure (not) of observing how they react to foreigners. Like I think I've said before, everyone is really shy.
We took a break halfway through class, however, and Felix suggested that we roll our wheelie chairs over to the table where everyone else was sitting and say hi. I swallowed my nerves and just did it - and it turned out great. I introduced myself in Chinese, and everyone warmed up pretty quickly (although it was soon discovered that my Chinese is, in fact, deplorable at best). We all added each other on Facebook, and I felt a lot more optimistic about school after those two minutes of positive social interaction. It just takes one or two nice people to make the new kid feel more welcome, I am discovering. I swear on all that is holy that if I ever see a struggling foreigner at school again, I will not hesitate to go over and say hello.
Class ended, we had lunch with Joyce at this Korean restaurant across the street, and then we went to... dun dun dun... gym class. Insert high-pitched string music here.
How did I end up taking gym class, of all things? Good question. I'm not entirely sure. But the bright side is that it's perfectly acceptable to just sit out and talk, especially when you're the foreigners and there are kids in the class who want to practice their English. Our gym teacher introduced me and Felix to two Taiwanese girls and told us to practice our second languages on each other. "Taiwanese are very shy about speaking English," he said. "You just have to take the initiative." Something about that one little statement really made me feel a lot better. It was like he was telling me, "They're not ignoring you, they're not indifferent, they're not mean - they're just a little shy. When you just go up to them and say hello, they will talk to you, and you will find they are very friendly." So far, that has universally been the case. Once we started talking to these girls, they were really, really nice and it wasn't awkward at all. I just kept smiling and laughing (mostly at myself and my Chinese mistakes) to dispel the nerves. Once some of the other students saw that we were friendly, they came over and said hello as well. One guy told us that his English is really bad because (and I quote) "I only know how to say 'fuck you' and 'fuck your mother.'" And then, of course, it turned into let's-teach-the-exchange-students-how-to-swear-in-Chinese class. XD As Felix put it, people come and talk to us once they realize that "We don't bite... yet." I had to hit him for that one, but since I was laughing so hard it probably wasn't very effective. :P
One hour and several Catholic jokes later, I took the bus home and went to sleep. Finally!
So what did I learn this week?
I have a huge tendency to intensely psychoanalyze people's behavior, especially my own, and while I was sitting in class not understanding anything that was being said I got to thinking about what makes me so shy around my peers.
When I was a little kid, there was no sign of this behavior. Everyone was a potential friend, and I didn't hesitate to go up to anyone my age and say hello. And yet now, I have to push past a barrier of nerves and actually work up some courage just to go introduce myself. So what happened in between?
I can remember countless times in elementary school, and even more in junior high, when I would find myself in a situation where I didn't know anyone. I would try to approach someone or maybe a group of people, say hello, and just be totally ignored - or worse, rudely asked why I had approached in the first place. Maybe there was the occasional friendly classmate, but for the most part everyone already had a comfortable group of friends and they were reluctant - or even actively opposed - to letting anyone else join them, regardless of who they were. Several years of getting the same negative results, and I am now conditioned to fear social rejection when I try to get to know people.
The good part about this is that I'm not actually very shy at all. Not naturally, anyway - I only act shy because enough of the kids who went to the same schools as I did are jerks.
This realization made me feel a lot better, because once that fear of social rejection is realized and dismissed, I become very outgoing and eager to meet people. And there's no reason for fear here, because once I start talking to people they are as friendly as they can be. They're like peanuts: I just have to give their shells a tiny pinch to crack them open, then they're delicious (and by delicious I mean friendly). Consider my conditioned habit extinct- and thank you, psychology class.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Eating and Being Eaten
Okay, this is going to be a really random and all over the place post because most of the things I've been doing lately aren't really related in any way.
First of all, more exotic food. There's one kind of meat that's apparently really popular here, and it's only found in Jaoxi. It's tender, it's juicy, it's very rare, it's eaten raw, and it is very hazardous to snack on because it's actually alive enough to fight back. Yeah, you guessed it - it's me. Apparently the mosquitos here like exotic food as much as I do. But they don't know what they're in for - I've become a pro at smashing them in midflight. Beware, hungry mosquitoes: I can destroy you, and it won't be hard.
Speaking of wayward animals, I've had some chaotic adventures in cat-catching lately. My host sister's cat, Lisa (he's a boy), is not supposed to go outside, but he is very good at escaping through windows and doors that haven't been bolted shut, booby-trapped, and lined with barbed wire. Since there aren't any windows or doors like that in the house, Lisa escapes on a daily basis. I haven't really explained this yet, but I basically have two host families (although they're both part of the same extended family) for the first few months of my exchange, and I bounce back and forth between their houses. I've been at Lisa's house for the past two days, and he has escaped once each day so far. The first day, I looked up from my game of Zombies vs. Plants just in time to see him expertly pushing a window screen aside and climbing out of an open window. I climbed out after him and grabbed him before he could jump over the fence. Today, I was watching TV when I happened to glance outside and see Lisa nonchalantly strolling across the porch. I don't know how he got out (I'm starting to think he can teleport or something), but I had to run and get him again. Thankfully, although Lisa is smart enough to escape the house, he does not quite understand the concept of leaving the scene of the crime.
I feel bad for having to keep Lisa inside, but really it's for his own good. Last time he escaped and no one noticed he got into a fight with another cat and was injured rather badly. From what I'm told, he can't seem to go outside without getting into a fight, so he has to stay in. Last night he seemed more depressed about this than usual, because he kept yowling outside my door. This cat is insanely loud when he wants to be. But I wasn't annoyed, actually; he reminded me of my kitty at home when she meows outside my door at night because she's lonely. It was cute.
Okay, let's backtrack a little bit. Two nights ago, I actually went to a Rotary meeting with my host dad and sister. It was held under a bridge at night. I'm not kidding; they literally had portable chairs and tables set up under the highway at night. Not weird at all, right? Anyway, I finally introduced myself to everyone in Chinese, and then we left. Everyone was really friendly, and the food was very good (especially the fruit!). I still haven't gotten this month's allowance, but I've decided I'll bug them about it when we're not under a bridge at night. O.O
Yesterday morning, I went to hear my host dad give a speech about this architectural tour of Yilan City. Or at least I think that's what it was about - as usual, it was in Chinese, so I could only guess. The event was held on the very beautiful grounds of the Yilan County government building - and I actually did take pictures, but I don't have them with me so I'll add them later. After my host dad spoke, we all went on an architectural tour of Yilan City, but not before someone from the news came up to me with a big black camera and a microphone and asked why I was at the event. Thankfully I had one of my two host moms there to translate for me, so I got to do a little on the spot interview - mostly in Chinese!
This evening was a very important Chinese Festival called the Moon Festival, and my family (ALL two hundred or so of them) had a big party for it. As usual, I tagged along. I kind of had it in the back of my mind that today is not a very festive day for Americans, but I didn't mention it because sulking wasn't going to do anyone any good. And I had a great time. I performed line dancing with a group of people who all knew the dance better than I did, mostly because I had just learned it that morning and just found out we were performing an hour before we got on stage. Someone took a video of it, which I am reluctant to upload because I look silly. :P But I kept smiling and had fun, even during the third dance which I had never actually been taught how to do. People must have liked watching the American make a fool of herself though, because I kept getting pulled up on the stage without warning. My host mom put me on the spot and turned me into a spontaneous backup dancer while one of the bands was performing. Someone broke out a karaoke machine which happened to have English songs - so guess who got to sing? I didn't exactly hit all of the right notes, but I had a fun time and that's what matters!
I start school in two more days (FINALLY). I can't wait to make some friends my own age!
First of all, more exotic food. There's one kind of meat that's apparently really popular here, and it's only found in Jaoxi. It's tender, it's juicy, it's very rare, it's eaten raw, and it is very hazardous to snack on because it's actually alive enough to fight back. Yeah, you guessed it - it's me. Apparently the mosquitos here like exotic food as much as I do. But they don't know what they're in for - I've become a pro at smashing them in midflight. Beware, hungry mosquitoes: I can destroy you, and it won't be hard.
Speaking of wayward animals, I've had some chaotic adventures in cat-catching lately. My host sister's cat, Lisa (he's a boy), is not supposed to go outside, but he is very good at escaping through windows and doors that haven't been bolted shut, booby-trapped, and lined with barbed wire. Since there aren't any windows or doors like that in the house, Lisa escapes on a daily basis. I haven't really explained this yet, but I basically have two host families (although they're both part of the same extended family) for the first few months of my exchange, and I bounce back and forth between their houses. I've been at Lisa's house for the past two days, and he has escaped once each day so far. The first day, I looked up from my game of Zombies vs. Plants just in time to see him expertly pushing a window screen aside and climbing out of an open window. I climbed out after him and grabbed him before he could jump over the fence. Today, I was watching TV when I happened to glance outside and see Lisa nonchalantly strolling across the porch. I don't know how he got out (I'm starting to think he can teleport or something), but I had to run and get him again. Thankfully, although Lisa is smart enough to escape the house, he does not quite understand the concept of leaving the scene of the crime.
I feel bad for having to keep Lisa inside, but really it's for his own good. Last time he escaped and no one noticed he got into a fight with another cat and was injured rather badly. From what I'm told, he can't seem to go outside without getting into a fight, so he has to stay in. Last night he seemed more depressed about this than usual, because he kept yowling outside my door. This cat is insanely loud when he wants to be. But I wasn't annoyed, actually; he reminded me of my kitty at home when she meows outside my door at night because she's lonely. It was cute.
Okay, let's backtrack a little bit. Two nights ago, I actually went to a Rotary meeting with my host dad and sister. It was held under a bridge at night. I'm not kidding; they literally had portable chairs and tables set up under the highway at night. Not weird at all, right? Anyway, I finally introduced myself to everyone in Chinese, and then we left. Everyone was really friendly, and the food was very good (especially the fruit!). I still haven't gotten this month's allowance, but I've decided I'll bug them about it when we're not under a bridge at night. O.O
Yesterday morning, I went to hear my host dad give a speech about this architectural tour of Yilan City. Or at least I think that's what it was about - as usual, it was in Chinese, so I could only guess. The event was held on the very beautiful grounds of the Yilan County government building - and I actually did take pictures, but I don't have them with me so I'll add them later. After my host dad spoke, we all went on an architectural tour of Yilan City, but not before someone from the news came up to me with a big black camera and a microphone and asked why I was at the event. Thankfully I had one of my two host moms there to translate for me, so I got to do a little on the spot interview - mostly in Chinese!
This evening was a very important Chinese Festival called the Moon Festival, and my family (ALL two hundred or so of them) had a big party for it. As usual, I tagged along. I kind of had it in the back of my mind that today is not a very festive day for Americans, but I didn't mention it because sulking wasn't going to do anyone any good. And I had a great time. I performed line dancing with a group of people who all knew the dance better than I did, mostly because I had just learned it that morning and just found out we were performing an hour before we got on stage. Someone took a video of it, which I am reluctant to upload because I look silly. :P But I kept smiling and had fun, even during the third dance which I had never actually been taught how to do. People must have liked watching the American make a fool of herself though, because I kept getting pulled up on the stage without warning. My host mom put me on the spot and turned me into a spontaneous backup dancer while one of the bands was performing. Someone broke out a karaoke machine which happened to have English songs - so guess who got to sing? I didn't exactly hit all of the right notes, but I had a fun time and that's what matters!
I start school in two more days (FINALLY). I can't wait to make some friends my own age!
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