And, We're Back!

The Fort San Domingo at the mouth of the

Danshui River, which runs into Taipei
from the north. It was originally built by
the Spanish, and later fortified by the
Dutch (from which it got its current name
in Chinese, 紅毛城, meaning red haired
fortress), and later used by the British
and American consulates before being
returned to the ROC.

Dang, it’s been a while. Yesterday was my one month anniversary with Taiwan, and figured it was time for an update. One of those anniversaries that isn’t really an anniversary, but you celebrate it anyways, just because you can.

For now, I’m just going to go over the basics of my first month. Or at least some. I’m getting the boring stuff out of the way first I suppose. I’ve got to give you all a reason to come back, right?

My first task at hand was finding an apartment. (This part is for future fellows, so feel free to skip it) I’d looked on tealit and forumosa a bit before getting to Taipei, and sent some emails to apartments of interest. Once here, I checked out the sites Ruten and Yahoo, which had more listings and more variety. I called up the numbers and set up some more appointments. I’d narrowed it down to 3 areas based on proximity to ICLP, all within 20 minutes walking. The real way to see the apartments is to show up early to your appointment, or walk around afterwards, and check out the area and look for listings posted on doors, lampposts, and bulletin boards. Because, to be honest, location is probably most important—there will be different types of apartments in every neighborhood, and there are restaurants all over the place.

The street choc-full of restaurants right next to
my apartment. Very nice!

My room after I'd just moved in.

I found a nice studio apartment 6 minutes from ICLP, which is great. It’s got all that I need, I’ve got a nice landlord who used to teach chemical engineering at NTU, and my neighbors are all students. Unfortunately, neighbors don’t seem to really communicate much, so that opportunity may be lost without a lot of effort. Something that’s really struck me so far about Taiwanese is that they are remarkably willing to help you out and incredibly polite, but aren’t quite willing to open up beyond that.

The world around, students go to the
library to a. sleep and b. study. At any
given time, I'd say about 1/4 of the students
are asleep in the library.

In order to try and get beyond that, I’ve joined the guitar club and the calligraphy club. The guitar club is fun and should be a good way of making some NTU friends. I’m in the beginners class, and we have class once a week followed the next day by group practice, when we split into “families” to practice in smaller groups and review what we’ve been going over. It’s been cool to be able to understand everything, including music theory (which is, oddly enough, coming together now for me in Chinese rather than in English back when I was taking piano haha). Good times.

Calligraphy teacher at work, doing his
thang. He even did some upside down.
Now that's skill.

Calligraphy club. Haha calligraphy club is a bit different from the cacauphony of beginning guitar players. I walked in last Friday to a room where the only sound I could hear was the purring of the fan, squeaking as it oscillated to and fro. Everyone was diligently in their place, practicing their characters. I too found a spot, sat down with my brush and got to work. It should be a good cathartic activity at the end of the week, and as always a good way to learn a bit more Chinese and everything. Hopefully I’ll be able to make some friends as well.

I really feel like I need to get on that, because my life is still lacking enough Chinese. Classes have been good, and are certainly quite a bit of work. Only two are really that challenging as of now, however. The classical Chinese class has been straightforward and review of stuff from the summer, and my one-on-one class is not too exciting, as we’re “reviewing” a book that I’ve never studied before, because I’ve already learned most of the vocabulary. I trust they’ll get better in the upcoming weeks. I’ve been going over some slang and Taiwanese dialect with my one-on-one teacher, which has been a bit more exciting.

The main problem I’m having with the program is too much English! The language pledge is a joke. A good number of the students in the program came in with little or no Chinese, and so they can’t communicate any real information in Chinese yet. I can understand their frustration, but the weird thing is that the language pledge is limited to the third and fourth floors of the building where we have classes. This is a result of the international nature of Taipei presumably, but I still find it a strange decision by ICLP. The thing that’s been most frustrating, however, is that almost all of the lectures that ICLP organizes have been bilingual. So much for the language environment on in ICLP. I can’t believe they’re encouraging the lecturers to speak in English. If people struggle to understand it, then so be, they shouldn’t be encouraging them to break the language environment if they don’t want us to.

In short, I need to find ways to speak more Chinese.

More later, hopefully more interesting.

A bridge over the small Danshui port, a nice area where
the Danshui river empties into the Pacific. Beautiful
at sunset.