Weathering the "Typhoon," Part 2.

Quite simply, there was no typhoon to weather, just a LOT of heavy rain. Seems like it decided to skip town and invade Japan instead. So with that said...

Yesterday was resolutely boring. It was the Chinese Mid-autumn Festival, also known as the Mooncake Festival. The "party" ended up being another orientation telling us about where to poo, how to use the squatters, what we were and weren't allowed to do in the dorms (again) etc. etc. A few of us defintiely fell asleep. We were originally supposed to have a barbeque but because of the heavy non-typhoon rain, we instead had a massive hot pot indoors. You can probably start to imagine how stuffy and gross it got in a room with around 100 people and 10 hot pot pots boiling at full steam.

There is construction going on in Guo Qing, and as far as I can tell, it's happening directly above my room. Waking up to sawing and hammering sounds in the morning is NOT cool. Move to another room, and you realize apparently the entire third floor is undergoing construction or something. I don't get why they're doing any construction on Guo Qing at all, especially apparently they're tearing down the whole building in a year or two.

Today was our first day of classes. All I can say is when they called this a Chinese boot camp, they were not kidding. I already have three pages of vocab to memorize and four pages of Chinese to read, and that's the homework level each day! Also apparently they messed up my schedule; two out of three of my classes were changed last minute which had me getting kicked out of classes and running across the building to what was "supposed" to be my correct class. The first time it was kind of funny; the second time it was just plain silly.

I'm almost positive I'm outmatched in my third Chinese class. The people in that class clearly know Chinese; one guy was speaking pretty much fluently to our teacher (who speaks RIDICULOUSLY quickly). Other people in our class learned Chinese for eight years, or two but spoke at home with their parents, or something of that variation. I'm pretty much screwed. However, It's important to remember that even though the past week has been all about having fun, travelling and vacationing, the real reason I came to Taiwan was to learn Chinese. Not to party, not to vacation, but to learn Chinese. It's time to buckle down, wrap my head around that and remember it, I suppose.

I suppose it's time to start working on homework. Until next time, zai jian!

-Justin