I am not going to lie, I had a really good morning this morning. After waking up, I called one of my friends from Hoffman, and it was amazing. I have been having a hard time holding onto what I learned there, and I am terrified that I am going to lose it all, or crash spectacularly. But I got some good ideas. So hopefully, I won't crash. I have some ideas. But it still makes me nervous. I think it might just be a pattern that I am expecting this to fail. Why do I expect failure? What is wrong with me?
I also got to go for a bike ride along the river this morning, before it got way too muggy for me to do anything near something green. 15 minutes out, 15 minutes back. I got a lot of weird looks, being the white girl on the broken down bike wearing aviator sunglasses. Not a typical scene, I don't think. But it was so beautiful. And there were a lot of people out and about, doing their thing. Some where walking their dogs, and of course there were the hard core bikers with their gear, pedaling away. I know that the skies are blue here, but I would not trust myself if I was sucking in that much pollution. There were also groups of people playing tennis, and of course, dancing. Yes, you read right. There was a nice little ballroom/salsa/whatever the fuck you want kinds of dancing going on. It was so cute. They were sweating their asses off, and having a ball. I wanted to stop and dance with them.
And then it was time for my test, both speaking and writing. I went in and talked to the teachers for 10 minutes, talking about my favorite movies and why I decided to learn Chinese. I think I did pretty well. The writing and listening test was a joke. Most of it was pretty straight forward and easy, and some of the questions seemed like they were straight out of my text book from last summer. It made me laugh outloud. Literally. I got the right answers simply because I had seen the questions so many times that I knew what characters belonged where, even if I had no idea what the sentence actually meant. How is that for intuition. I gave up trying to go over it and check my work in the end though. I was tired and hungry. I'll be placed in the Chinese class that I will be placed in. No pressure.
And then it was time to set off into the world to find lunch, that glorious glorious meal that one had in the middle of the afternoon. How lovely. I went with three other people to find a place for lunch, and we ended up wandering around back alleys until we found a sketchy Korean place. We had a little trouble ordering, as there wasn't really a menu, just really a sheet that you tick off. Pictures really help sometimes. It was a team effort though, and we got enough food to have quite the meal.
I also have some bad news that I forgot to share, but which is crucial to the next part of the story. I got absolutely eaten alive by mosquitos last night. I have no idea how they got into my room, because both the door and the windows were close last night, but there you have it. My legs are covered in bites, and they were so itchy that it actually woke me up in the middle of the night. I look like I went to battle and lost. So, I did the only thing any sane person would do: I bought a pink mosquito net, and taped it above my bed. I had to use a mop for one of the corners, because in all my genius, I forgot that I don't actually have a four poster bed. Duh. As a point of interest, I also bought a towel. It's not perfect, but it is infinitely better than the dish towels I have been drying off with most recently.
My afternoon was uneventful, to say the least. I was exhausted from being social all afternoon (seriously, it is hard work. These socialites make it look so easy) so I tried to take it easy. And then of course it started raining, so it was no longer so difficult to convince myself to stay inside for the rest of the day. I ventured out briefly to buy some lotion, but the feeling of it raining while being super muggy was not one that I wanted to prolong for a long period of time. But lotion was a must. There is nothing worse than skin that is just sticking to you. Which now that I write it, seems to be a really strange sentence. But you know what I mean.
I met up with some people from my program that I went to lunch with to go out to dinner with. Although dinner was kind of a failure, it was fun to walk around with them. We started off at Club 7 (also known as 7 Eleven, in some places) to buy a cheap drinkable liquid, and then start hopping from small sketchy restaurants, eating small appetizers along the way. It was definitely a fantastic night. And I stayed up until 11. Take that jet lag. You can't beat me.
And that was my night. Thankfully, my friends convinced me to buy an umbrella before we started walking around, because I did not have one. Taiwan is tropical, I have no idea why it didn't occur to me earlier that I would need a rain coat, or even an umbrella. Both of which I forgot to bring. Duh. However, I don't know what I expected of the quality of the umbrella I would buy at 7 Eleven. I was swinging it around by the handle, and the entire umbrella part of it broke off. I carried it around in two parts until I went back to exchange it.
And that was my day. Long, eventful, and good. What more could you want from a day abroad?
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