Speaking Wine, Drinking Words

I have some bad news. My mosquito netting fell off last night, so I decided to be brave, and not sleep with it at all. Bad mistake. I woke up with 9 new mosquito bites on my legs. And these bites seemed to swell up more than the other ones. I think I am getting slightly allergic to them at this point. Yikes!

I woke up early this morning, for the first day of class. I meant to wake up at 8, but rolled out of bed at 7:30 anyway. It seemed to only make logical sense that I would go buy breakfast, so I put a proper shirt on, and went out to buy some bao for lunch. I ran into some of my classmates, desperately running to class on the other side of campus. I was not nearly awake enough to think about what was going on though. I have decided that I can't really stomach bao in the morning. Far too much grease, and too many carbs. My stomach can't handle it.

And then it was time for class. I am not going to lie, I was pretty nervous, not knowing what I was in for. What were these classes going to be like? Was it going to be as intense as last year? Who knows! The possibilities were endless. But I wasn't going to know until I tried, right? Thankfully, I have class from 9 - 12, which seems to me to be the best time. Not too early, and I still get out early from class. I am going to hold onto this schedule if at all possible.

First up was the class that I was most nervous for: the one whose textbook was only in traditional characters. This was going to be fun, let me tell you. I got to class, and my teacher, 江老师 is this sweet young woman, who smiles easily. There were only three students including me in this class, which is a fantastic student to teacher ratio. She told us what our class was going to be like, and then we all introduced ourselves, and chatted away the remaining twenty minutes easily. Thankfully, we only have to do one chapter a week. That means only one night of headaches from traditional characters a week.

Next up was my main class, and it was only right across the hall. I wasted the time away on my iPad, because guess what? FREE WIFI. That doesn't happen anywhere in Taiwan. I finally have the chance to actually play around with my iPad. When class started, I discovered that we had four people in my class this time, one from the previous class, and two new ones. This teacher was very peppy, and talked in a loud voice, very quickly. We discovered this is because she used to be in broadcasting, and so is used to talking very loudly very quickly. We did the same thing, introducing ourselves, and hearing what the class is going to be like. Again, one chapter a week, and only 30 new characters a night. And simplified ones at that. Piece of cake. She kept saying how she was going to ask us to speak wine (speak well) and that she expected us to give her wine when she gave it to us. She did not mean literally. I can see a funny joke being made out of this at the end of the semester though. Do I dare? I think I might.

My last class was my one on one class. This teacher was not nearly as much fun. She blinks a lot, and doesn't seem to be quite present. But it is definitely going to be helpful to have a teacher just to talk to for an hour, about new words, or anything that I don't understand. One on one's are always good, I just wish my teacher was a little more fun.

I'm afraid I didn't have a very productive afternoon. I wish I could say I did, but I didn't. I wrote my previous blog, talked to a friend, and then promptly decided to take a nap. When I woke up at 6, I had no idea what I was doing, and was all of a sudden struck with the notion that it was already dinner time, and I still hadn't done my homework. And there was absolutely no way I was going to make it to the gym. i made plans with friends to meet them for dinner at 7, and then desperately tried to make some sense of the traditional characters I was supposed to be reading.

It gave me a headache, let me tell you. It took me an hour to just read one page, and I was ready to pull my hair out by the end of it. There were a lot of new words on my new words page, and even more that I had to look up for myself. And a lot of words that I should have known, but didn't, because I didn't recognize the traditional version of it. What am I supposed to do with that? But I'll let you in on a little secret: I actually kind of liked it. I liked feeling like I could read traditional characters, like I was actually learning something. And it felt good to mark up a page with notations again. I really do love learning Chinese.

For dinner, me and some friends went back to the Sichuan restaurant, but went easy on the Jin Pai this time. The food was not nearly as good the second time, unfortunately. I don't know why. We ordered one food that we have now termed "Windex Beef." It had a distinctly odd taste. I did not eat much of it, I would rather not be stuck to the toilet for the whole night. We had street vendor ice cream as it was, I didn't want to test my stomach too much. Once again, the ice cream was more ice than cream, but for $1.5 US, I will take it. It's always more fun to go on an adventure than to just do normal Haagen Daaz or something. I do not think I spelled that right.

After dinner, it was most certainly time to study, which me and Dante did, at D Cafe. It was superb. At first we were just going to try to use the foreigners discount (meaning we would just walk in and not order anything) but the exhaustion got to us too soon. Ordering an espresso did not seem like too much. And I think that the coffee people behind the counter were glad to see us order something.

I stayed there until 10, and called it a night. I had to write my surfing blog, after all! I stayed up late writing the blog, and then promptly crashed. That is, after all, what summer is for!