okay, well things have been pretty busy here between schoolwork and hanging out with my friend cai xiaojie (formerly known as cai laoshi). a typical day consists of me waking up, going to my 9am class which is really hard, then sleeping until 11, then doing some review and running out to get lunch at the cafeteria, then I have my 1v1 class and then 2 hours of an easier group class. then, I usually hang around the huayuzhongxin doing homework and chilling with the teachers / other students. Recently i've been going to the OIEP (tunghai's IEFP) to chill with cai xiaojie, it's quiet there and no english is spoken, and she's willing to help me out with stuff if I need help.
Then I go home and be bored for a while, and end up doing my character memorization around 10pm. By nature of this task it is boring and I usually mess around on the internet because I'm a horrible time scheduler, then I go to bed really late. Occasionally at night I'll hang out with students / xiaojie in which case I get back really late. Some interesting nights have been had, notably involving the lack of an open container policy .. or any policies .. in public parks. For the most part, I've gotten my work done well and I'm getting 9.0 or above on my quizzes. (One exception was when we needed to memorize an entire chapter text and read it - no prompt - which was a mess.)
Anyway, recently we took a field trip to 日月潭 (Sun Moon Lake) and the 九族文化村 (Formosan Aborigine Cultural Village), which are famous spots in Taiwan. I was actually unimpressed with both - Riyuetan was cool but the mountains around it, not the lake, were the most pretty, and the bus ride over actually featured the best scenery (mountain passes, etc). The FACV was actually an amusement park, I don't know if there's much more to be said about that; it had a whole section in the back demonstrating aborigine culture but it was pretty wierd. Lots of plastic models sitting around earthen jars. One good thing was that the "UFO Abduction" ride was basically a big thing that lifted you really high and you could get a sweet view of the mountains. Then it dropped, which was actually really fun.
Here's some pictures! Click for larger.
opposite Sun Moon Lake there was some temple. Just about anyone reading this off of the Google Reader feed will already be sick of pictures from a million Beijing blogs about the ming tombs and whatever (I am), so I tried to take some interesting pictures of things I thought interesting about the temple, rather than the little dudes on rooftop edges. There was certainly an egregious anachronism with old culture hastily modernized, with paint unrealistic in its brash colors and stores seamlessly integrated into the temple.
I don't really have many pictures from traipsing town with cai xiaojie, but here's one interesting one. There's a huge department store in the middle of a night market district, and every floor has a different bathroom theme. Here's a men's bathroom that I found inviting:
One interesting thing I find here is that my own attitude towards my progress in Chinese fluctuates wildly. Right now I'm really feeling like my Chinese sucks, but a few days ago I was really in the pocket and speaking fluently. It's wierd; whenever I involve my brain in a musical activity, my Chinese weakens.. a lot. For example, I went to that saxophone factory, played a lot, and afterwards I found myself barely able to form sentences. Good that my (current) major is music cognition.. it'd be interesting to study something in that vein - whether music activates parts of the brain that are only associated with native language and not ones learned later in life.
Also, I'm learning quite a lot of characters a day, and I'm not having a problem memorizing them, but at the pace of my class (1 lesson each day) I don't really get to use the words ever after the test. For example, I find it unlikely that I will be using 雜糧 (miscellaneous grains) much after the lesson about the Welcoming Students Barbecue. However, I especially remember that word now, whereas every day I forget how to say "sun." (tai yang, damn it)
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