家人: Family.

The thing about being Chinese, when it comes to family, is that it seems to never end. Now, this is--for the most part--a great thing. Being around family gives you the feeling of belonging, and a sense of safety somehow. But at the same time, being with distant relatives even if we are "family" just isn't the same as being with family from home.

I spent my lazy Sunday with family, to be specific: my Mother's aunts, cousins and their families, and in the evening my Dad's cousin and his girlfriend and their friends. I overslept by accident :) so I got to my great-aunts' house at around noon. My great aunts still live in the house my mother grew up in, which was really cool to see. There was a big yard with a bunch of trees, the same trees (I'm guessing) my Mom told me she used to climb as a kid. The house is pretty big, so I guess everyone used to live together? As a kid Mom told me she used to drag her younger cousin Paul around with her whenever she went to play baseball or climb nearby trees--I obviously did not inherit any of her athletic/tomboy genes... I call all my mom's cousins, including Paul, my "Uncles" in an effort to avoid the complicated Chinese family tree terminology (there are different terms for EVERYONE depending on their relation to you, including whether they are from your Dad's or your Mom's side of the family!!).

So anyway, I had a very healthy lunch with my Uncles Paul and Henry, Paul's wife, Paul's 5-year-old daughter, and my two great aunts. One of my great aunts is like a yoga/meditation master, but I think I may have mentioned this in one of my earlier posts (God... I'm turning into my Mom, repeating all my stories 3-5 times to the same listeners... haha). Then I went to the park with my little "niece" ? Ting An haha and my yoga master great aunt. She climbed trees with me and Ting An like it was NO BIG DEAL!!! I gotta ask her for a lesson or two! After running around and sweating bullets in the park all afternoon, we stopped in the Astronomy museum to cool off, and Ting An played with all the gadgets. When we got back home, Enchanted was on, so we watched it, and I helped translate what was going on to Ting An :) then we had some cake, and Ting An ate a whole slice of her favorite, strawberry cream vanilla cake with pink frosting! She had her first experience writing Chinese characters with a brush, and the silly little girl spilled literally half the ink bottle (of VERY VERY THICK AND BLACK INK) all over: my legs, the chair cushions, and the floor. Haha

After I left my Mom's family, I went straight to a BBQ with my Dad's cousin. At first I felt really awkward because I didn't know anyone else at the BBQ except my "uncle" and his girlfriend. But then he gave me a glass of wine and of course conversing and meeting people became easier after that. His girlfriend's daughter, who's 16, and her friend overheard me speaking in English to a friend on the phone, and looked like they were SO in awe of me haha! So then they sat by me at the dinner table, and they were so cute! They kept whispering to each other in Chinese, like "does she speak Chinese?" and then they asked me and I said yes and they whispered back to each other like "oh my god! she can speak!" and then they looked at each other and were like "i wonder if she understands" and then before they could ask me i answered "yes, i can" haha so cute. Then I met some other people who I can speak Chinese ONLY with! Success. I need to meet more non-English speakers so I can practice my Chinese, even it WILL be so hard to converse with them..

Anyway, my Sunday passed by very enjoyably :) meeting and hanging out with my "new" family here in Taipei makes my life here a little more familiar and comfortable, and safe. Even if there is still a little wall between us. But being with distant relatives here made me miss my aunts (hi Auntie Olivia & Auntie Nancy!!!) from home, and all my cousins that I grew up with, and my mommy, daddy, and Sam. It's always nice to meet new family, and expand my family tree, but there's no replacement for the original :)

I love and miss all you guys! Big Hug & Kiss from Taipei!!

The Swiney in Taipei.

So apparently H1N1 is like frighteningly rampant here in Taipei. NBD right?

Until I started getting a sore throat and other BS last Sunday. Then I woke up Monday morning, not feeling too bad, and made the poor decision of googling "H1N1 symptoms." Like I said, bad idea.

As my eyes moved down the screen, I got more and more scared: sore throat? yes. headache? yes. coughing? yes. HOLY CRAP I HAVE H1N1 WHAT AM I GOING TO DO OH MY GOD OH MY GOD. This is exactly what was going through my head at that exact moment. But I stupidly decided to read on: "Doctors suggest staying indoors, and staying away from others for at least 24 hours until your fever goes down." Fever?!?!?! OH MY GOD I DON'T HAVE A THERMOMETER WHAT AM I GOING TO DO. So obviously, I googled "how to tell if you have a fever without a thermometer" duh, I mean I DID go to USC.

Unfortunately, the people who answered all the Yahoo! message boards didn't seem to have gotten the same education I did... because answers ranged from: "put a cold glass of milk on your stomach, I say milk because afterwards if you still can't tell at least you'll have a cold glass of milk to drink" to "THERE IS NO WAY TO TELL. THE HAND ON THE FOREHEAD DOESN'T WORK" to "put the back of your hand against your forehead." Bottom line: there is no way to tell without a thermometer, jokes on you retards!!!!

So, freaking out, I made some quick calls to excuse myself from class--I mean, they should be THANKFUL I wasn't going to infect them, right?? And decided to spend the whole rest of the day indoors. The only time I left my tiny, tiny "apartment" was to get food & ravish the nearby 7-11 for any vitamins I could find... and also look for something, ANYTHING, resembling emergenC (oh, how I miss you, Pink Lemonade EmergenC...).

Totally thought this was a good idea.. until two hours later, at 12:00 PM when I flipped through all the channels on my TV and realized there was NOTHING GOOD ON TV BECAUSE IT WAS A MONDAY AT NOON. I subsequently had nothing else to do. for the whole freaking rest of the day. AWESOMEEEEEE, can you say cabin fever??

Anyway, the rest of the day was extremely boring: I took a nap because I literally had nothing else to do, woke up, watched the last half of Braveheart on TV, watched some CSI:NY, ate, went online... ate again.. slept..

Update: one week, a lot of rest, and lots of medicine, and NO PARTYING later, I feel much better. I found out later I did NOT have the Swiney, aka H1N1, because I never had a fever. This would have been useful information at around 9:30 last Monday morning, but ah well. C'est la vie. It was just a cold... actually more just a cough than anything else... Thanks to all my friends for enduring the coughing sounds coming from my body.. that sounded like I was going to cough up a lung... :)

David with his safety mask

*fun fact: these masks don't prevent you from GETTING anything, it is actually to keep you from SPREADING anything. So I suppose I should have been wearing it..... haha

I Miss You, beaches of California...

Today I went to a beach near DanShui (pronounced "dan shuay"), about 2 hrs north of Taipei. It was so nice to get out of the city and see the water, and be around fresh, clean air!!! The beach was beautiful, and there was a small crowd, but funnily enough, most people were clothed (because you know how much we Asians HATE tanned/dark skin, it's all about the white here)! It was a perfect day to go to the beach because it was sunny but a little windy so it wasn't too hot. The water here is the perfect temperature, though the waves were a little big for my liking, since I just like to float around in calm, still(er) water, so I only went in about butt-deep. haha

Even though I had so much fun at the beach today, it was still so different from our beaches in California! First of all, Santa Cruz is like a 30-minute drive from my house, and here it took me 45 minutes on the MRT (Metro) and another 45 on a bus to get to the beach! What a tiresome journey! There were lots of beached logs on shore, and some garbage, too, which was disappointing. But even though it still doesn't compare to my beloved California, it was much better than expected. The water and the beach in general was cleaner than I expected! I can't wait to go back to enjoy fresh, sea air again sometime soon! :)

The Deets.

For those of you who aren't familiar with abrevs, The Details.

It will be Week 3 in Taipei on Tuesday, I can't believe it! I've been accused of being vague in my blogs about Taiwan so far (sorry Nik haha) so I will do my best to now write down all the Deets about life in Taipei :)

School

So right now I'm attending Shi Fan Da Xue, which means Shi Fan University, or ShiDa for short. I have classes every day from 10:20-1:10! To be honest, being in class for three hours is kind of straining, just like the 3 hour classes I had to take at USC, but I'm actually really enjoying learning Chinese. We started on Lesson 5 and we're already at Lesson 7, only a week and a half into classes!! So, as you can tell, the teacher is moving our class pretty fast through the textbook, which is also a struggle--to keep up and learn all the vocabulary. We have a quiz every day; the teacher will say a sentence out loud and we have to write the whole sentence down. The sentences are getting longer and longer, and harder and harder! And then every couple days we have a chapter test... But even though the class is harder than I expected, I really enjoy the challenge! During class, after our quizzes, we usually go over the vocabulary from the chapter. There are 8 students in my class, including me, 4 girls and 4 boys, and we all rotate reading the vocabulary and the examples out loud (which is actually kind of hard because in the beginning they put the zu ing fu hao next to each character, but now they don't. Zu in fu hao is like the Chinese alphabet that all kids learn in the beginning when they're learning Chinese to help them sound out the characters). After the vocab we go over the grammar and the examples as well. We do all this.... for THREE HOURS.... :)

Night Markets

The night markets are a HUGE thing here in Taipei. Let me explain what they are... it's kind of like a farmer's market, but at night, with a LOT more stalls, and a LOT more people. Thing is, here in Taipei, the apartments are all really small, few have kitchens. In the States, we think of home as a safe haven and a place to relax and hang out, but here in Taipei, people don't spend that much time in their own places bc they're so small! So everyone goes out at night to these night markets to eat, shop, walk around, and hang out with friends... well, young people at least haha! At the night markets there are ALL KINDS of different foods: buns with meat and veggies inside, fried anything and everything, steamed, boiled, sauteed things of all different kinds! There are also lots of clothing stores, too, that sell clothes for cheaper than you'd find in a regular mall. There's stationary stores, pet stores (where they apparently they sell baby baby animals that shouldn't be separated from their moms yet!!!), seriously, stores of ALL different kinds. The night markets are really fun, and just filled with people!

Transportation

I'm not really sure what the local people use most, but I wanna say the bus and the MRT (Metro) system. Even though taxis are really cheap here for US standards, most locals can't afford to take taxis anytime they want, so if you use the taxis it means you're really spoiled. And/or rich. The bus system is something I'm getting used to, since I've always had my own car back home, but they're all air-conditioned (thank goodness!!) and fairly straightforward. The MRT is also really convenient, and fast, and much cleaner than I was expecting!

Exchange Rate

1 US dollar = about 32 NT, or Taiwan money

But, don't misunderstand and think everything is like 1/32 of the prices we pay in the states. For example, an iced tea at the 7/11 is 20 NT, and a cab ride from my apartment to school is like 85NT. So it's just annoying because every time I buy something I have to divide it by 32, and that's not quite as easy as dividing it in 1.5 like I did in Europe.

My Apartment

I live in a "studio" ?? on my own in an apartment complex called Chung Gong Guo Zai, which is just a couple bus stops down the street from school, and really close to the Taipei branch of my Dad's office. I have my own bathroom (thank God!) and then just one room with a bed, a closet, a desk, a bookcase, a small tv, and a small fridge. My bed is SUPER hard, nothing at all compared to my super comfy memory foam back home *sigh*, but it's pretty clean and pretty big compared to a lot of the other ones my Dad and I looked at while he was here. The bathroom is pretty standard: sink, toilet... but get this: there's no shower! Well, I mean, there's a shower head and tile floors... so it's pretty weird showering because I have to stand butt naked in my whole bathroom haha! So... I either have no shower... or I technically have a really BIG shower! :) All the buildings in this complex also have elevators, which is a rare thing here in Taipei! There's also a lot of old people and young families living here, because it's mostly government housing for veterans. My landlady just divided up her apartment to 5 rooms that she lets out to all females. It's pretty safe here, I believe, and in a good area.

Going Out!

Is a HUGE thing here, like really. The big nights to go out here are Wednesday (ladies night at a lot of places), Friday and Saturday. But you can pretty much go out anytime you want haha. I'd say the living standard here is pretty cheap, but going out is SO expensive. The nicest club in Taipei, called Primo, costs 1,000NT to get inside (unless you know people, and thankfully I have met people!), which is about $30!!! Drinks are also expensive, so basically going out in general will cost a good amount. Girls here are also pretty slutty, I heard from a friend that they sometimes go out in bikinis and high heels!!!! Isn't that ridiculous?!!? It's like WHO ARE YOU. Oh, and they're all really freaking skinny. FML. Whatever.

MTV Asia

I've been watching it like 24/7, listening to songs in Chinese and trying to read the subtitles to get myself to learn more Chinese. It really helps! It's helping with recognizing characters, plus, the music is pretty :) all girly love songs of course haha! I'm scared that I'm going to turn totally fobby in the year that I'll be here, singing Chinese songs, wearing Chinese style fashion.... YIKES!!!

Ok, this is all I can think of for now... will update again soon! :)

Some Semblance of Normalcy?

For everyone who's been wondering how I'm doing, don't worry :) I'm doing fine here in Taipei!

Classes started for me last Thursday, so from here on out I'll be going to class every day from 10:20 am - 1:10 pm. Kinda like SC, except, well, everything's in Chinese! haha this is my GRAND PLAN for daily life:

9:30- wake up

10:00- out the door

10:05- on the bus

10:20-1:10- class

1:10-grab a quick bite

1:30-library/hw

2:30- gym

3:30- home/shower

4:30- go out and play with friends! :)

however... I am extremely lazy so we'll see if my life goes according to plan... which it rarely does!

For those of you who have been worrying, do not despair, I have found some friends! Haha ah, thank goodness. I was getting cabin fever sitting in my apartment all by myself all day every day, and yes, that is the sad, sad truth. There are students here from all over, but I'm mostly making friends with people who are like me: can speak and understand, but not read or write. So mostly Asian kids from the states... aka California. Haha

I'm hoping to get acquainted with the city while I'm here: doing all the touristy things as well! I went to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall yesterday, took some pictures (it was actually quite boring...) felt nice to be a tourist again! :) There's also a zoo, which I'm extremely excited about!! I'll finally get to see a panda!! :)

I've been watching Chinese television, and listening to Chinese music on MTV Asia, haha, which, although embarrassing, is helping me quite a lot! The class I'll be in is an intensive course, so we're moving fairly quickly through the textbook, which is great! I'm excited about the challenge, even though I know it will be more work than I'd like at certain times.

Life here is really great so far, apart from missing all my friends and family and everyone back home. It's exciting to see and experience new things everyday, and even living on my own is better than I thought it would be, but sometimes I just long for the familiarity of home, and coming home to an empty apartment is something I'm just not used to yet!

That's all for now! :)