Best First Day of Class Ever

Yesterday was our first day of class. We all woke up around 6am (on our own without alarm clocks...), laid around the dorm for a little while, then headed out in search of some breakfast. Now that we have found the nicer part of Sansia, the area of Taipei we are staying, I can eat without feeling like I am going to get sick after; however, I am not yet ready to try some of the local cuisine just yet. So we went to a Family Mart, same as like the inside of a gas station except very very clean, which has a bakery inside. I got some caramel pudding which is supposed to be like a dessert and it was delish. It is the same as custard. I also had a piece of french toast which tasted like a combo of garlic bread and cinnamon toast.

After that we headed back to campus to the College of Business building. Since we were awake so early, we were about 30 minutes early so we just sat and relaxed in the building while we waited for our TAs to arrive. When they came to get us, we went up stairs to the computer lab where they handed us a packet with a cd, chop sticks(ones that you carry with you where ever you go that you screw together like a pool stick, and they are awesome), little stickers with my name in Chinese on them, and a planner with pictures of sights and things like that. We put the cd onto the computers and installed a bunch of programs to help us learn and pracice chinese. We can put these programs onto our own computers so that we can practice while we are at the dorms. Since our teacher speaks mostly Chinese, we each had a TA sit next to us to translate and help us use the computer that was mainly in Chinese.

After class, the TAs took us to an "Italian" place to eat lunch. I had pesto pasta with chicken. haha I think they knew that some of us (me and Daniel) weren't eating and wanted to take us to a place they knew we would like. After that Simmon took us to his apartment building to have a language practice class. His apartment building was so nice in the lobby. The cost of living here is way better than in the States. He says to rent an apartment here it would be about 4000 NTD which is about 125 US per month. THAT IS CRAZY. After was sat and talked with the other TAs for a while we headed over to Ting's apartment which is equally as nice. They have pools, a large game room and weight room, and karaoke rooms. These apartments look like resorts they are so nice. The boys played ping pong for a while and the rest of us went to sing karaoke. Karaoke is very popular here.

After all of that, we walked back to the dorm and rested for an hour then Daniel, Daniel, Rob and I headed back into the nice part of town to find some food. We ended up at this little place called The Garage that serves American food like pizza, hamburgers, and chicken wings. Like I said, I'm just not ready yet to venture out... but hey, I still have 5 more weeks of this haha. We had cheese fries, some wings, and some pizza. I also had a Fanta because I am getting tired of drinking tea. We sat and talked to the owner of the place, Wayne, for a little while. He was very hospitable and answered all of the questions that we had. We will definitely be visiting there again very soon. Then we went back to the dorms where I fell asleep around 9:15pm.

I would just like to note to my mother that I have been to bed before 9:30pm every single night and have woken up without an alarm clock before 7 everyday. Maybe going to bed earlier really is the key to being able to wake up without 4 alarm clocks and a phone call each morning hahahaha

Today and tomorrow we have free time to do whatever we want. We are all going to head into Taipei City with Jovy, one of our TAs, to spend the day. More to come later!!