My first weeks!

First off, my apologies for not keeping up this blog as well as I should have done. I'll try to better my life from now on and at least post something once a week. Last time I was writing at 3:30 in the morning because my jetlag was keeping me up. Thankfully, that was the last night I experienced my jetlag that severe. The second week of my stay here in Taiwan meant the start of my classes.

On Monday morning I had Cross Cultural Management. A very interesting course, mainly for international students, that is all about the definition of culture and how it affects business relationships and the management structure in a company. Every week there is a certain topic on which the lecturer will give us an introduction, and afterwards we get divided into groups and discuss the lecture's content from our own culture's point of view. This gives an interesting insight in other cultures and how being from another country can really make for a very different way of looking at certain things. It has also once again made it very clear that the differences between cultures within Europe can be very large, which is funny considering the fact that in other parts of the world Europe is often mentioned as just that; Europe. Whereas Europe is only a continent home to a large amount of cultures and sometimes very different values and norms.

On Monday afternoon I had a class called Application of Financial Modeling. This class, like the name suggests is all about applying financial models in a practical way. We learn how to analyse financial problems and how to solve them using the magical software that is Excel. I knew the basics of Excel before starting this course, but I soon found out that there is so much more to that program than I had expected. Our teacher is a true pro and seems to actually be in love with Excel. He always, very proudly and enthusiastically , shows us all the things he has made using Excel. One of which was a sort of game for his daughter meant for studying English. Later I found out that his daughter is very young still and the poor girl still had to sit behind the computer to study her English. Which is apparently quite common here in Taiwan. A lot of parents want their children to study English from a very early age onwards.

This brings me to a class I have on Wednesday morning, this one is called English Teaching for Children and it is meant for people who would like to teach English to children here in Taiwan or in Mainland China. In this class I found out that a lot of children get sent to summer school to learn English at a very young age, and the way they are taught English is the same way we learn foreign languages in high school in The Netherlands. It's a lot of plain vocabulary and grammar. This is of course not the best way to teach children a new language. Children this young still have the ability to pick up a new language fairly quickly and they should be taught in a more childlike way. By using stories and songs for examples, by playing games, by doing a small play in English etc. They learn the language by hearing it, being around it, using it in a playful manner. And this course emphasizes that and gives us a lot of insights in how children can learn a new languages and actually teaches us practical things to teach ourselves.Perhaps I will someday come back here, or go to Mainland China, to teach English.

My last "normal" (non-Chinese) class is Managing Global Acquisitions and Mergers. This class uses a lot of very up to date cases to teach us all about how mergers and acquisitions work, what the motives and goals may be, and also how things can go wrong. The class is taught by a very interesting professor. And by interesting I don't just mean he's interesting to listen to. He is an interesting personality. His "English" name is Carlos. He is quite an achieved businessman and he is a great fan of taking pictures of his students during class and having birthday parties in the classroom. Also, selfies! The guy loves selfies! Last class he also seemed to have a certain preference for Shakira songs. Maybe it's because of his latino western name, or maybe just because he likes that her hips don't lie. Who knows..

In the second week my Chinese courses finally started as well, and these are an entirely different story. These courses are probably the single most important reason I went here in the first place and it's definitely a challenge to start learning this language. The grammar is not complicated at all, or so I've heard. For example, they don't really conjugate verbs. They don't even distinguish between present or past, you just use a time indicator in the sentence to indicate when it took place. But I can tell you right now, the pronunciation more than makes up for the easiness of the grammar. Boy oh boy, my poor western brain can't handle all those different tones. Especially when people speak really fast I can't even hear them using the tones. How am I ever supposed to pronounce things right when trying to speak fast, I can hardly manage it when speaking sound by sound. BUT, I will not give up. I still have four months left here and I intend to get the basics of Chinese down before I go back to the Netherlands. I will keep you updated on my progress. And my inevitable struggles of course...

Now that we've gotten the academic part out of the way, let's move on to the real reason I'm here. SIGHTSEEINGG! So far I must admit I haven't really seen as much as I would've wanted to. In the first week we went looking for a toilet restaurant, this restaurant apparently serves all foods and drinks in toilets. Which sounds disgusting and will probably make it impossible for me to properly enjoy my meal, but I want to try it nevertheless. Unfortunately, when we got there the restaurant was under construction. I am definitely going back though! Instead we went to a Korean restaurant which where I had some very nice seafood kind of soup and afterwards we explored the Ximen area (a commercial district in Taipei).

I also climbed the Elephant Mountain, where I took some beautiful pictures of Taipei at night.

View from Elephant Mountain

Last weekend I went on a surfing trip organized by a local student here, especially for the exchange students. We went to the Yilan district on the east coast of Taiwan, to Wai'ao Beach. A beautiful black sand beach, that was surprisingly quiet on the day we were there. We had rented a tourbus to get there, which took about 2.5 hours due to heavy traffic (apparently the east coast is a popular weekend getaway for a lot of people in Taipei). Since this was a surfing trip I actually went surfing for the first time in my life. I rented a board at the surfing place on the beach and took a two hour class. The surfing was a lot of fun to do, but very hard and even more exhausting. After the two hour class I was just drained. Not only because it's a lot of paddling and moving in water, but also because most of the time I went down hard and being thrown under water again and again is very tiring haha. Luckily though it wasn't all bad, I managed to catch a few good waves and actually managed to stand on my board!

Wai'ao Beach

As you might have seen on facebook I also managed to get myself a bike. I ended up not buying a second hand one, but a new one. Because for the second hand bike auction you had to get up at 4am to get one and I was not about to do that. There are limits to my thriftiness. On this bike I have undertaken two cycling trips. The first one was to Da'an Park, a park close to the university, and to Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall. The Memorial Hall was immense as you can see from the picture below and it's really humbling to stand in front of such a vast building.

CKS Memorial Hall

CKS Statue

CKS Memorial Hall

The second cycling trip was down the river with a group of people to the Bitan Suspension Bridge. That was a really fun day and the parks and bike lanes down the riverside are beautiful and really well maintained. One of the things I want to try doing as well is cycling all the down the river to the northern most point, Tamsui. It is about a five hour ride, but apparently a very beautiful one. 

Bitan Suspension Bridge

Near Bitan Suspension Bridge

Bitan Suspension Bridge

This blog post has become waaaaay too long, sorry for that. And I haven't even told you everything there is to tell! The only way to solve this problem I guess, is to write these posts more often. Which I hopefully will start doing starting from now!

The Journey

The Journey started three days ago. Something that probably won't be a surprise to most of you is that I only finished packing like three minutes before we left for Schiphol. But even despite my clear lack of planning skills I seem to not be missing anything essential, yet. Well, not counting the Taiwan travel guide I left behind on my desk in my room. I can still see myself looking at it and thinking I still needed to put that in my hand luggage, which in the end I still forgot. Thankfully, my mum and dad were nice enough to buy me a new Lonely Planet travel guide at the airport (they're visiting in November, so they'll be able to use mine then). Thanks again by the way!

Moving on; when we arrived at Schiphol we met up with my mother in law and Sharon (a family friend) and we got to the gate 15 minutes early. Checking my luggage went well and before I knew it I only had one suitcase to tow. Because I still had two hours until the gate would open we went to Starbucks to kill some time and it was nice to just take in these last moments with the people closest to me. 

Then, after what felt like both ages and seconds at the same time, it was time to head through customs. It was time for goodbyes. It felt weird to have to say goodbye to my parents since I have never been away from them for such a long stretch of time. But it was definitely hardest to say goodbye to my boyfriend Mark. He has been such a big part of my life over the last ten months that I really couldn't imagine what it would be like to suddenly not see him for 4.5 months. What it would be like to go to sleep alone, and to wake up alone, to not have him there to share all of the experiences that I was sure to experience over the following months. Yes, some tears were shed, but only reasonable amounts haha

Now, I will skip the very uninteresting parts about boarding and being on a plane for 17 hours. It will suffice to say that it was not the most comfortable experience of my life and that I spent it watching more movies than I have ever watched in one go before. 

Thankfully there were no delays, so, at almost exactly 13.05pm local time I arrived at Taoyuan International Airport. The moment I stepped off the airplane I was almost literally hit by a wall of heat which was thankfully followed by the cool welcome of the airconditioned arrival hall. At the airport I was supposed to be picked up by the university who had arranged shuttle buses for international students going back and forth between the airport and the dorms. Not only that, there were also Taiwanese students present to help me withdraw some money and buy a sim card. That was really appreciated, because the woman who helped me at the telecom provider did not appear to speak that much English.

Which brings me to an interlude relating to English in Taiwan. I've been here for two days now and I have already noticed that not being able to read, speak, or understand any Chinese is quite a handicap. Yes, I have managed so far, but life would be much easier if I would have some prior knowledge of Chinese. Especially when it comes to food. Eating out is the norm here, and I don't even have a proper kitchen to cook in even if I wanted to. And unfortunately it turns out to be challenging to find places that offer English menus, or even pictures of their food. In the end I'll be fine, and I'm sure I will start to recognise some characters quickly enough but for now it is a handicap.

Back to my arrival. The NTU (National Taiwan University) shuttle buses were comfortable and dropped us off right in front of the dorms, so it couldn't really get any more convenient. At the reception desk I was handed a stack of forms that I had to fill in before I could even get into my room. Afterwards I got my keys and was able to check the state of my room and to see if everything was there. After reading some stories about the rooms not being all that clean I was afraid I would encounter the same issue, but thankfully that is not the case. I've got a nice rather empty looking room on the ground floor of the building. This might not provide me with spectacular views, but like we say in Dutch 'ieder nadeel heeft zijn voordeel' (every disadvantage has its advantage); I can be outside in about thirty seconds, which is nice when you're late for something or when you've forgotten to bring something (especially the second thing will definitely occur).

On the first night I needed to buy everything for my room, ranging from a mattress and pillow, to a shower curtain, to a trash can. Thankfully, there was a temporary shop set up just outside the dorms, which saved me a lot of time and trouble. Even though I've been here for two days now I still haven't really settled in yet. Yes, I have everything I need. But I need to clean and personalise it still. My suitcases are still on the floor and my desk looks like my desk at home, aka full of sh*t.

The first night I went to sleep at 11pm and woke up at 10am the next morning, which was fine and I thought that this meant that I would not be troubled by jetlag. However, as I am writing this blogpost my MacBook tells me it is currently 3:30am, so I guess my jetlag has caught up with me. Which is not so good, since the second hand bike auction starts in like 5 hours and afterwards I have a campus tour and international student orientation. I hope I will survive, wish me luck!

P.S. pictures will follow!