Habits, Addictions, and Settling (Much To My Dismay)

The time is ripe and I feel as though I have something to relate here. Today is October 22nd, exactly two months after my arrival. The true span of this time, though, is nebulous to me. At times, I tell myself, "Well, it hasn't been that long. Only two months, you have quite the while ahead of you." However, there are times when the adjustments of my body tell me I have survived many, many days on this island.

I have developed a few unexplainable and perhaps irrational addictions these past weeks. The one that immediately comes to mind is playing the game of Solitaire in a manner that could be called hysterical. ... Just talking about it makes me want to play a few games right now on this computer, but I know that I will lose the first 3 games and once I do eventually "win" one, I will be so pleased as to believe that I might possibly win the next one. Needless to say, I need to replace that habit with something more progressive.

A second addiction takes the form of any substance involving chocolate. Chocolate milk, a Japanese brand of dark chocolate, chocolate that you're supposed to use for fondue, chocolate ice cream, etc. All have been slowly enjoyed or quickly devoured.

Just now, I found my favorite radio station out of Philiadelphia online, which I think is pretty cool. They just happened to be playing a song that's been on my mind (Les Artistes by Santogold). Of course, as I listen right now they have the morning show going on, but also a pledge drive ('cause they're public radio). Whatever. This should probably be on the list now too, anyway. Apparently it costs $50 to play one song on the radio.

So, the last topic today is settling (much to my dismay). "Summer camp" ended awhile ago. "The honeymoon period" which I think I skipped, wouldn't have lasted very long anyway. What I feel now is a sense that this is my home and that I'm like most of the other kids at my high school. What I mean by "(much to my dismay)" is that the things I'm settling into, and that I'm settling at all, is not quite what I expected.

Before I stepped off of the plane and actually realized I was in Taiwan, I had been convincing myself for at least two months that I didn't have any expectations, which I believed, at the time, was the tolerant thing to do. The reality is that I did have expectations, from grandiose things, like living in some sort of hotel-like building, to little things, like all my classmates being very studious compared to most American kids. What I had done prior to arriving here was bury all speculation as to what my future held in Taiwan. The only thing I left on my mind was that I was embarking on what I believed (and continue to believe) would be the first of many great adventures.

What happened with the supressed expectations is that something would trigger one of them (such as the expectation that getting to and from school would be a simple and relatively painless ordeal) and I would have to accept the reality of the situation (it takes over an hour to get to school and the public transit and walking I use to get there often leaves me fatigued). My biggest example of coping with a denied expectation is, again, language. I expected to pick up Chinese in "no time at all" (which really isn't a specific time to begin with). In reality, I must fight an uphill battle everyday in which everything seems so apparent in my Chinese class, but then I go into my highschool and I talk to my Rotary Club and my host mom. Everything becomes muddled and I understand three sounds I think are words and the rest is mumbling to me. That's being a little unfair to myself though because there have been times where I have understood something that was said by a native speaker that other exchange students may have missed.

One thing that makes the hill even steeper is the quiet lacking of books and materials that I feel would help my process of becoming fluent. I was in a bookstore today (I suppose not tone frequented by foreigners) and I found only three different books for English speakers learning Chinese amongst the hundreds of "Learn English" books. It's a little frustrating.

That's enough about that though. Good things continue to happen. For you, a list:

• I have been learning Tai Chi Chuan the past two Wednesday (which are culture learning days). I will be performing with 19 others at the Coming of Age Ceremony held by the Rotary Club at the Confucious Temple in Taipei.
• Yesterday, I played the Erhu, a traditional Chinese instrument much like the violin, for the very first time. I found it to be very simple to play and now feel that I must have one (they aren't so expensive here, so it shouldn't be much of a problem to procure one).
• I've been reading a book about finding Taiwan's identity, which has proven to be quite a struggle (finding the identity, I mean).
• I have decided to enjoy, rather than despise, the morning companionship of the other foreign exchange students. This has, I believe, led me to enjoy myself a great deal more, even through this process of "settling".

I'll admit, I miss my bros: Sam, Vince, and Eric, I miss my brethren: Lyle and Jarik, I miss a certain girl in Germany, and I miss Mom and Dad and the dog, too.

Opportunities Find Me

Sometimes a door is opened for you and all you have to do is walk through it. That's how this week has gone for me. The first of such opportunities began actually last week when I decided to take the chinese painting instruction that my art teacher, Cohenko, had offered to me. So, Tuesday my lessons began.

This first lesson introduced the four treasures of the study (文房四寳 wen fang s bao). These are 筆bi (the pen), 墨mo (ink), 紙zhi (paper), and 硯yan (the ink stone). My name, 墨 , is a combination of the characters 黑 hei, meaning black, and 土 tu, meaning mud or soil. This is because the traditional process of making Chinese ink is, well, I'll start at the beginning, the reason will become self-evident, I think.

To begin, pine trees ar cut and burned in a furnace. The resulting soot that gathers on the walls of the furnace is collected and mixed with an oil creating a sort of black mud. This black mud is then pressed into a mold very tightly, thus creating what Cohenko referred to as an "ink stick", 墨 . This ink stick is dipped in water and rubbed on the ink stone in a circular motion for 20 to 80 minutes in order to prepare the ink for use.

Of course, now everyone cuts out the middle-man of the ink stick and goes straight to liquid ink.

Cohenko said that next week there may be four or five more people learning with me, which is great. I'm excited for that.

The second great thing that I learned this week was yesterday in my Home Ec. class. Not only have I made an apron using a sewing machine AND put an awesome little robot man on it using glue on jewels, the teacher randomly started introducing me to some traditional Chinese knot-work, which I have no objection to learning. I've pretty much mastered the Chinese button and now I'm working on the knot they call "lucky".

Later that day, my friend Leo and I went to back to the university where I study Chinese to check out the Traditional Instruments Club. Not so long story made even shorter, I will be studying the 二胡 (Erhu) on Tuesdays at 7:00 P.M.

I am really beginning to enjoy myself here, so I apologize in advance if communication becomes even more infrequent, but this is what I'm here for and I know you all understand that.

Also, while I'm here, I'd like to mention the possibility of another great opportunity that I recently was made aware of. I haven't looked into it very far, but apparently there is a Working-Holiday Visa in Australia available to people under thirty in which you can work and travel in the Land Down Under for a year. Just some forward thinking.

Until next time.

Something to Help You Visualize

This is my Dough Figurine. It's a panda bear eating a fish and some strawberry jam. The dough was extemely hard to work with because it would dry almost instantly, which made it hard to attach things like legs and ears. My other creation was a sort of alien snot blob with toothpicks sticking out all over him. He was a sidekick to Adam's awesome Super Penguin.

These are two of my classmates, Sean and William are their English names. In the second picture everyone is taking a test. I get a lot of drawing done at school, which I think is a good thing. Next Tuesday, I'm going to begin learning the art of Chinese Ink Painting from an art teacher named Cohenko.

I'm studying my Chinese very hard. I want to be a master. I understand more and more every day. That's all I can really ask for. The second picture I took because I had no idea why every one in school would be out of their classrooms. It turned out to be some one's birthday.
The MRT can really weird one out at times, especially because one can see from one end to the other and one realizes one is in a giant metal tube traveling very fast.
Have you ever wondered what the Mona Lisa would look like if it were made out of ASUS motherboards? I never did, but this is Adam standing in front of it. That was an interesting visit. I thought we would see all the machines makig more machines and we'd all be freaked out by it, but all that happened was a "sales representative" showed us a bunch of ASUS stuff, talked about some "red ocean, blue ocean" strategy, and had a number of technical difficulties with equipment that supposed to be the best stuff ever. Then there are these next pictures.

We got a look at where the workers (who apparently work twelve hour shifts) chill out and play games. At some point, the salesman said the workers basically live at the factory, so that's why they have a swimming pool and a hot tub and a basketball court (instead of a bigger paycheck?).

After the visit, a group of us went to a restaurant where I ordered a huge bowl of seafood soup and ate the whole thing. Here's the photographic evidence.

I took the first picture because I think they spelled "Hershey's" wrong. These two are from the shopping trip before the Class 218 Barbecue. Couldn't find any graham crackers.
Some classmates trying to light charcoal.

This girl was one of the first to try my S'moresenstein's monster. I wanted to get a picture of her overstuffed mouth (she was making a mess), but she insisted on covering her face with a napkin.

The first picture was taken right before (I mean not even a minute went by) the policeman showed up on his motor scooter complete with the red and blue lights flashing. The second is Taipei 101 with the words "WE ARE" illuminated in white lights. I couldn't stop thinking, "We are what?" Never did get an answer.
This is the ShiLin Night Market with about a brazilian people. Prom all over again. I don't know if I'll go back there.

Leo's church. First is a picture of the band practicing their song, second is the group talking about fashion things. I couldn't stop thinking about how much the cross looks like a lower-case "t" sans serif. That made me think of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Here's Adam with a Diabolo. Only a few of us really got the hang of it this first time (not me though). Next Wednesday I get to try again, but I think it takes daily practice to get better (like everything else).
Here's some random people that wanted a picture with us, not the first or the last time this will happen I'm sure.

I've figured out how to get all my pictures uploaded so that shouldn't be so much af a problem anymore. One last thing, you see in the last picture I'm wearing my bandana and my beard is grown out a bit, well the Student Affairs Director at school asked me if I wear a beard in America. "Yes," I replied. He told me that boys in Taiwanese schools don't wear beards, so my assumption is that I should shave (even though my Rotary Club seems to like it)(they're mostly well-to-do, middle-aged women, if that explains anything). Then he asked, "Are you a cowboy?" To which I promptly responded, "Yes," as though it was obvious. Actually, I wear my red bandana because it makes me feel intrepid, but I don't tell anyone around here that.

The Hardest Thing

Let me say first that lately I have not been able to find a computer capable of uploading all of my awesome photos and for that I apologize.

Today, I want to explain the hardest thing I'm having to cope with here and it has to do with the Chinese language. I know it's suppoesed to be the most difficult language to learn in the world, and I'll admit, it is proving to be more difficult to pick up than German was, but that's not my problem. Really, to me and my associate exchange students, the grammer is relatively simple (the trick being to forget everything that makes English great, like "the" and plural nouns and tenses) you don't have to conjugate verbs like in German and pronunciation takes practice and attention, but that is just another important aspect of any language.
No, the true difficulty with Chinese is getting native speakers to help me speak it without having them resort to using English every time the conversation strays into something I haven't learned yet and therefore don't understand. It's in not flipping out when the way some people speak to me in English sounds like they're mocking me and inside saying, "You foreign knucklehead, I can speak your language, why don't you just give up on mine. It would be a lot easier."
However, I didn't expect learning any new language to be easy, but when every Taiwanese person comes back to the idea that "Oh, Chinese very difficult to learn" it gets very old. Actually, the nicest thing I heard today was when, in Chinese class, we were making question sentences and so everyone is practicing out loud and the teacher said, "See, it's easy!" I could have cried because it was the first time anyone here had ever given me that kind of encouragement.
My point is that Chinese isn't, in itself, a hard language to learn. It takes time, practice, and patience. The other things I mentioned, though, take time, practice, and patience, as well as self-control, humor, and all kinds of love.