Have a New Year

Well, another year is over, another year's gone by. I hope everyone had fun crossing over. I know I did. Here's my New Year's Eve in pictures.

I woke up yesterday morning and headed to the University to take my Chinese final exam. I think it went well. I'm just glad this class is almost over.

Lunch has always been just alright at the college. I tried the beer-flavored green tea. It was interesting, not completely beer-flavored, but I think it manages to taste somewhere between green tea and beer.

After lunch we had another culture study class, which was again dissappointing. I was dissappointed by the fact that the few of us who really have an interest in what we might be learning about are consistently hindered by the obnoxius and very vocal majority of ... I'm having a hard time deciding what exactly to call them. Let it be known that there have been all sorts of problems with this exclusively exchange student Chinese learning course that nobody (no one with any authority anyway) has been willing to address. I think it's a cultural thing though. I've been told that it is often the case here that if someone has a problem with you or disagrees with you they won't bring it up to your face, especially women and the class is run by women.

So what the class ended with yesterday was the very pretty little calligraphy teacher telling us in Chinese (and a not so good English translation by another of the teachers) that at first she thought we were all very bright and interested young adults. She went on to say that she thought it was great that everyone had decided on their own to come to Taiwan for a year for the reason of learning Chinese. She then tried to explain how she couldn't understand why were acting so much like children. The rest I've forgotten because I was trying to cry.

The people that were supposed to be hearing this message were talking and laughing the entire time. The people that have tried so hard to fit in here suddenly felt like they wasted their time. The director of the whole Chinese Language Education Center, a little woman who has been far to nice, also had a message for the people who weren't listening. She told us she received a letter from the Ministry of Education, never quite mentioned what it might be about, but I assumed it was not good news. She talked about how some kids were smoking on campus and generally being rambunctious. She later said that when she was asked by the Rotary Club about certain students' behavior she said that they were very hard-working and bright even though she doubted it. She said she tried to treat us like adults and then took the blame for receiving the dissappointing letter. She admitted that we're all foriegners at some point, that we're here representing our countries and our families and our Rotary Districts.

I took issue with everything those two, too nice women were saying. It tears me up that seemingly no one actually takes this seriously. That's what I think prevents a lot of these other exchange students from growing from this and being more adult.

One thing that gets me is that I didn't come here for the sole purpose of learning another foreign language, but rather to figure out what it means to be Taiwanese in the 21st century and to make my world a little rounder.

So, anyway...

New year's eve was great. The night club plans fell through, so I ended up walking with my dad to Taipei city hall where there was a concert going on before the big fireworks display on Taipei 101. I think about 8 o' clock I headed to the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall where some of my friends were hanging out before the spectacle.