Monday 9/9: Settling In, Getting to
Know…
I finally
left early to go to the P.O. next to school to open my bank account; it was a
full waiting room, I was number 229 when they were at 185 and I had 20 minutes
until class. I chose to risk it
and wait, watched the minutes and numbers tick by and got served just at 10:10
but “[Sorry, we need your passport]” which I forgot. PO’d, I ran to class late. JiaLan and I went to lunch, running into Steven who told me
he tried the other cooking class teacher who’s much better. We found a random little restaurant on
a street lined with eating places, and after lunch at a drink stand I got my
first pearl milk tea this trip, this one with mini pearls that you sip through a
regular straw. I like this better
because there’s less chewing involved and it fools you into thinking it’s less
fattening.
Then went
to NTU MC where I went to the hospital wing’s 15th floor instead of
the medical school’s, yet the offices look similar so I wondered why no one was
in today, was it a holiday? People
saw me and asked who I was looking for, and told me I was in the wrong
building. For some reason the
medical school part was a lot harder to find this time. I saw Patricia in the elevator. We entered the office and ChiYuan and
Dr. C were sleeping at their desks and the lights were off. I asked her if they do that every
day? Apparently so, she says it’s
just “shiou shi” (rest).
Dr C said
we’d meet to talk at 5:00 about project ideas. For two hours I madly researched on the internet and re-read
my original proposal and his paper, which I haven’t looked at in months, then
met him at 5 with several ideas which he said were good, but the BNHI (Bureau
of National Health insurance) data sounds pretty spotty and is going to be the
real obstacle. Patricia and I
stayed latest, she’s studying for the GRE and TOEFL and asked if I want to join
her gym since she said I look athletic.
We checked out prices online and I said I’ll have to compare to NTU and
ShiDa’s and see.
My cousin
ZuenHong drove M&D over at 9:30 with most of the furniture from AiYi, all
that could fit in his SUV.
This
morning on the bus I again didn’t see the ShiDa stop until we were right there,
so I jumped up and lurched forward almost knocking out an old man and
girl. Jumping forward in a moving
vehicle that is stopping abruptly is not a good combination of movements.
It’s kind
of amusing that some buses have seat belts, and signs that say to buckle up
when seated, when half the people on the bus are standing, holding onto straps
in the air.
I went in
a little early to change my cooking class to the section with the other
“better” teacher. They said,
[“Another student wanting to switch cooking teachers?]” and said the first
teacher quit and we all have the other teacher now. Did the first realize no one liked her?
Got 98% on
my first quiz. I still don’t know
my classmates because I wasn’t in this section the first day they went around
introducing themselves. I’ve
figured out two girls are from “De Guo” (what is that?) one is from France; there’s Stella (the South
African), and the rest are apparently American.
In cooking
class the new teacher is chubby and told us the first teacher quit because she
has pains and can’t carry all that food to class each day. Hmm. I was in a group with a Korean and a Japanese girl so there
wasn’t much chitchat. We learned
MaPo Tofu and General Tso’s chicken, 2 Szechuan dishes which are very
useful. So you’re not
supposed to just mix the jarred sauce with ground meat and tofu and call it
MaPo tofu?
Something
like 40% of all the students at MTC are Korean or Japanese. Gary says it’s the same at English
language schools in the U.S., “These Koreans and Japanese are always learning
languages.” It’s pretty funny how
Chinese is the only unifying language around MTC, but we’re all trying to learn
it, so you hear some hilariously slow and broken Chinese conversations between
people who aren’t from the same country.
At work I
get soo tired at 2-3 each day but I didn’t want to ask my office mate for
coffee again, so I’m always nodding off. I’m still
doing online researching. And I
just realized that standard paper is longer here. I spent the longest time trying to jam some pages into my
folder and wondering why they wouldn’t fit.
At 3PM
there was a floor “tea party” (no tea though—fruit punch, fruits, cake) and
each office takes turns preparing it each Tuesday. They place the spread out in the hallway and people come by
for the grub and chitchat some.
I can’t
remember the names of the girls I share the office with. One is older with short hair, very
friendly and nice and speaks English well because she studied in Boston for a
couple years. The younger one with
longer hair is quiet and either shy or doesn’t like me, maybe because I’m using
her PC until mine comes in. The
good news is that the short-haired girl is teaching intro SAS and SPSS and I
asked if I can sit in and listen. She
said sure but is afraid it’ll be too easy for me, but I’m like, “Trust me, it
won’t.” Besides, it’ll be
interesting to hear it taught in Chinese.
At 8pm a
guy from the phone company called to come over and discuss ADSL (that’s what
they call DSL here). He came in
discussing lots of things I barely understood, then asked if I had a “Yin Jang,”
which I figured out was a name chop.
I was excited to use it for the first time, but I had no ink. He asked if I had a red pen, anything
red? I thought and giggled, “[Uh,
I have lipstick].” He said
[“Ah! That’ll work,”] and started
rubbing the chop with lipstick, shaking his head saying it’s first time he’s
ever used lipstick on a chop. It
worked really well though.
He also
said they’ll do long distance service, will only cost .9NT/minute to the U.S.
plus some monthly fee I didn’t understand. He talked to Juling on the phone and said he’d go to her
company tomorrow to get a document from her. Wow what sales service, they run around the city like that
and make house calls at 8pm? I
told him, “[Don’t go to her company from 12-2 because they usually go out to
lunch.]” He looked at me like I
was stupid, and said of course he knows that, and he himself wants to (gestured
like he’s sleeping) “shiou shi” at that time.
Dave
called as he was walking to lab and said, “I can’t believe you unplugged the
phone, how rude!” I told him how
cheap my long distance would be on this plan. I kept saying excitedly, “It’ll be .03 of a cent per
minute!” and he corrected “It’s 3 cents,” and it took me awhile to realize he
was right and I got the decimals wrong, duh. He asked about my day and it must have sounded really dull
because I told him all about the right way to make MaPo tofu and that we’ve
been doing it wrong this whole time, and about General Tso’s chicken, and by
the time I said, “We have a tea party every Tuesday in my lab,” he said, “OK I
better go now.”
At
midnight the phone rang and I expected Dave, but it was Arthur calling from
China. They were at a hotel in a
city I didn’t know and had had some problems with people there: “Loooong story,
Gary will tell you about it when he gets back,” and “No, I didn’t meet any
girls or get any digits” in response to my email. I chatted with Laz who said he just replied to my
email--they’d had the hardest time finding an internet café in China, and the
one they finally found, only had two computers in it. He says he is coming back earlier, cutting their trip
shorter since they can’t stand it:
“I can’t wait to get back to Taiwan, I hate the people here! They SUCK.”
As
time goes on I’m having an increasingly hard time getting excited to finally
visit China because of all the horror stories—they stifle creative thinkers,
arrest and shoot students, suspect everyone’s a spy, they’re backward and
unsanitary. Kathy told me a lot of
poop stories. Children take poops
on the street, mothers hold out babies and let them poop on the sidewalk, and
you have to use outdoor toilets which are just holes in the ground and you can
look down and see everyone’s past poop in them, and you poop next to everyone
in a row. Then there were the
missionary scorpion stories, and now Gary’s. Not to mention the whole conflict with Taiwan and the fact
they have 400 missiles pointing at us from across the strait. Yet despite all this, people keep
telling me I must go and visit because it’s so “interesting.”