Thursday 9/12: Young Classmates and
Internet Issues
At the
break I saw Steven’s friend John brought over the Taipei Times and showed us an
article on the candlelight vigil.
There was a shot of the young couple in the front of the ring wearing
American flag bandanas and he pointed out part of his head in the
background. I said, “Damn, I knew
I should’ve stood over there!” The article described it as a “somber
cermony”.
At the end
of class I asked Stella where she usually goes for lunch and she asked me to
come along. I followed her
downstairs where her friends were waiting, two very cute Asian guys from
Germany, brothers, who looked like Anime-drawings come to life. PingYi from Costa Rica who I met the
first day joined us and we headed out in the other direction this time behind
school in a little lane,
pretty quiet and clean, called YongKang Jie. We went to the 2nd
floor of a small restaurant with an English menu, and ordered shiau long bau and
kongshin tsai, Stella got a vegetarian dish and John never got his order so we
3 shared it all which didn’t quite make
me full.
John had
to run to work and PingYi left, so Stella showed me more around the area,
bought drinks for us (I got another Zenzu Nai Tsa, I really need to learn other
drinks). She’s been here about 3
weeks now, but her younger sister was here last semester and has introduced her
to her friends who she hangs out with all the time now, like the German
brothers. She and her sister live
in a double flat nearby and walk to ShiDa. She went to “love boat”
in ’95 too but it was during our winter months because that’s summer for people
from the southern hemisphere, so her program had all South Africans,
Autralians, New Zealanders, South Americans etc. Interesting, no wonder my program was all Americans and Canadians
and British. I guess I never
thought about Chinese people being in the southern hemisphere.
I asked
her opinion of President Mbeki and told her a little about my thesis, and she
said he wants one united Africa, and wants to kick US butt basically since he’s
racist against whites. Back at ShiDa she ran into a whole bunch of
more people she knew, 3 Japanese girls who spoke Chinese very well (suddenly
Stella’s bored, slow, in-class Chinese was transformed into accent-free
fluency), more guys, and
a girl from Paris who was only 18.
Sheesh! And the two De Guo girls in my
class are both 19. Wasn’t one of
the entrance “requirements” to have a university degree? Stella is 24, the closest to my age
yet. I feel like I need to start
an oldies’ club, like post flyers seeking friends over 25.
Got
a new computer at work.
Disappointed I got Giun’s old monitor (not a flatscreen) and she got the
new, sleek flatscreen I’d seen delivered yesterday, but I can’t complain. Windows is all in Chinese though, so I
have to figure out what menu options are by trying to remember their positions
in English windows.. The PC’s fast and it does have USB ports where I can bring
my CD burner and webcam so maybe I won’t really need internet at home.
Whenever
Dr C sees me he seems to smirk, as if he knows my presence is BS and I really
serve no use here, but that it’s OK since
they’re not paying my salary. I spent a long time setting up MyYahoo page with tons of
news headlines so I could keep up to date on U.S. goings-on. Again I was the last to leave at 7, one
of the girls commenting how late I stayed.
Back at
home, M&D came with the rest of the furniture and they helped me set
up. While they were here, they
caught 2 small bugs and I kept asking what they were and finally Dad smiled,
“Baby cockroach.” “NOOOO!!” I
wailed, and Mom quickly said, “No it’s not!” but I don’t believe her.
She
brought a huge papaya and few mushy things shaped like pears but are thick
skinned, said proudly they’re like grapefruits but BETTER! Like that’s an
astounding claim. I tried to eat
one later but couldn’t even tear through the skin.
After they left I went downstairs to the Internet Café because I’d told Dave we’d try to use the webcams to talk to each other. I had the most frustrating time hooking up the cam, it wouldn’t work, everything was in Chinese and I couldn’t follow it at all, the format was messed up, the taskbars/toolbars/URL bar weren’t showing up, I was very annoyed, and Dave on Yahoo Messenger was getting annoyed asking why the people at the café weren’t helping me? They tried, but didn’t know how to use it, and they kept adding to my time since it was wasting, and I even ran upstairs to get the webcam CDROM and came back, and we kept installing it and restarting the PC, but finally they said it wouldn’t work on Win98. By then it was 1:30 and Dave said he had to go. I still had 30 minutes of time but he left. I went back home dejected.