Arrival part II

I did this weird thing with the last entry where I tried to "set the time", so that it would indicate that it was written at 4:30 pm my time (on Feb 14), but instead, whatever I tried to do delayed publishing it and so it was just sitting in my drafts until now.  So now you can't tell that several hours have passed, and it just seems weird that I'm posting twice in a row.  But anyway.

Here are some photos of my dorm room:

The mattress really is as thin as I said.  This time the photo is not an exaggeration.

Here is my desk! Take note of the homey family photos.

My bed is on the left, mysterious roommate resides (as far as I can tell) on the right.

Here you can see my desk, wardrobes for each of us, and the door out.  Against the wall opposite the wardrobes is the door to our in-house bathroom.

Nice, right?  In any case, much nicer than the jail cell I was sent photos of.  Of all the 16 CIEE students, only two of us - the two in the new program (Communications, Business and Political Economy) (as opposed to than the intensive Chinese language program, which the other 14 are in) - are living in this new dorm.  I feel very lucky to be placed here!  There are, of course, advantages to being in the other dorm: it's closer to most food options, and that's where everyone else is.  But then I think about squatting over a hole and again feel thankful for where I was placed.

Here is my dorm from the outside:

Lush green grass!

And I can even see mountains from my window!

Pretty!

So after getting to the dorm and struggling with Afore to get my internet set up, we met up with the other CIEE students and the rest of the ambassadors for lunch and my first meal in Taiwan.  It has now become clear to me that these ambassadors are basically like the equivalent of Rice o-week advisors.  And I feel very much like a freshman again.  For lunch we went to a Japanese-style restaurant.  It was very interesting because for the first time in my life I got to be on the receiving end of practical jokes for gullible foreigners.  One of the ambassadors very gravely recommended I get a certain dish, while those around him held in their giggles.  The dish was fish jaw, and I told him that I would only get it if he did too, which he declined to take me up on.  He then made more jokes at my expense about my chinese name, but I didn't really get those, because I don't know anything about chinese names.  But it was all in good fun.  All the ambassadors and other students seem really nice and many of them remind me of their Rice counterparts.  Finally the only way I could decide what to order was to tell Olly, an ambassador, that I would order whatever she was getting.  She decided on a Thai-style fried fish.  It was outstanding!  The fish tasted really fresh and freshly fried, and the batter was delicate and flakey, and the sauce was interesting and a little spicy - I couldn't have ordered better myself.  For just $100NT (about $3 in US money) we got a generous helping of the fish, free tea and miso soup, a bowl of rice, a side salad (which was almost like a normal US salad, but with corn, ham, and a somewhat odd dressing), and, next to the fish, a mound of what I discovered to be cold mashed potatoes with pieces of carrot.  Anyway, everyone was great, and lunch was great.  Maybe when everyone raved about the food they were actually right.

After that was when we went to buy essentials (those cheap mattresses really are pretty cheap - less than $20 in US money) and hauled it all back up to my room so I could settle in.  That's when I had time to unpack (discovering, to my dismay, that my insect repellent leaked over all my other toiletries), set up, take a quick pseudo-shower, and write that last blog entry that I then didn't publish until just now.  As mentioned at the end of the last entry, we (the CIEE students and the ambassadors) had a big welcome dinner.  It began with awkward mingling, which paved the way for less awkward mingling, then eating and mingling, and then organized games and icebreakers.  It was exactly like Rice o-week all over again.  We milled around interviewing each other about embarrassing moments, ideal mates, and favorite Chinese stars to complete a scavenger hunt, did the human knot, a chinese character calligraphy competition (did I mention that I'm the only one here who has never studied chinese?  That is not an exaggeration.  I am the only one.  And yeah, what's the deal with that.), and other related funtivities.  Overall, everyone is really nice and the evening was a lot of fun, but I am going to be totally screwed when I don't have ambassadors holding my hand and translating every street sign for me.  Even my campus map is in Chinese and therefore useless.

A week or so ago I got a facebook invitation for the night market!  When I saw this, I immediately thought, "how did they know?" although I then realized that this is an on-campus Rice event put on by the Rice Taiwanese Association to simulate a Taipei night market.  I can't bring myself to decline the invitation because even though I won't be in Houston this Saturday night, I may well be at the very night market they are striving to imitate!  For those of you who don't know what a Taiwanese night market is, I understand it to be something like the Texas State Fair, except some of the big ones are every night.  There's supposed to be a lot of food, a lot of weird and unhealthy food, and it's supposed to be amazing and a ton of fun.

It is now about 8 am Texas time, 10 pm Taiwan time, and I have been awake (assuming plane sleep doesn't count as real sleep) for 47 hours, and I can safely say that I have never stayed awake for a longer stretch of time.  And I never intend to again.  I'm sure that not even this horrendous excuse for a mattress will stand in my way of sleep tonight.