The busiest week ever

There are a couple reasons I have not been able to do a blog post recently. The first reason is that I am not doing much lately, traveling has stopped and I have began studying a lot. As stated previously, I have been taking my Mandarin course five days a week for three hours per day. This has kept me very busy. I have never been so busy in my whole life.

Full-time Mandarin is just that, full-time. I rarely have the ability to go out and hang out with friends which is a downer. But there is a very large upside to learning the language; after three weeks of being in the course I am not able to carry on some conversations. This is obviously no where close to fluency but I am on my way. Normally Mandarin takes up about seven hours per day, at least (not including talking to Taiwanese and extra studying some days). For me, I am not learning the language as fast as most so I need extra time to study. Recently, I picked up a language exchange with two Taiwanese twice a week for two hours; I talk to them for one hour in English, then we talk or work on my assignments for another hour. Then I also talked to a Japanese student in my class and we are going to work together outside of class. He barely speaks English so it will have to be mainly Mandarin spoke, which will help us both.

I have tried to break away from the international students more and more. By doing this I am meeting more Taiwanese and am using what I have been learning in class outside. This is essential in learning the language, and most likely the reason why Spanish did not stay in my mind. Also the Taiwanese don't drink and party all the time, which is a good thing because I am not here on holiday, I am here to study. I do like to go out some nights or have a couple drinks every once in a while, but not as much as the other international students do.

Much of my time lately has been spent in the last week is in the upper campus. The upper campus houses the dorms and has most of the Taiwanese that are not from Taipei, along with the international students who don't want to be partying and around only international students. Eventually I am hoping to move up there, maybe within the next month.

Just today I woke up early and went with my language exchange and her friend to MaoKong (猫空) and took a gondola ride to the tea houses up on the mountain. On our way up we took the see-through car called the Eye of MaoKong and it was really cool to be able to see how high we were just by looking down. When we got to the top we went to a temple that was recently built and then made our way back to a tea house. At the tea house everything is made with tea or using tea. We had a meal of rice that was cooked with tea, meat that had a tea based broth and some vegetables that were steamed in tea. Everything was extremely good, I could eat up there everyday. After our meal we then had our tea. This was another very interesting part and very cultural. I have never actually made tea like a Taiwanese before, I normally take a tea bag and throw it in water, sometimes adding honey. When you prepare 茶(tea) in Taiwan you get two tea pots, 二杯子 (two cups), the 茶 (tea), and a bowl. What you first do is heat the water then add the hot water to the bowl. Then a smaller tea pot goes into the water with the tea in it. You add water to the smaller pot and wait thirty seconds. You then take the tea pot and pour it into a tall cup, this is a cup that you smell (like wine, the smell enhances the taste). Once you smell it you take the smaller cup and put it on top of the tall cup upside-down and flip. After you flip it you carefully remove the tall cup and your tea is ready. It was very new to me and I thought it was a new fun way to drink tea.