“Monolingualism can be cured” – Anonymous

Interesting quote I found today.  I don’t think monolingualism is a disease, but I do think everyone should try to learn at least one other language in his or her lifetime.

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This coming weekend is the Moon Cake Festival, or “Mid-Autumn Festival”.  I’ve already bought my speed rail/bullet train tickets to Taichung and will be spending this weekend with my grandparents and cousins to celebrate the festivities.  This will be my first time (that I can remember) being in Taiwan with relatives to celebrate this holiday; I’ve been told there will be a lot of Chinese barbecuing involved?

An afternoon at Danshui, Taipei, Taiwan.

I’m excited!  I hope to take lots of photos to share with you guys later.

In the last two weeks or so, I’ve had a really great time in Taipei.  I’ve only ever come back to visit family, so I never really made any local friends or really immersed myself into the daily life that is living in Taiwan.  Since moving here and starting school, I’m experiencing a part of Taiwan and Taipei I never got to before; I love it!  Last weekend, I went on a trip to Danshui (the northern part of Taipei) and spent the evening hanging out with some new Taiwanese girl friends: snacking at the Night Market, chatting and joking around, and sitting by the bay enjoying the sunset.  The girls were so sweet and so funny!  I’m really happy to be here, I feel like I’m starting to get reacquainted with a small part of me that I had long forgotten.

First week Taipei shenanigans

National Chengchi University logo

The first week seemed like it flew by: I got settled in my dorm, met my roommates, started classes, and then BAM — it was the weekend already.

At first I thought it would be challenging sharing a dorm room with 5 other people, but I’ve actually found that I like it.  My roommates are all really nice girls, and I chat in mandarin with my three taiwanese roommates a lot.  Everyone has been really helpful with any questions or concerns I have and it hasn’t been too hard getting to know people:  I try to go with the mindset that other girls are probably shier than me, so I try to be a bit more outgoing and initiate conversations first.

The first week of classes was mostly sitting in courses and deciding which ones we’d like to take.  Since I’m in my senior year, there’s a  limited number of classes I can take that will fulfill my degree requirements; there were some cooler sounding courses, such as  ”The High-Tech Industry in Taiwan”,  but I had to settle for some core courses and an elective:  Organizational Behavior, Financial Management, Information Management, and Global Leadership.  Although the fall semester here ends in January, all of the professors have been very accomodating in letting students that need to leave early (such as me) to do so in December.  Most of them got their degrees in the U.S., so they understand how the university calendars are different.

With the exception of one class, Information Management, I’m taking all of my classes in English.  The College of Commerce teaches a lot of their courses in English with american textbooks because they believe teaching the way U.S. business schools do is the best way to give their students the best advantage.  As one professor put it, English is the language of business ,and Taiwanese students should get used to listening, speaking, and conducting their projects in English.   I guess this system works out for me since I can take Information Management in mandarin, while still having the textbooks and tests in English.  However, after sitting in on many of my classes, I have to say I do admire the taiwanese students in my courses; I couldn’t imagine taking business courses in English when I have difficulty communicating in that language.

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After a week getting the academics all sorted out, I hopped on a bus and took the metro to meet up with my mom at an auntie’s house.   My mom has been here a week and decided to go stay with her friend, who I call “auntie SuFang” in Chinese culture,  for a couple days before she flies back to Seattle.   I haven’t seen auntie SuFang since I was little, probably around 7 or 8 years old, and so I was really excited to spend some time with her and my mom.  SuFang owns a clothing store in a Taiwanese morning market and lives right above it.  My mom and I stayed in her house and spent most of the day with her downstairs at the store, chatting with the neighborhood housewives that stop in during their morning stroll or grocery trip.  It was really nice to be completely immersed again into a completely non-english, Taiwanese culture; I felt 100% at home.

A typical morning market in Taiwan. This isn't the one my auntie works in, but it's similar.

Spending time with auntie SuFang made me remember how funny and easy-going she is, which made me very reluctant to leave and go back to school Monday:  I wanted to spend more time with her! Hopefully, in the next couple months, I’ll get the chance to go back and see her again.  It would be nice to leave the “exchange student” atmosphere and plop back into the simple Taiwanese daily life I enjoy so much.

Cambodia/Lao Adventures – on short hiatus

Kratie, Cambodia

I love my blog, even if my recent lack of entries doesn’t show it.

I’ve decided that since having no internet made it very difficult to keep my travel stories up to date, I’m going to put my Cambodia and Laos stories on hiatus for now. There are so many things to blog about now that going back and trying to catch up would make me chronically behind on everything.  I’ll type up everything in a nice MS Word or something and post them all later — maybe something like the “The Lost Chronicles of Cambodia and Laos”…lol.  In the meantime, I’d like to fast forward a bit and start sharing about my arriving to Taipei, Taiwan.

A couple days ago, my aunt and my mom (who decided to fly from Seattle and meet me in Taipei) picked me up at the airport and took me to our family home in the city.  My great-aunt (my mom’s oldest aunt — grandpa’s sister)  recently had a stroke or heartattack of some kind, and all of the sisters (the other 4 great-aunts), and my grandpa and grandma came up from Changhua to take care of her for a few days.  After country hopping around for a while, it was quite nice to be around family again, even if  — out of about 10 people in the house — I was the only one under the age of 50.  Watching my grandma, great-aunts, aunt, and mom sitting on little stools, huddled around a bucket of vegetables on the floor, plucking at the long green leaves, and chatting away with one another, seemed to really immerse me back into the simpler times in Taiwan that I’ve missed.

All of my older relatives speak Taiwanese, a dialect of Chinese, and very little Mandarin.  Since I only understand a little of Taiwanese and speak close to none of it, it’s always been a bit hard to communicate with them; we always resort to a small game of charades and broken “Mand-wanese.”   Sometimes when I think about it, it makes me a bit sad: I really admire my grandpa and his accomplishments, and I wish I could talk to him more.

National Chengchi University (photo taken from internet)

Today, my youngest aunt flew in from Shanghai to visit everyone.  After having a couple days to get settled, I got my things packed again and my mom and she took me to my dorms at the National Chengchi University (NCCU), where I’ll be studying in the next few months.   It took me a few hours to get my things unpacked and in their proper place, but once I did I got the opportunity to know my roommates (3 taiwanese students, 2 other exchange students).  I also had the opportunity to meet my “NCCU buddy”, a student who would get me acquainted with the school and area, and grab some dinner with him and his girlfriend.  They are very sweet and will be be grabbing some dinner with a mutual friend of ours (who I met in Seattle! Small world!) tomorrow evening. I’m glad I’ll know some people to practice and improve my mandarin with.

Tomorrow morning, I start my first College of Commerce courses.  I’m quite excited.  I hope they aren’t too hard, but at the same time… I hope they don’t bore me either. I’ll let you all know soon what I think of them.  Things have gotten off to a great start, so I’m sure things will be interesting.

Round circle: Back in Bangkok

August 31st, 2009

Note: Photos to be posted soon, check back later.

After a wonderful week staying with my friend’s family in Singapore, I packed my backpack and headed back to Bangkok.  I was staying in there for two nights before my next trip to Cambodia and Laos, and my mom’s good friend – a Thai native – had returned home from a trip and wanted to show me around the city.  Although I had already seen the touristy spots, such as the Grand Palace, during my last stay in the city, I was really looking forward to Ponsie showing me a side of Bangkok only a local could know.

Although I had avoided the true “rainy season” for the first three weeks, my luck with good weather seemed to run out the moment I stepped off the plane. Within the first day, there was enough rain to make up for those first sunny weeks.  After I checked in, Ponsie and I spent some time around the neighborhood, doing some jewelry shopping, and I found some beautiful silver rings.  Afterwards, we went to Chinatown and Ponsie insisted that I try some shark fin soup – a Chinese delicacy that was known to be the specialty of district.  Normally, I try to avoid exotic animal products while traveling but it had been a while since I had shark fin soup, and I wanted to try a small bowl.  We ordered some other great complementary dishes, but the soup was definitely my favorite – it was delicious!

Before long I had to head back to my inn and Ponsie to go home because the rain started pelting down.  Being from the Pacific Northwest, I’m used to rain, but these storms were something different.  Tropical showers barely give you any warning before buckets of water start falling from the sky; one moment you’re walking along and the sky’s looking a little grey, the next moment you look like you’ve just fallen into a pool with your clothes on.

The first night was an early night for me; I went to bed right after I got back to my room.  The following morning, I had to get up bright and early to meet Ponsie for an afternoon at the largest outdoor market in Bangkok.  We were going to get there at around 9am but when I woke up, it was raining so badly that Ponsie called and told me she’d be late – her neighborhood had flooded and taxis were reluctant to go in to pick her up.

The second half, Cambodia

After two nights in Bangkok (where a hostel’s internet seemed to hate me and made it impossible to post a newentry), I made my way across the border to Cambodia.   I haven’t much time to blog as much as I want to, since the internet access and availability here is much less extensive than the other places I’ve been in — which I didn’t know was possible lol.  Today, we went to the Temples of Angkor, made famous by the movie Tomb Raider, and tomorrow we head off Phnom Penh and I hope I’ll be able to blog more.  I’ve been in Cambodia 3 days and it’s already been a bit of an emotional roller coaster.  The Cambodian people have just begun to recover from decades of suffering and war, and the stories I’ve heard have been both inspiring and heart-wrenching.   I really hope to share soon.

Love,

Morganna