Taipei!

I'm in Taipei! The Chinese characters here are definitely traditional, the people are amazingly friendly, and the glutinous rice and red bean paste is just as tasty as they were in Ningbo! I flew in Wednesday at 6am, got myself on a bus to the city, checked in at a hostel, registered for Mandarin classes at NTNU (National Taiwan Normal University), took a placement test, and then tried really hard to stay awake past 4pm. I think I've gotten over my jet-lag on the going-to-sleep side of things, but I still seem to wake up at 7... strange.

In my 3 days here, I've been hunting for rooms to live in (the hostel I'm in is fine, but living in a cheaper place with Taiwanese people in a less-polluted area, sounds much more appealing to me). The room-hunting experience has been an exciting course in practical Mandarin, Taipei geography, and Taipei public transportation (the bus system and the subway are both fantastic!). And as of a few minutes ago, I have a place to live, yay! I'm renting a ridiculously cheap room about a 10 min. walk from my school. I'll be living with a Taiwanese girl about my age who's studying to become a Chinese teacher, her parents (who run a lottery shop and are deaf... maybe I can learn Taiwanese sign language?), and another girl who's also studying Chinese. I also have a bunk-bed. hehe, so now if I make any friends, I can have slumber-parties (my new family even said it's okay!).

I've also found a fantastic website for foreigners in Taiwan (called tealit Teaching English and Living in Taiwan). I found postings for rooms to rent, and there are a gazillion posts by Taiwanese people who'd like to get together and language exchange with people who speak English (or Spanish or French or Italian or Japanese). I searched for people who liked dancing and sent emails, and I got to go to a vegetarian dinner last night with an artist girl my age! I also emailed a guy who teaches ballroom dance here, and I went dancing with him at a latin dance club last night. Whoa. Crazy Taipei ballroom dance. They shake and shimmy in very ballroom fashion to a Taiwanese guy singing songs in amazingly accent-less Spanish. And my new dancey friend even played a Viennese waltz for me on his harmonica after the dance. Not sure why he had a harmonica at a latin dance club, but, awesome.

So far everyone has been extremely nice to me. Even the people whose rooms I don't want to rent have invited me over to cook Chinese food, or chat and drink tea! The little old couple who have a small restaurant outside my hostel make me special tasty vegetarian things to eat and seem to get a kick out of talking to me... although their accents are a little hard to understand, but I get to listen to their Taiwanese! Overwhelmingly though, people here speak Mandarin! In Ningbo, I didn't understand much of what other people said to each other on the street, because it was usually in a dialect I didn't understand... but here I can eavesdrop on people's conversations and understand things! :)

I also haven't wasted any time in asking people what they think of the Japanese, and whether or not Taiwan is a part of China... :) In an interesting hypothesis presented by my new artist friend I ate dinner with last night: people are very divided on both those topics depending on when their ancestors came to Taiwan. *ahem* The people who came here about 400 years ago were colonized by the Japanese and integrated into Japanese culture somewhat. Consequently, many of them are grateful to the Japanese and don't feel a part of China. However, then there's the group of mainland Chinese who came here in the 1940's with Chiang Kai-Shek. Their ancestors fought the Japanese in the second Sino-American war, shortly before they came to Taiwan. Consequently, many of them have views on the Japanese more in-line with mainland Chinese views ( i.e. dislike to hate), and they consider themselves Chinese as well. No idea yet on what the aboriginal Taiwanese people might feel about all this. I have yet to test these theories on the unsuspecting people of Taiwan, but I have six months here, so we'll see what I learn.

In more exciting news - Taipei mayoral elections are next Saturday! And support for the current Taiwanese president is also evidently very low, so there have been a few anti-president protests wandering down the street, and there are lots of political fliers and people who yell things (not exactly sure what they're saying yet) at folks waiting on their motor-scooters at red lights.

Well, I'm off to move into my new place, make some friends, and get some much-needed sleep before my classes start tomorrow. Take care!