Traveling to Taiwan

I have been bad about keeping a blog during my time in Taiwan. My first couple posts will attempt to remedy that and cover the basics of my first two weeks here.

I woke up at 5 AM and arrived at the airport in Boston with hours to spare only to find my flight to DC was canceled. This was the beginning of a day--and--a-half long process to get to Taiwan. By the time it was all said and done, I landed at Taipei's airport at 11 PM Sunday night.

After some long amount of time in immigration and a brief hello from customs, I was met at the airport by  Sean, my SIT staff representative. The SIT staff was responsible for introducing about 20 of us Fellows to the Taiwanese way-of-life within 5 days. It was made up of individuals with extremely good English and an absurd amount of energy and cheer. To make a long story short, I was whisked off to the NTHU dorms and finally was able to lay down to sleep at around 1 AM.

I was awoken at 7:30 so we could begin our orientation. It was hot, humid and most of us were extremely jet lagged. We were taken on a walking tour of the NTHU campus; a tour I am sure most of us don't remember. Here are a few pictures:

The White Tiger Building

A girl tied to a tree...

A memorial

A pond with an extremely romantic and tragic love story attached to it. We were all fairly sure it was B.S.

This was the 1st of July. We were getting in the spirit

After the tour we began our Chinese lessons. We had a total of 8 hours during orientation. Here is an early video of our efforts.

You pronounce the Zhi sound by curling your tongue up.

Really, trying to learn Chinese in such a short amount of time is crazy

This is only learning to speak the language. We also had an hour's instruction on how to write various characters:

 This means "awesome"