At it again

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Hello everyone,
As this post indicates, I am of course traveling again and for anyone who doesn't know, I am studying this summer in Taiwan at Tunghai University and then in Beijing for the rest of the year. If I don't lack the discipline, this blog should be somewhat continuously coming till...next May. Any bets?
At any rate, Kim and I arrived after a lengthy flight early yesterday morning. After finding another hostel (the World Scholar's House host had apparently forgotten our online reservation) I managed to stay awake until 2pm and then slept until 3:30am. That said, I think the jetlag will wear off by the time we head down to Taichung for orientation on the Saturday. I was expecting quite a bit more of a shock from both the jet lag and the whole showing up in a big Asian city Lost in Translation kind of thing. People seem friendly for the most part and actually much more normal than I've seen in many big cities. Of course, there is the language barrier to deal with: I haven't struggled this much with a language since I went to Costa Rica having taken two years of high school Spanish. Even in France I felt like I could read most basic signs, or at least maintain a butchered pronunciation of it in my head. With characters, you can feel pretty lost with street signs and menus and such. We mostly rely on pointing on menus and the pinyin (romanized chinese pronunciation) for street signs, all the while imagining what our professors would think of our blundering. Sometimes it almost feels like they might jump up somewhere to correct us. It is actually pretty fun to start using our Chinese though. As turns out it, people actually speak this language and to all appearances it isn't some elaborate ruse!(stop the presses...) We've celebrated our little chinese victories: Kim successfully ordered a pork bun (quite tasty) this morning and I got our train tickets to Taichung for nine in the morning on Saturday.

I am typing this on the hostel's computer which is in a non airconditioned room, which means I'm starting to sweat. (although the heat here is much more tolerable than the spanish heat wave in late July) That also means that pictures will be on their way when I hook my computer up to the internet and, of course, take some. Bye for now!

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