"...Because you're American". That's what my classmate was told by a cab driver who refused to give her and some friends a ride a week ago. I learned about her story today, after I was telling her my own cab problems I experienced today. I must admit, I've known that people here are not as friendly and out-going toward foreigners as in Taiwan, but I hadn't noticed until today how far people went to avoid us. I was trying to hail a taxi today to get to a show (a theatrical show required for my culture studies class) and I was [View Full Entry]

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Well, here I am again with another Sunday morning wrap-up of the past week! This past week has been very busy! I started classes last Monday. After switching around a lot of classes, I finally have a schedule that will work and classes that hopefully I will like. As part of the CIEE program here, we are assigned a private tutor (a local student) who we meet with for 2 hours per week. My tutor is very nice. He's a freshman from Si Chuan, and on our second meeting I got the honor of giving him an English name. Out of [View Full Entry]

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As the title says, it's Monday morning here. When could be a better time to blog and wrap up last week? So, I've been asked about my language skills and how they are improving here so far. Well, I haven't started classes yet (I start tomorrow) so I haven't learned a lot of new Chinese yet. But I have learned how to use the Chinese I know. My listening skills have most definitely improved in the last week. And I'm happy to say that yesterday I had a small conversation with a local in which I didn't even realize I was [View Full Entry]

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This week I've been fairly busy with orientation activities. CIEE has an extensive orientation program here. It's a week-long process with different workshops everyday. Some are required, some aren't. And we took a trip to downtown Shanghai yesterday. So far, things have been going well in terms of settling in. On Monday I successfully bartered down a salesman for a cheap cell phone and sim card. Every phone here is a pay-as-you-go type of deal. And generally you have to pay more if you want a good phone number (with a lot of 8's and no 4's). So naturally, not really [View Full Entry]

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Here I am in Shangahi! Whew, it was a lot of work getting to where I am now. Where am I now, you ask? Well, I've just moved into my permanant residence for the semester and I'm ecstatic to have internet. I've met my roommate, who's really awesome and from North Carolina. The dorm we are staying in (the international student dorm) I believe is far better than the rest of the dorms and just got remodeled last year. It's way better than anything Umass has to offer. I'll upload pictures of the dorm and everything else later when I get [View Full Entry]

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First off, I logged onto travelblog.com today and was pleasantly surprised to find that many of my pictures from older blog entries have been recovered. Awesome! Because I don't have the time or energy to re upload them. Now all they need are captions-stay tuned. Today was the final day of classes, which is hard to believe. I can remember writing my entry 'First Day of Classes', and wow does that seem like so long ago. As last Friday was the final, this week was sort of pointless. Monday had somewhat structured classes, Tuesday we watched movies, and today we had [View Full Entry]

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Well, this entry is a little late, but I finally have some down time to write. Last Saturday, we took a day trip to Lu Gang. Lu Gang is about an hour away, on the coast. Our first stop was a restaraunt-like place where we used an imitation of old-fashioned rice-clay (playdough, basically. But edible.) and had arts and crafts time. The guy leading us through the clay modeling tried to help us create birds...Well, as you can see in the pictures, we butchered the art of traditional clay figurines. Throughout the day we stopped at several temples. One, I believed [View Full Entry]

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Last week we took a trip to Kenting. Kenting is the very south of Taiwan. It's a 4-5 hour bus ride, which meant we got to watch lots of pirated DVDs-new and old. The one's that stick out in my mind are Pan's labyrinth, Harry Potter 5, and Transformers. We left bright and early Thursday morning (class was canceled for us for Thursday and Friday). Arriving around noon, we stopped for lunch. After lunch we went to the Kenting Aquarium, which was a lot of fun. After the aquarium (only took a couple hours to walk the whole way through) we [View Full Entry]

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Hey everyone! Sorry it's been so long. Travelblog.org has been down for a while. I'm not posting anything yet because travelblog.org is still having issues. It lost most of my entries and the 4 (of the 13+) that were recovered are only partially recovered-they've been mixed and matched with others' pictures and entries. I also got a comment that belongs to someone else's blog. So as soon as I sort through the mess that is my blog, I'll update. So hang tight until then! EDIT:: Ok, after some serious digging and copy/pasting action, I found some of my blog entries. I'm [View Full Entry]

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It's Sunday afternoon and I just got back not long ago from a quick trip to Taipei. Myself as well as 4 other friends decided to get away from school for the weekend, and what a weekend it was! We packed a lot into less than 48 hours. It all started Friday afternoon after classes. We left not long after classes ended. After getting to Taipei, we checked in at our hostel and headed over to Taipei 101. We got back pretty late from Taipei 101, so we went straight back to the hostel. On Saturday we slept in (until 8:30 [View Full Entry]

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