2015/07/07

Early Morning, Class, Night Market - 大清早,上課,夜市

大家好!是我,張洋。可是我覺得我需要臺灣人的名字。覺得...“張海洋”,“張克洋”,或者我的老師說”張瑞洋“。瑞是"lucky",克是"overcome",海洋是"ocean"。我不知道,going to think about it some more. Having a minor identity crisis lol. My name is more of a Mainland China name, so thinking about adding that third character to be more Taiwanese haha.

Anyway, been going to bed way early compared to my normal habits. Typically passing out around 10-11pm and getting up around 6-7am. Got some sweet photos to show yall of the morning.






Hardly any cars out on the road, 很安靜。
I wish I had some uber awesome camera to really show how huge the moon was that morning. It was quite awesome.

Just spattering beautiful pictures up here haha. Yes those are mountains in the background.

My textbook "Taiwan Today". The middle part looks like a bunch of squiggles, but then I realized the squiggles are the characters for Taiwan, 臺灣 heh, in the middle of the island.














Forgot to mention my toothpaste exploded in transit from the States. I was able to salvage the rest of the tube :P















This machine is a beautiful piece of engineering. Hot, cold, and luke-warm water at the press of a button. I've never drank this much water in my life, it just bleeds right out of you. 














Trash is sorted everywhere. Non-recyclable, recyclable, and food waste here. Even at MacDonalds you sort out your food waste, plastic, and paper trash, and next to those stations are typically sinks to wash your hands afterwards, it's pretty rad. 

 I am pretty dang obsessed with 奶茶 or milk tea. 

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   成功湖 Cheng Gong Lake, 可是 it's very small, so more of a pond heh. So the school is called 成功大學 or Cheng Gong University, but it's using the old romanization style, so it's written in English as Cheng Kung, which kinda bugs me. The ducks are super zen.




 
A street we went down for lunch. Most of these places have English menus so you actually know what you're ordering. Some of my classmates walking in front of the 3rd picture. All the signage is so beautiful haha. 

 

And of course what I ate. It was these very large flat noodles at the bottom. They were quite wonderful, I need to find this place again. 


These banyan trees are everywhere! So super beautiful. Also the front of the library. Going to spend a lot of time here... 

 Outside of a fairly large super market type thingy. The top was all like sports goods and the bottom more groceries oriented. 

 I really wish I had scaled these swim shorts better. They were like the size of my hand. Also found Black Jesus! He has returned in bottle form for all to consume! Also that durian fruit. It was pretty stinky but I would like to try it haha.





Some scooter-ing around pictures. I'm not sure what that last picture billboard is saying but I'm pretty sure it says, "come Zach, be a rice farmer, and/or a guitarist."

 

 Went and got some fruit with the best language partner ever! The little dish in the last picture is a sugar/salt mixture. It was super super tasty with pineapple. Awesome platter of fruit only $2 USD.

Some cool motorcycle and a little civic tucked up in a shop of some sort.


Went home, did some studying, and then Chad and his two buddies decided to take me to the night market! Just going to splatter them all here and talk at the end.
















Fried sweet potatoes is a pretty common thing, and super tasty. Also had some pork in a sweet syrup type sauce that was amazing. Got a little bit more experimental with chicken feet (found out how to really eat them, just straight up bite the toes off), and in the last picture the 2nd to bottom most dish is coagulated pigs blood with rice. It was actually pretty decent, tasted like gravy, just don't think about it too much. The night market was super busy and really fun. Chad gave me his cell phone in case I got lost because I still can't make calls in Taiwan (fixing that Wednesday night). After that I went back to the dorm, studied some more, contemplated the universe and my existence in it, then went to bed for another wonderful and crazy day.

I'm really struggling in class, but I think I can pull it off. I relied so hard on making sure my reading and writing were good the last two years, that my speaking and listening skills are nill. Back in the States I told myself and other people I wasn't going to speak English over here, but that went out the window pretty quickly when I realized I didn't know how to say anything. I am using English too much though, even with my language partner. I've studied a lot of Chinese, and believe I know quite a bit, I'm just scared to death to use it. I couldn't even say "you're welcome" to this guy after I helped him pick up some stuff he dropped. I just froze and waved a little then scurried off.

The Taiwanese accent is quite different too. I'm not sure if I've discussed this yet in a previous post, if so you can skip. The zhi-chi-shi-ri-er sounds where you place your tongue behind your top row of teeth have fused into zhe-che-she-re-e sounds where you don't curl the tongue. Also the hard consonant zhong-zhang-cheng-chang-sheng-shang sounds have fused into the zong-zang-ceng-cang-seng-sang sounds. This is really hard to understand if you haven't studied any Chinese and don't know pinyin, but basically things are spoken softer so they end up sounding like other words which is pretty confusing, and the whole pirate Chinese has been thrown out the window to the max. There's also a whole separate Taiwanese language that's more of a household language, that has 7 tones and is totally crazy. It sounds like a Cantonese/Vietnamese fusion language.

Anyway, I've been getting a lot of good responses from people about the blog, so glad you all are enjoying. I'm finally starting to let my weirdness creep out as of  7/7, though this blog is about 7/3 (got some catching up to do). Doing my little velociraptor walk, random dances, and running into people and making them think it's their fault (should sound familiar to some of you). More on that later, enough for now.

謝謝大家!

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