Slow Motion

Time has been going by sooooo slowly... Some would think that's a negative; I actually enjoy feeling like there are three days packed into one. Because it's a new country for me, new sights, faces, languages, I'm seeing the world in technicolor. It's exhausting, exciting, and causes time to trickle by the way it used to as a kid. Remember how long a day at school felt in first grade? That pretty much sums up my experience of time here.

School has been going well. We're learning Bopomofo, a shorthand phonetic alphabet most Taiwanese use for texting. We're also learning pinyin which uses the western alphabet to spell Chinese words and tones. We will be moving along to characters soon. As I anticipated, the workload is starting to increase. I need to find my study zone so I can continue to keep up. The dorm room is no good for studying since there are 3 of us (soon to be 4) packed into a space half the size of my bedroom at home. It's impossible to concentrate...

Yesterday it was my new friend Kate's birthday. A group of us went to dinner, then on to Babe 18, an all-you-can-drink night club in downtown Taipei. We met at the main gate on campus at 6:30p but didn't wind up sitting down to dinner until 9p since we were gradually picking up people along the way. Kate's from the US as well, the only fellow US-er I know so far. We kept laughing the whole night because we were trying to coordinate everybody, "we're are the Swedes?", "Have you heard from the Mexicans?", "What happened to the Ukranians/Hungarians/Koreans?" -- it's so different/awesome to be hanging out with people from all over the world. In the last week I've met some of the most inspiring people. Young, driven, intelligent, fearless kids. Kate's in Taiwan for three months. She then heads to Peru on a Fulbright scholarship to teach English for a year. I spent my twenties so constricted, trying to get ahead in work. It's amazing to find that really, there are so many options.