May 17th and 18th

I can't believe our week in Taiwan is already over! I had a blast in Taiwan and I hope Japan is the same way! We arrived in Hikone, Japan last night and took a 2 hour train ride to JCMU. It took forever to get through all of the different lines in the airport. We had to go through the swine flu line (or should I say H1N1 to be correct :) ), the customs line, the money exchange line and then the line where we could get our train tickets! What a production! It took like 2 hours for everyone to get throug. Once we got to JCMU we went to Coco's, a restuarant right next door and ate some pretty good food; it definitely wasn't Japanese food, but it was food no the less.

Today we had a welcome reception at JCMU. a survival Japanese class, Arrigato!, we went on a bike tour of Hikone where we ate some actually Japanese food, and then we went to the grocery store to buy some food so we can cook some meals. Let me tell you, it is very difficult to shop for groceries at a store you have never been to, where everything is in Japanese, in 30 minutes. To add to the pressure I apparantly can't shop for more than 1 meal at a time so all I ended up getting was some Special K, Bananas, yougart, water, milk, sunchips and a chocolate bar. I don't think that is going to get me very far! After shopping we went to a music concert at JCMU and then we went to a Reception afterwards.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of Japan in the next week! Oh and I am finally over my jet lag! I have no desire to wake up early in the morning!

-Lauren

Thursday May 14, 2009

Today we participated in some "team building exercises" when we white water rafted 22 kilometers. i am going to have a very strong right shoulder from paddling so long and not switching sides! it was so much fun but unfortunately everyone has a crazy sunburn! I put sunblock on and it wasn't even really sunny today! that took about 3 hours. Afterwards we went to our hotel called a resortopia, I am not kidding, and we went for a bike ride throughout the town. I finished the 11 kilometer bike ride. Needless to say I am exhausted and it is only 8:20 at night. The time difference is still messing with me, I can't sleep past 6:00. It is really nice getting to know everyone here and I am having a great time. the scenery in Eastern Taiwan is absolutely amazing, words or pictures cannot express how beautiful it is here. Until next time....

Lauren

May 12, 2009

Yesterday we went to the American Chamber of Commerce and we also listened to two lectures at NTPU and one at Tamkng University. The first lecture was about the Taiwan economy while the other was about management science. During the second lecture at Tamkng we joined a lecture in progress and each person in our group joined groups in the classroom. My group members were very nice and funny and very curious about our culture. Their class was in English and so was their book, which I though was strange but apparently they are in the international trade center at the university and they are required to learn English. After the lecture we had a tour of the campus by freshman students at the university. The campus was absolutely beautiful! After the campus tour we went to the night market in Danshui with the students. The students, Rebecca, Chenle, Lisa, Fish and Shawn showed us around. they were the nicest people ever and they were so much fun! We played a scavenger hunt game where we were given pictures of street vendors and we had to find them and eat food from each place. It was nice having the students with us to tell us what food was good and what wasn’t. All of the food was good except the iron egg; that wasn’t right. Our group won the game surprisingly even though we took a pretty long time and sat down at every place and chit chatted. I had so much fun with every person in our group and it was definitely the funniest night so far. They were so interested in our culture and it felt very weird being the foreigner. We got home about 10:30 or 10:40 that night after about an 45 minute ride on the MRT. Hopefully we will be able see our tour guides again during our free day on Saturday!

May 10, 2009 first full day in Taiwan

We had hardly any internet connect the past three days so today I am going to try to catch up on my blog ☺.On Sunday we went to the Taipei 101 tower and took the super fast elevator to the 88th floor in 40 seconds. We saw the big damper and kept the building from swaying when the wind gusts. We also went to the observation deck, which is surprisingly not as creepy as i thought it would be. The security guard yelled at Fatima when she stuck her camera out the guardrails. We ate lunch at the food court at the Taipei 101and I had an oyster omelet. That was an experience! It was very slimy and gooey and weird; I was not a fan. Afterwards we went the National Palace museum. The museum was absolutely beautiful and the scenery was amazing! Next we took the bus to the Shilin Night market. Words cannot describe how out of control everything was. The amount of people, the lights, the sounds and the smells were overwhelming. I tried stinky tofu and a piece of squid. Stinky tofu is extremely stinky! It made me nauseous just walking by it. It didn’t taste as bad as it smelled and it was ok until I tried to swallow it. It was difficult to get it down. We all went to the shops and walked around for a while. Fatima and I got misdirected (or lost what ever you want to call it). We kept walking back and forth down the streets trying to find anyone who looked familiar and when we though all was lost we ran into Monzir, Suyash, Ellina and My. Suyash parted ways with Rob and the rest of us tried to find our way out of the market. We finally did get out and took the subway back to the hostel. This is when we got lost again. We got off at the right station but we got off the wrong platform. We took #5 instead of #1 or 2. While we were lost we saw the CKS memorial and the president’s residence. We just walked and walked and we ran into a saintly lady who actually walked us to our street even though it was in the opposite direction she was headed. It should of taken us about 5 minutes to get home from the station but it actually took us about 45 minutes. If I was to get lost in any city this is one was a good one. It is very safe and the people are extremely friendly. Since we’ve been in Taiwan I haven’t seen anyone get irritated at each other, which is nice! Everyone goes with the flow, if you bump into someone they brush it off, it’s very relaxed. I am loving Taiwan so far!!

T-Minus 15 hours...

Yikes! I'm mostly packed, got all the big stuff in the suitcase, now I just need to make sure I don't forget anything important! I'm so pumped!

-Lauren

10 days and counting....

It still hasn't hit me that I will be half way around the world in less than two weeks! I should probably start getting all of my things together or at least make a list of all of the things I need :) Tomorrow I'm getting some contacts so my glasses won't go flying off when we go white water rafting. Is that a possibility? Don't want to take any chances because I don't feel like being blind for the rest of the trip. I don't think I have any idea what I'm about to experience! Until next time.....

-Lauren