| 7/17/2007 12:00:00 AM
Second day; relatively uneventful. Long day full of lectures and the opening ceremony. Organization still hasn’t improved much; they told us several times last night to wear the light green uniform, and everyone had gotten dressed in the morning with that one on… half of the kids went to the ji he place and were instructed to come back and change into one of the green polos. Uhm. Yeah. Picture taking was also chaotic, though my shortness certainly shone. J Made a few new friends that way, which I s’pose is a good thing. I really like our “family”… group 17! Played Mafia tonight with the group, which was pretty fun. Three of us (myself included) ended up being on the mafia during both the games we played. That was entertaining. Starting to get a little more used to the whole bang thing. Nail polish needs to come off though. Miss some people from home, which is weird. Well at least… the internet. Suffering a little from DotA withdrawal, which is sort of weird and bad at the same time. Comp lab is tiny, but we do have internet every once in a while… I’m sure there’ll be a great long line for most of the time though.
It was funny to see people in the lab get onto fbook immediately after the internet was fixed in the comp lab. Heh. There was some circuit-y stuff on the whiteboard in that room – a clock and a full circuit. I got rather excited. Maybe I really should switch into EE. Meh. There’re a few people who are going to UT here, which is fun. Too bad I don’t really get to wear all my burnt orange shirts around… we’ve gotta wear uniforms all the time. Oh, and there’s a token black guy. Haha poor kid got called up to the stage and they introduced him and stuff. His Chinese is pretty good; apparently he went to school in Taiwan from 1st through 5th or something like that. Mixed, too. Jamaican/Taiwanese, I believe.
It’s hot here. Hot and humid. Not too many bugs yet, which is good. We aren’t allowed off campus though, so that’s a little disappointing. Going to take a plane from here to Tai Tung apparently, which seems like it would cost a good bit of money. I thought we were just going to take a train or something. Hm. I like this journaling business. J Bedtime again now though. Gnight.
Oh, almost forgot the fan. They have giant industrial fans everywhere, and they stuck one right by my row (I’m at the end of the row). Needless to say, my hair was blowing every which way. One of the guys took a pic and hopefully I’ll be able to append that to this post sometime. Quite amusing, really. Ok bedtime. Haha jasnlee just called. Funfun!
7/15/2007 9:58:00 AM
So today was the first day of AID – Assisting Individuals with Disadvantages. What a bizarre name. Each time I see it, I keep thinking of AIDS. Oi. Anyway, “ji he” was at 300P at the Taipei train station, and it was mass chaos. There were people everywhere! The worries that I’ve been having about the organizational level of the program pretty much were accurate. There must have been somewhere around ¾ of the volunteers (out of 200) there. They didn’t have enough buses, the leaders didn’t seem to quite know what they were doing, and people were milling around everywhere. It was nice, though, to hear people speak English after the past few days of only Chinese. Puts one at ease. Anyway, got on the second bus, said goodbye to Wai Gong and G uGu & fam. There wasn’t enough room for the luggage, so I climbed into the luggage storage thing under the bus and started moving stuff around. Freaked out Wai Gong, I think. Heh. Met a guy named Brian who was nice and helped me while I was crawling around under there. He probably thought I was insane. He’s an incoming high school junior – still young. Nice guy, liked Catcher in the Rye, the first book of Harry Potter, and another book I can’t recall at the moment. Related to me his interest in sports and academia – kinda dorky guy. Group members are pretty cool – our small group has our group at Hai Duan (all incoming second years) and another group in Tai Dong (all incoming freshmen). Guys are pretty nice thus far, one reminds me of Philip. One of our facilitators is a young man who is doing mandatory military service in Taiwan, but apparently there are two choices – one of which is doing things like this. He’s cute in a dorky sort of way. Seems to understand English well enough to follow our conversations, or at least smiles and nods at the right times.
Everything’s run pretty militarily here, which is interesting. Times are even given to us in military time. Heh. The girls in my room are nice. J That’s always good. Bangs are killing me. No bugs as of yet, but I hear it gets pretty bad in Hai Duan. Not much freedom here, but we should have a little more free rein whenever we get to the school. I’m excited. |
