Day 25 -- June 18

I woke up with much more pep in me. I guess getting a good 8 hours helps. I finally took a picture of my typical breakfast. It’s a chicken patty with egg and random bits of vegetables, sometimes its lettuce and cucumber and occasionally they throw a tomato in there. Less than a dollar too on 27 NT, which is why I like it so much. It leaves room for the possibility of buying coffee. I actually finally went to try out Kawa and was absolutely delighted. 700ml of freshly ground coffee. I am now a very happy human, finally somewhere with a significant amount of coffee. I still got a funny look when I said no sugar, but I suspect she’ll see me enough to get used it. I headed off to class wide awake and rearing to go.

On a side note: Lunch!

The top part is asking for coffee, the bottom part says "she wants beer", compliments of Chintsu

    Class was much more fun, everyone was much more awake. Our two wayward members returned to us. It turns out the Reid was a little bit sick too which is a total bummer. We went over the next half of vocabulary in class. As it turns out that which would act as an adjective in English is a specialized verb in Mandarin. So English says “I am hot” while Mandarin will say in literal translation “I hot”. There is an existence verb in Mandarin but it is not needed, the way laoshi explained it was being hot is an established state, so the ‘am’ or ‘is’ is already there. Fun stuff right? Tomorrow is the test for this chapter, 3 days per chapter. Only 10 more chapters to go for this book. Good times.

Chinese Idiom

    Got back to the dorms and showed what I had to do for homework to my Chinese roommate. She said that what I was doing was hard, but I think it’s reasonable. I am doing an intensive course in Mandarin, difficult comes in the class description. I went for a run around 6:30, and today would mark my first ‘bad’ run. Most of the times running is great fun and I love it. However, I was pumped to get on the track but once there I started having all sorts of problems. The biggest one was my left foot getting severe pins and needles. I’m not really sure what this is about, I am going to try my older shoes that I originally brought for hiking and see if it makes a difference. If this keeps happening I’m going to need to see foot doctor when I get back to the States. I only made it 4 miles before I gave up on it. Hopefully it’s just the shoes, I’ll keep you updated. My next run is Thursday.

    I went in search of food and had my first foreigner experience, where people thought I couldn’t understand their menu so they shoved a poorly translated one at me. All I wanted to know was where the order forms were, I couldn’t find them. The thing is I can usually guess with decent accuracy what is on the menu, turns out the characters for food don’t really change all that much between Japanese and Mandarin. So anyway, I wanted to get my usual after-run meal but because I had only English I ended up ordering the wrong thing. I was slightly annoyed by it. The food wasn’t bad I just went in there to get something specific and got stuck with something else. Next time I am pretending I don’t speak English or I will just ignore the English menu. Occasionally things like this bother me. I am trying to practice what little I know and people insist on trying to use bad English instead of trying to use their native language. Sorry, mini-rant.

    I also got a mahjong tile pastry that was absolutely delightful. I also got to properly order something which I was pleased about. The thing with the restaurant really threw me off. So I swung back to the dorm and worked on homework for a bit. I got to skype call Meredyth, who is still settling into her new home in Corpus Christi, Texas. It was nice to talk to her again. I gotta do some made studying for tomorrow’s test. We have a whole script to memorize, should be fun!