One month dudes
Hey guys I'm back. sry I haven't written in awhile but between10 hour long school days and sleeping its been tough.
We have another typhoon coming our way which i'm getting excited for and i get to visit taipei city with my family tomorow to go shoppping, hopefully i can find that elusive rugby ball (all they play here is basketball, and all the shops sell are basketballs, it's getting absurd). I was looking to find a club to play rugby as well but the closest one is a mens one that is a 2 hour train ride away so it looks like ima have to make my own. School has been great, I've made alot of new friend and the girls have settled down a bit. In gym class i fail hard at basketball so i just impress them with my running haha, it's really just so i dont get fat because my mother feeds me truck loads of food, and when i only eat a little the chef is like ni bu shi hwan(you dont like) and i'm like wo shi hwan, wo si bow lei (i like it but i'm full) and it continues like this until one of us give up or i sit and eat more. I haven't found much time to longboard but there are some wicked hills near my house and i still have to put together my second board so i can go cruise.
I now take aboriginal dance, potery, weaving, drawing, woodcarving, photoshop, computer animation, computer programing, math, english, chinese and i also teach an english class on fridays which is pretty fun, i get to choose how i teach and i must say i'm pretty wicked at it. Oh and in addition to being a chick magnet i'm also i dude magnet :9 i have 4 gay guys that hit on me but i'm thinking after this is all said and done i will not have a homophobic bone in my body unless i get raped.....
Me and the exchange students get along really, well most weekends we'll watch a movie since all of our school mates are in weekend school haha, the last one we watched was really bad. You know when you barely understand a thing that goes on in your everyday life you really look forward to see a movie in english where you will be able to fully grasp everything....well it's a huge let down when you don't and the movie sucks ass. something about swearing britihs people that kill priests, and then by accident kill a baby. in the end a movie star, heroine addicted, racist, prostitue loving midget gets his face blown off then a guy kills himself because he though the midget was a child and said he had to stick to his principles because he was trying to kill the guy that mistakenly killed the kid.
I dunno i hated it then i went to play bowling with every one. We played a game of pool, South America vs North America and sadly we went down hard, i think Brasil payed America to take the dive, dirty cheating Brazilians. I got the high score on the punching game by fluek and i got the high score on the hammer game (the one where you hit a button with a mallet as hard as you can) because of my Canadian wood chopping skills. then we all take off to a rotary dinner. me and the exchange from California joke and giggle like school girls like we would back home which is awsome i actually had a few tears in my eyes making fun of British saying the word cock and racist midgets.
This week we went to watch fight Club after school and me and Hugo got lost in the city trying to find block buster for two hours. finally we found it by fluek and found out that absolutley no where has fight club, so we ended up settling for God father part one. When we got back to hugo's house i felt so inclined to take off my pants and make myself comfortable because uniform really do suck as much as people say. I soon realised i had made a mistake when Hugo's host father came home and it became really akward hahaha. I had to leave early because my mother needed to pick me up because it wasn't safe to ride home at night even though all the streets are lit, my bike is yellow and my shirt is white. I think she was mad because i didn't come home first but i called the maid who speaks english, who passed the message along to her becauseI needed clear communication but like our house is a 20 min bike ride from the city so it would be to much wasted time. I dunno i don't want to argue because is really kind to me and she is gracious enough to take me into her home. It's just culture i think because here parents hold the kids hand right up until there done university.
Well maybe I'll get more freedom as it is only the first month but I miss you guys and I hope your making the best of the grad year and to my family i will try to keep this as up to date as possible and try to send more emails.
<3 Ben
UPDATE:You can now view the pictures, sry mai badfacebook was failing so i uploaded them here on
photobucket
holy tits almost 3 weeks
that went by so fast haha. well lets see ima have to do this quick.
i got moved to the aboriginal class because i guess some people said something in chinese to me that the teacher didn't like but shit don't phase, my new class is a little hot but the people are fucking hilarious and super nice. The gay guy that hits on me in the class is a little unnerving but what ever. oh and i found out that in addition to being a chick magnet i'm also a dude magnet because i also have 2 other gay guys that hit on me in the weaving class haha.
I've come to notice that being gay isn't looked down upon in anyway out here same with being a man really haha (no offense intended). Like guys where make up sometimes, there constantly fixing there hair with mirrors in class ect, now that is of course culture and it's deffinatley different from home. The families are a little more strict here, you study all the time and alot of students go to cram school at night after there 10 hours of public school. it's crazy also in unrelated news taiwan has the one of the highest suicide rates :O
everyone has a scooter and most people live in there businesses. typhoons happen regularly (I'm in one right now and the waves are HUGE) and I felt my first earth quake, it doesn't feel like shaking it fells more like everything is waving up and down. No one speeds, they actually drive 10 km/h below the speed limit and the police are really nice, well to me anyway.
Last week end i ended up going to Taroko gorge with Hugo (American Exchange student), Palm (Thai exchange student) and my mother. It was so beautiful i can't even describe it. but i can give you some picture. Oh we also visited the Budhist temple there and i though it was kinda funny that the monks sold little trinkets and had a bar set up.
FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
ni hao.
well lets start this off. i woke up around 6:30 so I could get my self all cleaned up and looking/smelling good because school starts here at 7:30 am, yeah i know WTF. So once i get my shit together, me and mom head out the door in the benz and my new rad school uniform. we roll up to the school with the huge cross hanging in the door way, yeah boi catholic school. one problem though my belt is failing....HARD. so after my mother and i try to figure this stupid thing out we had to ask some of my new school mates to help me do it up, now i don't get embarased to easily but jebus it was deffinatley not the way i wanted to make friends haha.
So once we get inside my mother starts walking ahead of me, i assume she must be taking me to meet someone other than the dean we met the day before. so i start following her all around this massive school with everyone either giggling or saying hello, but then i noticed she was looking a little lost mostly because we went up and down the same set of stairs three times and she was asking students for directions. I try to help and take her to the Deans office but she ignores me and keeps walking around but I don't mind, this way i get to see more of the school. Finally the Dean comes and saves my Mother and me and takes us to the office I was trying to take my Hana to all along. We figure some stuff out, she hands me my schedual which looks something like this.
Monday
1. Math
2. Chinese
3. open
4. open
5. Program design
6. Program design
7. Chinese
8. Chinese
Tuesday
1. English
2. Math
3. Self Taught?
4. English Listening and Speaking exercises
5. Program design
6. Database
7. open
8. open
Wednesday
1. open
2. open
3. Math
4. Chinese
5. Life Ed
6. Training
7. Chinese
8. Chinese
Thursday
1. Math
2. English
3. open
4. open
5. Chinese
6. Nation Defense (Yeah Ima fight for Taiwan)
7. English
8. Computer Animation
Friday
1. open
2. open
3. Database
4. Database
5. open
6. open
7. Chinese
8. Chinese
So this is how I'll be reping my days for the next week, I think I might drop National defence though and maybe the computer stuff (Its pretty hard...even more when your teacher doesn't speak english btw Database isn't as interesting as it sounds). So i find my class room and after having a nice embarassing introduction, my councellor making people move for me and assigning people to help me out i finally found my seat at the back of the class. No one really spoke english so i tried to make some friends, i think I did haha. So after this class which i think was self taught because the teacher did nothing and everyone was studying something different, like the kid on my left was looking a design magazine and the kid on my right was studying the M16 rifle. After all this I'm told I can go to the library because i have an open, I make my way through the crowds of staring people and giggling people and finally get to the library where i see Palm the Thai exchange. We sit and talk for a bit as i look through a arcitectural design mag....i really wish i could draw tbh. So after i look at the cool pictures because it's all in chinese I play some games on his cellphone, which I'm horrible at and then a group of junior highs come in. All the girls piled in at our table and some kid that really wanted to learn english. So i try to help him and he help me with some chinese and the girls are asking me for my cell number and email while there teacher tells me not to give it to them. It was pretty funny how many people want to be my dick puppet, I mean Girlfriend (LOL). So after all this i head to my next class which is english, ractise which thankfully is in my home room, so our teacher comes in, some kid says my name and she focuses all her attention on me asking me to come up and introduce myself. I made it short because i really didn't want to be up there but then she made it worse by forcing students to ask me questions haha. Row for row so i had to answer about 7. The first was do you have a girlfriend, next do any of us have a chance to be your girlfriend and next which was who is your perfect girl, then it broke down into generic what music do you like and whats your favorite thing about taiwan oh and the one loud guy in the back ask how long is was HAHA. I told them my perfect girl is 10 feet tall and 400 pounds with curly red hair because what the hell do you say to that. So after all that I finally get to sit and just enjoy the class, I joke with some friends and learn that the english teacher really can't speak english that well.
After a long boring class the bell rings and it's time to roll out to lunch, one girl asks if i want to eat with her, of course I say yes and me, her and one of the guys thats supposed to help me walk down the hall with all there friends. I show up at the cafeteria which is a little building in the middle of the compound, the girl asks if i like rice and run of into the sea of people with my money. So i stand outside and try to talk with some people, she comes back with some rice topped with some kind of mystery meat and i end up walking off with some guys back to the class room. I sit down and start looking around because i guess you bring your own utensils but someone was nice enough to give me a spoon so i sit and eat and try to make some small talk with some people, and then the bell goes and absolutely every one starts to clean. LIKE EVERYONE! people are moping the floor, cleaning windows....it's absurd.
So after I finish up the blackboard, we all sit down and a bell rings and I'm like oh cool another class but the lights turn off and everyone put there head down and has a nap. A few kids look out the window but when a teacher walks by they all hide haha this school is weird not to mention there's a military base next door so you hear the sound barrier being broken in the distance, so i found it kinda hard to nap.
Ok well in the morning i signed up for some computer stuff and i thought it would be easy shit like we learn back home, no my first class is program design where Hugo (the usa exchange) and I input alot of script into some visual basic compiler to tell us if a number was the same forward and backward or not. Next was Database which is alot lamer than it sounds, basically we played with a program that help us manage accounts, contacts, sales and purchases of a company. So after a long time of plugging in numbers and wonder what i was doing the bell finally rings and i sit in the library for 2 hours before i can go home. AT 5:20 PM >:(
All in all school is strange in Taiwan maybe it's just because it's a catholic military school.
I miss you all <3
Ben
