A glimpse into my daily life

I've been promising to do this for a while: a description of my daily life accompanied by pictures. Well, today I was conscious enough in the morning to start taking pictures. I didn't take very many, but I think it'll be a good idea of what I'm up to these days.



I had cereal to kick the day off. The cereal I had was a chocolatey cereal made by Nestle. I haven't had cereal very often here, simply for financial reasons. Cereal prices are comparable to US prices (about $100-150 NT = $3-4 US for a large box), but milk is much more expensive ($100-150 = $3-4 US for a half gallon). Usually I've resorted to eating oatmeal or recently bread with Nutella.



This statue is in the main courtyard of the apartment complex. It's a big stone guy delivering a T'ai Chi kick. I like the statue quite a bit. I think the artist who designed it is pretty well known around the island for his sculptures. It's nice being able to walk by one of his works every day.



Here is the Bitan River (I think?). I walk by it every day on the way to the subway station. It looks a lot nicer when the weather isn't cloudy, I assure you. From my apartment door to my classroom is about 40 minutes. I left 45 minutes early, so I was in a little rush getting to class.



Here is the MRT (stands for Metro Rapid Transit, so basically "subway) stop I use every day. Since I'm the last stop I always get a seat, but I usually yield it half way through the journey to someone not as young and strapping as myself.



Here's how crowded the train car gets by the time I get off. Late morning isn't really a peak time.



This is Shida Rd, the street I walk up every day to get to class. Note how narrow the sidewalks are (which is quite annoying). At night this street is a pretty lively night market.



Here's a picture of my classroom while on break. I sit at the unoccupied spot in the foreground with the water bottle. The girl at the far left and the guy at the far right are Korean while the three girls in the middle (along with one other girl not present) are Japanese. There is another student who recently transferred from Indonesia. I sucked in class today. I went 1 for 5 on fill-in-the-blank sentences using grammar patterns. (My one good one was darn good, though.)

I didn't take any pictures of the afternoon. I went wandering around the Shida area and found a pretty good Korean restaurant. They have a dish that I used to eat all the time in Tianjin (a bowl of rice and all sorts of vegetables with a fried egg on top), but I didn't notice it on the menu until after I ordered Chow Mein. I then went back to the school to try to get some homework done, but I was lacking motivation, so I returned to my apartment.

My afternoon at the apartment was pretty typical: chatted online for a bit, did some household chores (laundry today), made some food, relaxed. Back in America this time would usually be occupied by a part-time job. I'm working on finding an activity to cram in here.



In the evening I went to kickboxing class. It has exploded in popularity; today there were almost 30 people there. After our workout, we did a little light sparring, which this is a picture of. We also talked about our big party, which will be the weekend after next. We may be having the party at my place (pending roommate approval and finding a cheap local restaurant).



After a trip on the MRT and a stop at McDonald's, I got back to my apartment around midnight (which is especially late since I stayed late at kickboxing). On the way back to the apartment I saw this (not so) little guy climbing up a pole. That's something you don't see too often in Minnesota.

Right now it's about 1:30 AM, which may seem late. However, tomorrow is ROC National Day, so there isn't any class. There's a parade and fireworks tomorrow; I'm going to try to go see both. Since I don't have a very clear idea of where either are, I'm not sure the trips will be very fruitful.

Other than National Day and the aforementioned kickboxing party, the only other event I have coming up on the agenda is Monica's birthday get-together on this coming Sunday. For the most part, though, things are pretty smooth sailing. Keep checking back to stay up to date with my exploits.