Week 2

I have finally settled into my permanent apartment. It was last Sunday evening when I carried my heavy suitcase through half of Taipei. I took the subway from Taipei Power Station, which is where I was living for the first week, to the busy Yongan Market. Yongan is a lively area with many shops, restaurants and lights. My apartment faces the the main attraction, Zhonghe Road, but the noise, fortunately, does not reach as far as the top floor. I have a peaceful and considerably large apartment. It was recently renovated and feels quite comfortable. The only problem is my Chinese communication with the landlord, who shows up every now and then to check up on me. She does not speak one word of English and my Chinese is still not advanced enough to seal an affordable monthly deal for a student apartment. Thus, for our first meeting she had organized an interpreter to translate what I said to her, thank god. In English, I was able to settle business and persuade her that I could move in on Sunday, the day before my classes.
I arrived at 11:00 pm. The apartment was empty. White walls, minimalist decoration and no sign of life. I went outside and bought three plants, fruits, and some speakers, so that I could finally listen to my favorite Bruckner Symphony, the 7th. When I came back it was already quite late and I was ready to go to bed, anxious about my first day of classes. I read a little, took a shower, prepared my bed, which was still a blank mattress at the time, and fell asleep.
My first day of classes went well. My daily schedule begins at 10:10 a.m. which makes my life much easier than some other students who have to show up as early as 8:00 a.m. I have three classes of intensive Chinese every day. Surprisingly, none of my classes is larger than three people (including myself). In fact, I have two classes with only three people, and one individual class where it is only me and the teacher. I think it really promotes fast learning and understanding. As far as I am concerned, I already feel improvement. For homework, I have to memorize about thirty words a night (which is about fifty characters, although some of them I have already learned). I also need to do grammar work, which is ok because so far most has been pretty much review from what I have learned at Yale. What's really good though are the teachers. My individual teacher, for instance, seems really experienced at what she is doing. She just has a great way of asking me questions so that I would have to use my new words and put them into practice. So, essentially the individual class is mostly for improving my speaking skills. One class is on Taiwanese culture and the other is solely on grammar and vocabulary. In the Taiwanese culture class, we only speak and debate in a group, and then in the other it is mostly our teacher who speaks and explains grammatical more theoretical aspects of the Chinese language.
One aspect about ICLP that is difficult getting used to is that everything is absolutely in Chinese and the teachers speak very fast, assuming that you already understand them. It is literally a total language immersion! They want us to get into the mindset of only using Chinese and hearing it in its natural setting, all the time. The funny thing is though, when we got our sheet for this week's homework, I couldn't read anything and thought we had almost no homework... Until of course the next day I realized we had to write a report and prepare an oral report. It's really intense, as we have to read a long text and answer questions about it orally. We also have to write essays in Chinese (basic Chinese in my case, but i am improving). Overall it's an exciting experience so far.
I am happy to have completed one week of class. I will have to study very much this weekend, but I plan on doing something outside of class, as in going to the museum or night market at some point over the next few days. Actually one of our homework for this weekend is to go to a local park and interview four people about their experience there. This should be an interesting activity as well.