Sayaka Chatani

One week has passed

My first week at ICLP has passed. Many students have been changing their classes and I am probably going to, too. Putting each student into his/her appropriate classes must require a complicated process since the school has a super-small class policy. Because I am Japanese, my way of learning Chinese is different from that of Americans. We Japanese usually know a lot of characters and vocabulary no matter how badly we speak. So once I learn pronunciation of each character, I am immediately able to apply it to the vocabulary that I already know. This way my progress should be a little faster than by memorizing each word from scratch. Anyways, I feel like I have been here for a long time already. I started to feel comfortable surrounded by Chinese. (that means I started to forget English!) My roommates always give me a chance to use what I learned that day.

I watched a Taiwanese movie called "The Personals (征婚启示）", which my school-mate Taylor bought. The story is very simple; a girl who wants to find a guy suitable for her to marry puts an ad on newspaper and meets many people. The movie describes many sick aspects of the Taiwanese society in a very cute but serious way. I watched this with my roommate Yaling. There was no English or Japanese subtitles but I could understand from the Chinese caption.

The highlight of this week, however, is not the school, but an experience of taking out garbage. In Taipei, people cannot leave garbage bags on the street as in Japan or the US, but have to take them to a certain place exactly when the garbage trucks come. I first thought the trucks would stay for a while, at least 15 minutes, but they only stop for a couple of minutes. I missed the trucks for 4 days in a row. I could make it on the fifth day when Yaling and I took our garbage to the collection place 10 minutes before the trucks came. It was very bizarre to see people gathering with huge garbage bags in their hands, chatting with each other while waiting for the trucks, and throwing them by themselves onto the trucks. It was almost like a big party. I would like to take a photo next time. Posted by sayaka at October 5, 2003 02:53 AM | TrackBack