First Day at Wenzao

I woke up after everyone in my host family had already left for work or school. I ate waffles, an apple and a Twix for breakfast. Then I walked to school. It was only about a 20 minute walk but it was incredibly hot outside. I arrived about 30 minutes early so I had time to walk around campus a bit, hear from my classmates about their weekends, and visit the chapel.

Wenzao Chapel

We were divided into two classes of four. We will be studying in these classes for the next two weeks. After that, we will take a placement exam and begin attending classes with other students at Wenzao. During class, we first played a game where we had to draw a picture representing each character of our Chinese name. We then had to come up with a story including the characters in our name. My Chinese name is 羅家睿. 羅 is a common last name, 家 means family and 睿 means astute. Next we studied adjectives that describe personalities.

After class, we ate lunch at a restaurant near campus. I had some noodles with sesame sauce. I also had some grape fruit green tea. We then took the bus to a teacher's house. At her house, we learned a bit about the different districts of Taiwan. Then we colored a map of the city and wrote a book about our map.

Our Books and Maps

After class we went to 9X9, a large 文具店 (stationary store). It had three floors! I really enjoyed looking around the store. I found this notebook particularly funny:

Italy or France?

I bought a planner so I can keep track of homework. I also bought a Taiwan key chain for my back pack.

My Purchases

I took the MRT back home. My host sister and I met up at the MRT station and walked together the rest of the way home. We were able to sustain a conversation about our days in Chinese the entire way back! For dinner, I had rice with broccoli, egg and rice soup, and a soup with beef, potatoes, carrots and squid.

I played Uno with my host brother and then listened to his violin lesson while I wrote this blog post. Next, we went to pick up my host sister from 補習班. This is a class most high school students attend in addition to regular classes to help them prepare for the 高考, the college entrance exam.

Afterwards we played a game of Skipbo and then went to bed. Tomorrow will be another full day!