The time seems to be passing very fast! I look at the date and feel like its three weeks past where it should be.

On Wednesday I’ll have my first midterm of this semester in Management class. The teacher sucks. I hate to complain but she doesn’t speak English very well, is teaching but seems to have no interest in doing so, and basically for class just reads powerpoint slides for three hours once a week. On top of that her idea of a midterm is have us memorize the powerpoint slides and then regurgitate them back onto the midterm word for word……..yuck yuck yuck. Oh and the midterm is 30% of the final grade. Okay enough of that.

Today Emily and I had the pleasure of Sunday lunch with our good friends Sandy & Laura. Two of Megan’s, my sister, really good friends who by their sheer coolness and the power of association with my sister are now some of the best friends Emily and I have as well. It was great to see them again and catch up.

Now, after getting back home Emily and I are both busy studying. I am memorizing for the Management midterm, reading in my mythology textbook, and working on a speech outline for an informative speech on the US mortgage crisis to give in speech class. Emily has a mountain of homework as well and so here we are in our nice little home off of Heping Rd., sipping coffee, with the hum of our window box air conditioner going in the background craming knowledge into our heads.

Friday I helped put on a Welcome to Freshman/Halloween Party at MCU for International College freshman. It was fun to be helping to try and build a more community like atmosphere at school. Sometimes being an older student I don’t have much interest in ’school spirit’ activities but I enjoyed myself. Emily came and we performed a rendition of the song Last Kiss by Pearl Jam with my guitar as part of the performance time. I also ended up being the emcee for the event so needless to say we were very involved. Saturday, the next day, all of us party organizers got together and just hung out for a little bit to actually enjoy some time ourselves. It was nice! Emily and I had them meet at our house and then we walked down to the Shida night market and had dinner at a restaurant we like called Evans’, a burger place. Its sort of cool how I have all my classes with the same group of people. We are all bonding and getting pretty tight.

On that note I’ll tell you about the Taiwan high school phenomenon. Taiwanese have very strong ties to high school classmates because in high school you are always with the same people in every class for every year. Very much like what I have now in college. Many Taiwanese form friendships with their high school classmates that last lifetimes. If I ask someone what they did over the weekend or where they went on a recent vacation they will often tell me they went to visit high school classmates regardless of their age or walk of life. Even Taiwanese in their golden years go and exercise with high school classmates or go shopping etc. Its really quite special and unique. Very different from America, wouldn’t you say, where half the kids wish high school never would have ended and half can’t wait to forget it ever happened.

In other news I made my first video with our new camcorder and posted it on Youtube. I didn’t put it up here in our movie section because it doesn’t really apply but if you want to check it out go here http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=183c2_won40. I’m hoping to start making some more videos about life here to add to your virtual experience but as you can see it hasn’t happened yet and its already almost November.

Speaking of November I’d like to give a shoutout to two very special women whom we love so so much. Megan, my sister, and Kathy, my mom, were both born on November 1st, different years, and I would like to wish them both a very happy birthday!

Today, October 10, is the Republic of China’s (known these days as Taiwan) birthday, basically their Fourth of July. Language can be a funny thing: Every Taiwanese person and news article calls it Taiwan’s birthday while every westerner and news article calls it Taiwan’s Independence day. The hip slang for it is “Double Ten” or “Ten Ten”.

On October 10th, 1911, the Wuchang Uprising started the Xinhan Revolution that led to the end of the Qing dynasty (the last dynasty) and the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC). Here’s a few links if you want to read some more about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ten_Day
 http://sinotour.com/news/160.html
http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/enlarge/double-ten-day_pod_image.html

Being the patriot I am I decided to celebrate by sleeping in since there was no school. Then I spent most of the day reading in my book, Generation Kill, which I have become hooked on. Thank goodness for my studies’ sake the book has an end and I’m fast approaching it. The other parts of the day included Emily and I walking the streets in our neighborhood trying to find a good bargain for a bed and frame. We found one! Now we can trade in our two single matresses mushed together on the floor for a sophisticated queen matress on a wooden box platform. Its crazy how we’ve been too busy to take care of these type of things and we’ve already been here for a month. Now we can focus on buying desks.

Last night after playing basketball with some friends from school down the street at Shida’s (thats Chinese for the name of Emily’s school) courts we came back to our house for dinner. Emily made Ken (our Taiwanese roommate), Jamali (classmate from St. Vincent & the Grenadines), Jabu (classmate from Swaziland), and me this chicken and noodle dish with veggies. It was excellente and we also had some good conversations too.

Today David, the brother of Sunny (our other roommate from France) who has been living in her room with her for the past 6 weeks, left to head back to France.

Tomorrow I leave for the weekend to help with freshman camp which is this thing thats common in Taiwanese universities. Basically sophomores put together a ‘bonding experience’ camp for freshman. Wish me luck.

Love you all!