Taiwaneers

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!