Thursday, July 05, 2007

First trip to Taichung


Taichung at night, right outside the train station.


I have just arrived back from a wonderful evening in Taichung city with a bunch of TAs and other students. We went to one of the largest malls in Taichung, with more than 15 floors of stores (!!). Those who know me might be shocked to hear it, but I didn't buy a thing aside from bubble tea and a cookie. The cookie, called tai yang bing (太陽餅), is something of a local specialty. These "sun cakes," made mostly in Taichung are known all over Taiwan and much of Asia. They have a flaky, almost sandy outer layer of pastry surrounding a sweet gooey center. The texture took a little getting used to, but I really liked the flavor. Hooray for Taichung, also the origin (supposedly) of the first bubble tea.


Inside the mall -- only about half of the floors are visible in this shot!


Another highlight of the evening was meeting a whole bunch of adorable little frogs on the grassy part of campus (which we passed on our way to the bus to Taichung). One frog even came over to give me a slimy little hello by hopping onto my foot! Importantly, I also discovered the date that Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix comes out in Taiwan (July 11th ONLY SIX DAYS AWAY!!!), and have made plans with other HP fans (including a classmate all the TAs refer to as "Harry Potter" [or, more exactly, 哈利波特] because of his dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses) to return to the mall in Taichung to see it on the 11th or soon thereafter. On the way back to campus, Kevin and I received a Taiwanese lesson from a few of the TFs. I now know how to say "thank you," "I'm sorry," "good morning," "eat," "I don't understand," "delicious," "I," "you," "s/he," and "college class," but I'm sure I'll have forgotten most of them by tomorrow morning.


One of the many posters outside the movie theatre where my friends and I are totally going to see "哈利波特" on July 11th!


Speaking of tomorrow morning, we have a quiz already on BoPoMoFo, an almost uniquely Taiwanese phonetic system for Mandarin Chinese. Naturally, Kevin already knows it, but the rest of us are quite new to it. I'm going to review quickly before bed, but I'm definitely not going to stress about coursework this summer!! Off to practice...


How cute is this frog? I didn't take this picture, but I think this is the species of frog we saw. Click on the picture above for more information about amphibians and other animals in Taiwan.


bo... po... mo... fo... de... te... ne... le...

posted by Kelly @ 11:07 PM