Arrival

So, this is it, my first entry!

I arrived in Taiwan one week ago, but it feels like I've been here for a month. Every day is a new experience and I'm busy from morning till night, mainly with appartment hunting. I stayed in a hotel for the first week, but today I had to move out of the hotel to a friends' place. My appartment search hasn't been very successful so far. It turns out that it's difficult to find a nice place close to university; the rooms are very small and often don't even have windows. That's why I decided to look for a room closer to the center of Taipei in the next few days. But now, I'll tell you a bit more about my first week:

The place I went to on my first day was, of course, my university. It's quite big, and I already got lost on campus twice... All buildings look alike, and are build in consistent gray concrete. As you can imagine, it's nothing much to look at. But I like the campus because it is very green, with lots of tropical trees and plants.

University life here is very different from what I'm used to. The students spend much more time at university, so it's always busy on campus, even in the evenings. Students of all courses are divided into two categories: dayschool and nightschool. The dayschool students have all their classes from 9 to 5, and nightschool students have classes from 5 to 10.

Sometimes the campus transforms into a little market, and students sell all kinds of things they produced in order to raise money for clubs. The nutrition students, for example, have their own little ice cream shop in one of the buildings.

On my first day, we had a little introduction at the university with the other exchange students. Most of them come from China, some from Japan and eleven of the exchange students are European (Spanish, Swedish, Italian and French). I mostly hang out with a French (Geoffrey) and a Spanish guy (Nil), who study business administration as well.

The university assigned us to school buddies, who are local students in charge of taking care of us. My buddy, Monica, is very nice and helped me a lot during my first few days here. She picked me up from the airport, went sightseeing with me and helped me with finding a room.

In general, it is great how helpful the Taiwanese students are. If Monica is busy, somebody else will always offer their help.

I have to admitt, I haven't done a lot of sightseeing yet. On my first day, Monica and Laila (a local student who studies German!), took me to the Chiang Kai Shek memorial and told me a bit about Taiwan's history, about its current political situation and its relations to China. I also found out that Taiwan is a very young country and only was founded in 1950!

In contrast to this 'older' side of Taipei stands the Xinyi district, the posh shopping area with Taiwan's most famous building: the Taipei 101. So far, I only walked around the area and did some window shopping. I haven't been on the viewing platform by night yet, so I hope I get the chance soon!

There is so much more to tell, but I will save something for the coming months...