Day 3: Opening Ceremony

Hello world! Sorry for the delay, we've just been so busy that we've barely had time to blog! We'll try to remember each day but it's been awhile so just bear with us please!

The language barrier was made a little more evident today. We woke up early to buy breakfast before our first day of school but unlike the previous day, we did not have any Chinese speaking students to translate the menu or to help us order. Luckily one of us knew some basic conversational phrases so we were all able to order, albeit with a bit of difficulty. Most meals here end up being a gamble as we just pick something random on the menu in our price range and hope they end up being good. So far it's been working out for us..more or less, haha. Hopefully as more days pass we'll be able to order with a lot more ease.

After breakfast, we made our way to campus for the opening ceremony. We were introduced to all the students in both our program, IIELE, and the other program, IIALE. Surprisingly, we learned that we were the only American school in our program and the 50 or so other students that we would be working with for the next couple of weeks were all from Beijing, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Since it was only our first day, we only had an informational lecture about Taiwan and were set free for the rest of the evening at about 5pm.

After returning to the dorm for a quick change, we headed back to campus where we met up with a couple of other students in our program. The students from Taiwan were nice enough to accompany us to the nearby night market and show us around. Taiwan's famous beef noodle soup, nai cha, and sweet potato puffs were just a few of the things we sampled on our first night out. Everything is so unbelievably cheap here! Most foods and drink can be bought for NTD100 or less, which is a little more than $3. On our way home from the night market, we found a bar that we decided that we would all go to after we all met up back at the dorms. Unfortunately when our huge group headed there later that night, due to the lack of translator, we could not be accommodated at the bar and just ended up at a 7-11 (which is as common as Starbucks in America).