How can a trip to the zoo possibly be so exhausting? Ahhhh: because of the heat of course. I am sweating all day long as if I had just had a very hard gym class in school. Unfortunately that is not the case, and I wonder how much I am going to sweat, when I start having gym classes at school...
But apart from the sweat I’m having a really good time here in Taipei. Yesterday my youngest host sister and a lot of her friends took me to Taipei zoo. Before we entered, we made a stop at McDonald’s, and it was a relief to see Taiwanese people eat without chopsticks although my skills are improving. After consuming a Sunday Ice-cream (which is really funny to hear pronounced in Chinese) a cake suddenly appeared from one of the girl’s bag because another girl had had birthday during the summer holyday. It was really great fun in the cosy way as we sang “Happy Birthday to You” and shared the impressive cake – at McDonald’s! :D
Afterwards we finally went to the zoo, and after some hours in the exhausting sun we made it to the panda’s house. As the panda is my favourite animal I had really been looking forward to this, and it was such a lovely experience to see two big, lazy pandas laying sleeping behind the glass. Unfortunately they did not look at me, so the pictures I took (without flash not to disturb them), are not impressive, but just to see them from behind was a great experience for me!
So apart from the warm and humid weather I find everything really great here in Taipei, and yesterday I realized that I was actually drinking from my rice bowl without hesitating – I guess that means, that I’m getting used to everything here :) Concerning eating I have the honour of eating dinner together with ba-ba (father in Chinese) every evening, and that is definitely an experience! He has an impressive “snap-slope-suck” technique, which I have to practice a lot to be able to copy!
Right now I just stick to improving my chopstick- and Chinese skills, and the amazing thing is, that I am actually able to read children’s books in ㄅㄆㄇㄈ (a Taiwanese alphabet used to learn Chinese called Bopomofo – the sounds of the first four letters written before this parenthesis). Hopefully Bopomofo will help me getting better, although it is not very likely that my schoolbooks will be in Bopomofo. By the way school starts at Monday but before that I have to go to the inbound camp, and to a Chinese test, and right now I am about to go to an indoor swimming pool with two of my host sisters. That is going to be interesting, as they are very impressed that I have a bikini and not a swimsuit (they are not very fond of showing their body)!
I hope everything is good in Denmark – because everything is great in Taipei!
Julia :)
