First Day at ShiDa

There were 8 students in my class. The breakdown is as follows:

• 2 women from Japan, one of whom can speak English
• 1 woman from Canada, on scholarship, who has taken an intensive course, but using pinyin
  
• 1 woman from Paraguay, who's taken 4 months of Chinese, native language is Spanish but she can speak English too
  
• 2 people from SoCal, male and female
  
• 1 man from America, who's been living in Taiwan for 4 years. He was at TLI and learned how to speak+listen, but not how to read+write
• me

We went over Bo Po Mo Fo initials and finals and practiced writing them. It was interesting to hear which sounds gave certain people trouble. Our assignment was to continue to practice writing them and memorize the initials. We need to be able to write the character correctly when she says an initial sound tomorrow.

I entered the initials into quizlet.com, which was recommended to me by Matt via Peggy. So far, I love this as a study method! This is a general purpose online flashcard program. Feel free to use my set: Bo-Po-Mo-Fo initials. You may need to create an account, but it is free. The nice thing is that there is a study mode, a learning mode, a game mode and a test mode. It's nice to feel like I'm not producing extra garbage by creating 21 flashcards out of real paper.

Speaking of which, the garbage situation here is intense. Taiwan has goals of eliminating land fill usage by getting everything recycled. Because of this, special general use garbage bags cost you by volume. But you can bag recyclables in just about any old bag for tossing. PoPo is in charge of bringing out the garbage to collection, which happens 5 days a week (not Sun/Wed). Since JiuJiu recently replaced all the lights in the apartment, there was a lot of old lamp fixtures sitting around for a while. PoPo had a little trouble getting the garbage men to accept them. I couldn't understand how she got rid of them in the end (out of my vocab range) - she either found someone who wanted some of the parts, or bagged the glass for recycling and threw away the rest - or maybe something else altogether. I have no idea.

Because of the strict recycling policies, it's rare that you see a garbage can on the street. So if you get edibles to-go (such as at a night market, or even a bubble tea drink), you're forced to carry the plastic bag or cup it came in until you find a way to dispose of it. Sometimes the busier night markets have a bag, but for the most part, I have to wait until I get home to throw things away. It sure makes me more aware of my purchases and ways that things are being wasted.

My other accomplishment of the day was getting a cell phone. I decided to go almost as cheap as possible - which is to say, I stopped in about 10 different cell phone stores and asked for their cheapest cell phone. This ranged from NT $1200 to $2500 today. I went with something at $1600 for name brand recognition and a partial warranty. It's got Bo-Po-Mo-Fo characters on it, so I can continue to study on the go! (Details: Just under US$50 for a Sony Ericsson J210i - a no frills phone - just talk and text - no camera, FM radio and other junk I won't use. There were Nokia phones for cheaper, but I've never liked the looks of them.)