KTV!

Today I lost my KTV virginity! The beautiful, young NSLI-Y students (4 of us for the Kaohsiung year) left campus during lunch with our tutors, Taiwanese college students majoring in “Applied Chinese.”  On a normal summer school day, we have a three-hour class in the morning and a two-hour tutoring session after lunch. Today, however, we just had morning class at Wenzao. Our 5-person class (4 NSLIY plus our awesome Resident Director) ranges from people who started Chinese last week to Abby, our RD, who lived in Beijing for a year.

 Taking the bus from school to a nearby shopping district in Kaohsiung, the 2nd largest city in Taiwan, my 朋友們 (friends) and I were especially hungry after a three hours of Chinese. If you’ve ever been in school, you may be aware of how long a 70 minute class can feel, but three hours (especially after second semester senior year and summer) is tough. Our day got dramatically better when we saw the American staple by KTV.

WOOOHOOOOOO!!!!! With the help of a picture menu, I ordered a shrimp sandwich, French fries, and a carbonated sweet tea. Our tutors then led us next door: KTV. With two floors and a marble staircase to get to the second, an attendant brought us to a private room. Filled with “Happy Birthday” decorations and a giant projector screen for lyrics and music videos, our tutors handed us microphones and started Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance”. Our initial reservations didn’t last long and by the time we got to our second song (“This Love”, Maroon 5), I wasn’t thinking about my terrible voice anymore. After our opening act, our group fell into a rhythm of a few Chinese songs and then “Sweet Home Alabama” or “(insert Britney Spears song)” or Fergie’s “My Humps”. 

Chinese songs that we like include:

 
Dubuqi wodezhongwen buhao (sorry, my chinese is bad) (our theme song)

Actually a Korean song (kpop)

Chinese version of bopeep 
Kobe Bryant and Jay Chou

Happy Breakup Song (jubbie's recommendation)

Zhong Guo Hua (S.H.E's song about learning Chinese, rap)
Ben's Favorite
Chinese Song
Other Song in Chinese

Four hours later, our time expired. Our room’s rental only cost 4 US dollars a person, including free bottled water, popcorn, animal crackers, and a bathroom with toilet paper (soap not included).

 

       Sample of Music Selection:

Karaoke is huge in Asia.  

                                                         Crazy Americans at KTV

Another cultural difference is cram schools. Testing is really, really important here. The “Basic Competence Test” can determine what high school a student can attend; the “Joint College Entrance Examination” helps determine where students go to college. Because so much weight is put on testing, most students take extra classes outside of school to prepare for these tests that can hugely affect their lives.

 In Kaohsiung, you can find “Joy English”, “Global Village Organization”, “Study Bank” (an online cram school), “Plus”, “Go 100”, and “Shine” among others. Some of these are chain cram schools, but there are also a lot of private cram schools that haven’t been “franchised”. There’s an enormous demand for these business because Asian families place such a huge value on education. My host sister says that often normal school doesn’t properly prepare students for the best high schools.

If your peer is going to cram school, but your not, your less competitive with them, and you’re also less likely to get into the best high schools and then colleges. Because of this, the majority of students go to cram school if their family can afford it. The wealthiest families hire private tutors for their children or send them abroad to improve their English.

        It’s interesting how this differs from 美國（USA). Jubbie is really lucky, because she’s a Wenzao. Wenzao is unique in that students have more extracurricular options than Taiwan’s normal educational route (for example Jubbie belly dances). Wenzao offers girls’ cheerleading, soccer, and basketball, but girls here don't play sports nearly as much as girls back home. In our NSLI-Y group, Nora and I both played soccer four years. My high school (with less than 200 girls to field teams with) offered women’s cross country, soccer, volleyball, bowling, basketball, swimming, softball, cheerleading, ultimate frisbee, track and field, hockey (if you wanted to join the men’s team), and LAX. Laxlaxlaxlaxlaxlaxlaxlax…..

        These days, I’m still recovering from my ACL surgery and unable to run/play real sports. I’m keeping up with my leg exercises (holler at Vanderbilt orthopedic) and making progress at a snail’s pace. (I’d like to run in the Boulevard Bolt of 2012.)

Thankfully, I can dance, so Jubbie is teaching me to 跳肚皮舞（belly dance）! Wenzao has tryouts with cuts (oh no!). During our first lesson, Jubbie videotaped me. She said she videotaped her friend the first time she belly danced. The friend had to buy Jubbie Starbucks in exchange for deleting the video; I now owe Jubbie Starbucks.

P.S. & XOXOXO: 美國朋友！ American friend(s and family)! Please send me postcards!!! If you write me, I will respond and bring you Taiwanese presents!!! Let me know if you need my address =)

Welcome To Taiwan

I’m writing in the middle of my first Taiwanese typhoon. Our NSLI-Y group is in the middle of our two-week summer Chinese class at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages, but Monday’s classes have been cancelled due to weather. It’s my two-week anniversary of leaving Nashville, and my host family and I braved the rain to eat steamed dumplings for breakfast, and I'm currently listening to the howling wind. Today we made mango tea jelly and watched a Chinese-dynasty soap opera. 

        This is an appropriate time for rhetorical and concrete questions. Who am I? What am I doing in Kaohsiung, 13 hours away from my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee? Do you speak Chinese? What have you been doing? How’s the food? Is Thai food Taiwanese? (No.) How’s your host family? Do they speak English? Do you have Facebook? Do you like your school? Do you like Taiwan?

        Hopefully, through blogging, I’ll be able to answer some of these questions. I love a lot of people in the United States, and I don’t want to lose touch during my year abroad. Despite the rain and wind, Taiwan is sweet! I’m no longer jet-lagged and my adventure’s begun.

        Two weeks ago today, I left Nashville crying; flying to NYC for my IEARN orientation, I was packed for my year in Taiwan. I met my fellow NSLI-Y scholarship students. The girls bonded, and I was impressed when I discovered Nora’s mom had made the Taiwanese flag into a bumper sticker.        

Nora: “She hoped. She applied. She went.”

In New York, we had our final supper at a 中國restaurant in Chinatown. Wednesday morning, we drove to the airport as we (we at this point is just the girls, our two NSLI-Y boys were silent) sang Taylor Swift’ s “Mean” and the Dixie Chicks “Wide Open Spaces”.

Our airplane flew about 15 hours from Newark, New Jersey to Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Continental only has so many episodes of  “Cougar Town” and “Man vs. Food” (man wins), but eventually we landed. From Hong Kong, we flew on to our final destination: Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

FYI: There are over 650 summer, semester, and year NSLI-Y scholarship given to young people between 15-18.5 annually in critical languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Farsi, Mandarin, ect. NSLI-Y scholarships were established in the Bush administration in an effort to better prepare America’s young people for an increasingly more global world. From a national perspective, it probably makes more sense to teach Chinese or Arabic in our nation’s high schools; however, it’s more likely that US students have opportunities to learn Latin or French. English is a core class in the Asian curriculum.

The beautiful, semi-tropical island of Taiwan! Upon arrival, we immediately went to a hotel and crashed. The next day, fueled more by adrenaline than sleep, we went to Wenzao for our tour and press conference. NSLI-Y stands for National Security Language Initiative for Youth; our group is on a full NSLI-Y scholarship for a year abroad in order to study Mandarin Chinese. Therefore, the U.S. State Department through the NSLI-Y scholarship pays our way (and found our student travel company, IEARN).

At Wenzao, we dressed up as students, and I met my host sister, Jubbie!

Chinese Press Release- Here's our group at the press conference!

Link To Wenzao's Website

We have a second orientation from our Kaohsiung hotel with our Taiwanese contacts from IEARN. I learned in Asia, you don’t open your gifts upon receiving them, but wait until the giver is no longer present (in order to not look greedy), and that toilet paper should be thrown in the trash rather than the toilet.

On the 20^th, Jubbie and her mom pick me up and move me into their apartment. On the 16^th floor overlooking the city, it’s quite a change from my house in Green Hills. To shower in the morning, I use a hose in the bathroom. Jubbie’s grandmother hand-washes laundry on the weekends and hangs it out to dry. I’m glad I’ve lifeguarded, because not only is Taiwan hot, but air-conditioning is scattered. It’s humid too (but let’s be real, so is Nashville).

My lifestyle changes from going to the US to Taiwan are somewhat dramatic, but it didn’t take long to realize I couldn’t have gotten a better host family. My host sister, Jubbie, is 18 like me. Through pre-Taiwan emails, I knew that she studied Spanish and belly-danced. Through living together, all I can say is that I’m incredibly blessed to have someone who’s a generally awesome person. She’s already helped our group order dumplings, navigate Kaohsiung’s public transportation, and been sensitive and helpful to our groups needs as we struggle to adapt. I’m looking forward to a year of adventures.

I’ll have to have an entire entry devoted to food and other cultural differences. It’s easier to find a karaoke joint in Kaohsiung than it is to find a church in the South.

Right now, our group of NSLI-Y students is taking a summer Chinese class, waiting for the semester to start on September 5. Wenzao has around 10,000 students with a thriving population of foreigners that come to learn Chinese. As NSLI-Y brought 5 students to Wenzao, we’re excited for the upcoming semester.

When I received my host family information, Jubbie described her family as “small, but lovely,” and I agree. I live with Jubbie and her mom, “Ya-Shu Mammy”. It’s really cool to live in a family of women after growing up with four brothers. Jubbie helps me (who speaks very little Chinese) communicate with her mom (who doesn’t speak English). It’s my responsibility to learn Chinese, and I can already see myself improving.

Though it’s only been two weeks, I’ve already had some pretty cool experiences. This weekend, I went to the beach with the NSLI-Y girls and Jubbie. We were doing some shopping…when something caught our eye. We looked to our left, and we saw a sign: “Modern Toilet Ice Cream.” Upon exploration, we learned that “Modern Toilet Ice Cream” was soft serve in a pink, plastic squatty potty.

 

Aside: this could be huge on US college campuses

Taiwan is sweet.  I'm learning Chinese and having fun!