Safe, Sound, and loving it!

After a very long day of traveling I have made it to Taiwan! This post is a bit late because I landed about ten days ago but I will try to post here every Sunday and keep everyone posted on what I am doing. The first weekend here I spent pretty much trying to find my way around and get settled and ready for school to start. When school did start, I was worried I was not going to have a good year. They put us in a room with the student teachers for a while and they taught us some Chinese but it was mostly just me and another exchange student, Austin, sitting in a room twiddling our thumbs. When I did go to class they sat me in the corner and I didnt have any idea what the teacher was saying. But then the next day, it seemed all my problems were solved. They brought in a private tutor to teach the exchange students Chinese, and they also brought in three more exchange students. When I went to class the teacher had moved me next to Douglas. Douglas's father is a diplomat so he lived in Chicago for a while so he speaks English perfectly. So class became much more interesting and I started learning a lot more Chinese! When the school week was over I was pretty tired so I left my Saturday morning open and I caught up on my sleep. In the afternoon I went to lunch with my host family and went to Ximending. Ximending is pretty much the partying district of Taipei. So my host family and I went shopping around and exploring and it was really fun. Today the Rotary club that is hosting me sponsored a child for the Make-A-Wish foundation so I went to the zoo to meet him. Afterwords, I went around town with the two other exchange students in my club, Vere and Austin. We ended up in Ximending again shopping around for a while before we became bored. Then we found a HUGE pool hall and we played pool for about an hour and went to an arcade for awhile. There is always something to do here! Well that's about it for now I'll add some pictures of my trip soon. But for now, Zaijian!