The atmosphere in Taipei was a little extra exciting, with everyone asking excitedly about the elections coming up. Yes the same elections that people talk about over there, the presidential elections in the U.S. Being a Witness of course makes the elections significantly less exciting, and maybe less interesting. But I'm sure I'll take note who the president will be next year once it's decided, I think last time I didn't know for about a week, I must have been busy that week. But recently I've been trying to keep up to date on world events, trying to be more aware of the world around me.

I'm trying to think of something worthy of blogging about, all that comes to mind is the bus. I took the bus part way to the meeting on Sunday, the English meeting. This is new, I found out which bus to take from Amanda and Corey, a new couple who came here to teach English, it's bus 225 (In case you were wondering). As a rule I stay off buses, I like them OK, but I have a hard time figuring out where they go, there are so many of them and bus maps are hard to find. They are easy to ride if you have an MRT Easy Card which just put next to the reader next to driver and wait for a green light to flash followed by a beep or two, this means money has been deducted from your card. I'm not sure what the difference between one and two beeps is. Maybe I should set that as a goal, to learn enough Chinese to figure out the difference between one and two beeps. One needs to set goals to motivate one's self. To start off: How do you say beep in Chinese? I can assure you, it's not beep as you might believe to be obvious. After all dogs don't say ruff ruff or bark bark here. No. They say wang wang. It's obvious to everyone here that they say wang wang, anything else would be silly to them, probably as silly as wang wang sounds to you, which is pretty silly isn't it? So don't ask for beef by saying Moo. It won't work. And if you try to pantomime a cow by making horns, well, that just means your angry in East Asia universal pantomime language. Anything with horns must be angry.

The other problem with the bus is where to get off. Not only do most streets look the same here, but you can't see them when you're standing on a bus. Usually all you see is the sidewalks and cars down below. But, despite these tremendous issues and obstacles, I took the bus to the meeting. And I was ten minutes late. Next time I'll leave earlier. Oh, and by the way, usually I just take the MRT, which involves 3 trains so it takes almost an hour.

I know, I know. I should learn the buses, I've been here for about 8 months already. But where should I go?

Class is about the same. We had a substitute teacher today, she had a soft pleasant voice. That's not always the case. I wonder if she was secretly shocked at our casual class-room atmosphere: Students taking meals during class, complete with greasy napkins, drinks, bags, and chopsticks, some food still sizzling and smoking, bought from some near-bye vendor. Students taking phone calls during class. (Most of the students in our class have jobs and get important phone calls they have to take, though they usually leave the room) Side conversations and jokes. (I make it a rule myself to not talk when the teacher is talking, but I can't force my rule on everyone!)

But, believe it or not, despite my descriptions of our unruliness and goofy offy ness, we do in fact spend the great majority of the time learning new Chinese words, phrases, and sentence structures. So slowly but surely I'm finding I'm able to hear strings of odd sounding Chinese syllables and respond with an even odder sounding strings of syllables, which may or may not be considered Chinese syllables by the Chinese ears listening to them, and then to have the teacher nod her head approvingly meaning that wonderful thing: "I understood what you just said to me." But then again the teachers are very good at understanding our halting crazy backwards Chinese sentences and our upside down tones. Sometimes I think they are able to "see my heart", which is how you'd say "read my mind" in Chinese. It's amazing to watch my third period teacher listen to my sentence constructions intently, then pause for a moment looking up and to the left in thought(or is her right?) and then repeat my sentence slightly modified, polished and "Chinesified" for the whole class to repeat. Sometimes, on magical special days, you might get a sentence repeated back to the class exactly the way you said it, meaning you said it exactly right. I usually make a mini victory scene when this happens. But I don't feel bad about making a scene because it's not often that it happens, making the victory that much more sweet when it does. (edit 477) Permalink