'Nother email, "From Taiwan". Also long.

So the computer lab is only open weekdays. Can still go to the library weekends to check mail, but they ask that people not use their computers for that.

With the buildings I was surprised with how tall they were. Not tall-tall like New York, but most of them have a few more stories than I'm used to. My hostel was on the eighth floor and now my classes are on the eighth floor of my school too. My room for the summer is in a house that's only one story, but it's really uncommon for a building to be that low.

The room's good and very close to the school. It's only a few minutes walk from the back entrance instead of having to take the MRT from the hostel. It's NT$8100 a month, so with NT$33 to the dollar, around $245 US. A couple other places that I looked at were cheaper, NT$5000-6000, but weren't as nice and were bus-distance away. Mine actually would be 1000 less without air conditioner, but it's already getting over 90 some days with high humidity (though humidity isn't reported with the weather here). The last few days we've had afternoon thunderstorms so the temperature's been ok, but before that, any un-cooled space I was sweating. I don't want to know what my room would be like out by August, but it will be getting a lot hotter. I've been assured that these are still spring-time temperatures.

It can really rain here. Yesterday I was lost for a while coming back from Da'an Park and I got soaked. Most people keep umbrellas handy, so they looked at me funny walking around without one. I think they're so prepared because they use umbrellas against the sun. Only girls so far, though boys will hold the umbrellas for their girlfriends. But on TV, even the guys have really white skin. I'm told that virtually all of the skin products here have some kind of whitener in them.

The TV channels offered here are pretty funny. On one kids show the characters are just what look like toy action figures moved around in front of animated backgrounds. The Chinese ads are loud and gaudy. Mostly in Chinese, but a large dose of English in the advertising too. There are always a few cable channels carrying low-quality dubbed movies out of Hong Kong. They're dubbed to Mandarin, but keep the sub-titles so that Cantonese-speakers or Japanese can read along.

That's the way it is with most of the channels, though cartoons are straight dubbing. However there are still American movie channels like HBO and Starz where they're only subbed, so I can kind of follow along with the subs but still understand what's going on. I watched a bit of TV with people at the hostel when it was really hot outside.

The people at the hostel were basically all English teachers and it looks the same way at my house now. It's really good money--around NT$600 an hour or more. This one guy at the hostel, Barry, only worked four hours per week. He had an instant noodle diet and didn't do much of anything beside sleep in his bunk, but he was able to live on that much.

I've been having a few instant noodle meals myself, but because it's hard finding out what the food is from the menus. None so far have been in English. I recognize the characters for rice, noodles, soup, beef, pork, and chicken, but that's about it. Those are usually half of the listing, so not enough to assure me of what I'm getting. So far I've mostly stuck to buffets where I can see and choose on that. There was one near the hostel for NT$60 that was really good.

For most everything else you can visit a 7-Eleven (they're eeeverywhere). No slushies, but sandwiches and payphone cards and everything else. Even bags of popcorn you can pop in their microwaves. Not cereal though. For that I had to go to a supermarket. There's one near school called Wellcome. Some things were really expensive. An American granola cereal was NT$320 for a normal-sized box. That was the most expensive--most come in line with NT$60-80--but that was just a whole lot. I noticed many prices lower than the US, but for the most part not as low as I had expected (though maybe I'm not too familiar with normal U.S. prices). Fruit I think is more--NT$11 per apple when on sale. Those instant noodles also eleven or twelve, so not as good a deal. Guess the most obvious savings are when eating out where meals are US$2-4.

I'll mail later about classes and stuff,

love,
laszlo