Duibuqi wo ting bu dong! ( sry I don't understand)

After a Long time I’ve finally managed to create a new blog. I guess what they say is true: “no news is good news” I’m having a good time and am quite busy but, although I’ve been doing a lot of things and been studying hard I should have written something a lot earlier, sry…

As I said I’ve been doing a lot of things, I went to chinshui again(home town of my friend) and Taipei (hiking on all stars and visit night market), went to the movies (with 3d glasses that were way to big).

I’ve also been eating in a lot of different restaurants, Sushi (with the famous sushi plate escalator)
Japanese curry, Tepanyaki ,where the table is against the bar and there is a tepanyaki plate in front of you where the chef prepares your meal.. it goes really fast and tastes quite nice.

I went to a traditional teahouse with my teacher and class and then again with my friend to eat and drink traditional Taiwanese/Chinese food and tea.. it was reeaaaaly delicious yet a bit expensive for Taiwanese standards, the tea was about 10 euro (more expensive then the food)
But really good!

I’m now planning some trips to Kaohsiung a big city in the south of Taiwan where I have some friends that were guest in the Intersail hostel and where my friend has classmates.
To Vietnam where I of course have all the friends I got to know last travel to Asia
And to Korea where I have one friend that I know from my university in the Hague. And my Taiwanese friend has a classmate.
Because my friend’s aunt works at Korea airlines we are able to get plane tickets with discount, yet they still are not really that cheap. A return flight is about 200-300 euro..

The study is going well but it’s very difficult.
We get a lot of vocabulary and complicated grammar rules (although higher levels say that our level is soooo easy…).
Where I had no grammar education in Amsterdam I now have to distinguish a lot of different major words.
For example one glass of coke = Yi bei kele , but 1 cup of tea = yi bei cha
We learned about 10 different measurewords, that are distinguished by sometimes weird rules.
For example all things that look like sticks are “zhi” and all animals are “zhi” it’s the same pronunciation but they are different characters.

All things that have a big flat surface are “zhang”, and all things put together are “fen”..
Paper and table are both “zhang” because it has a big surface, yet a newspaper is papers put together so it’s “fen”…
Etc, etc.

Next to that I’ve learned that Chinese don’t count in thousands but in ten thousands.
So where we distinguish 1000; 100,000; 100,000,000

They use 1,0000; 1000,0000; 1000,0000,0000
The word for 1000 = qian(tsian) and the word for 10000 = wan ( one)
So instead of saying 10 thousand they say one “wan “
And instead of 100 thousand they say 10 “wan”.
There are a lot more rules in counting nrs besides this but I thought this was the most confusing one..
I now understand why Chinese sometimes make mistakes when talking about nrs.

There are a lot of typhoons passing and coming to Taiwan which makes it rains really heavily. Which is awesome when you are in side, however when you are outside for about 5-10 seconds (even with umbrella (yu san)) you are absolutely soaking wet…><
And!! I felt my first earth quake 2 days ago, which apparently is normal for Taiwan...
It was a bit scary because I was alone, however because there were no screaming people outside I figured it was ok.

The study goes quite fast and it’s quite a lot of things that we have to remember.
And this sometimes makes me ask myself why on earth I decided to take this “quite” intensive course during my summer break.
However I do enjoy learning Chinese, I still manage to eat and drink something new every single day , I see a lot of stuff and experience new things and I’ve got a nice friend here. All of this immediately makes me forget any doubt about my decision.

I’ll try to upload some of the pictures we took and a movie of the rain a.s.a.p. on Facebook.

Ltrs,
Tommy