6th week in 台灣

大家好！
我喜歡台灣，可是我想念挪威！

Hello everyone!
I like Taiwan, but I miss Norway

This has been an interesting week. After I paid for the winterterm last friday, I recieved my enrollment certificate this monday. I was told I now had everything I needed to extend my ARC. Then I went to the imigration office to apply for ARC-extension. When I finally got to the service encounter, they told me I couldn't apply yet, and that I should come back after October 30th (1 month prior to my ARC expire date). I guess they wanted to see more than one third of my attendance record, but I'm a little bit disappointed anyway, as I expected to get it extended.

Japanese restaurant this week

Tuesday I went with some friends to a Japanese restaurant at lunchtime. We had to wait outside for 15-20 minutes, as all the tables were taken. It was so hot in the sun, but the waitress came outside to serve us icetea while we waited. When we finally got in to the restaurant we sat down and had a nice time with interesting dishes. There's so many places to eat in Taiwan, and if you want you can try something new every day, every meal.
In the evening the NCCU's magic club presented a magicshow at campus. A great performance with cardtricks, pigeons and more..

View from a Taiwanese bus :)

 I try to use some Chinese everyday, but it's not always easy as my vocabulary is very limited.. Every now and then I learn some new words outside class, and one of this weeks new words is "zui4", which I learned in the private class on thursday. It means "most", as in "what do you like most about Taiwan". 你最喜歡台灣的東西？ I've actually used it several times already ^^

Last friday every scholarship recipients in Taiwan (ministry of education-scholarships) where invited to a welcome party. There were speaches held by the ministry of education, diplomats and prior scholarship recipients. They told us about the scholarship, their experiences in Taiwan, and gave us their advices for our stay in the country. What to see and what to do. We got served a variety of Taiwanese food, dessert, snacks and drinks. Bubble tea were placed on every table for us to enjoy. The recipients from each country got together and got to know eachother and exchange experiences so far. I talked to other beginner-students from other universities, and some of them told me they where only 4 students in their class and that they had already reached lesson 9 in our textbook. We are 9 students in my class, and we've just finished chapter 5. If this is a good or bad thing I'm not sure. We might spend more time on each lesson and so learn the content even better, but we might as well progress slowly because we are more than twice as many in class.. I'm afraid my language center had more applicants than they expected, and therefore put more students together in every class.

This is the appartment building where I live now, 21st floor and a nice view :)

October 10th is a national holiday, so there's no class. There will be some happenings in Taipei during the day which would be fun to see. The problem is that we have mid-term exam the day after, so I guess I'll rather stay home or at the library to study. After the exam I plan to explore some of the available cinemas in Taipei, and hopefully find a good movie. Friday afternoon our class plan to go to a mooncake-factory, and there we'll try make some moon cake ourself. Looking forward to another challenging and fun week.