第八日

Taipei feels enough like home now that I'm not even guilt-ridden at the prospect of sleeping in instead of rising with the birds and street-sweepers. It was probably for the best if I didn't want to collapse in the middle of the day.
Another class with the Cosmos professor, but this one was more about down-to-earth Taiwanese culture and was actually pretty interesting! After our culture class we met up for group lunch with a girl who had done the program last year and now taught English in Taipei. She was pretty cool, but did not use any contractions at all, which was a little disconcerting. Still extremely jealous that she lives here, though! Here is what the food was:"Dry" noodles, some form of greens, fish ball soup (way more delicious than expected!) and some salted pork. Ate until my stomach gurgled menacingly.All was accompanied by the ever-present bubble milk tea. What am I going to do without it in the states? Oh, probably sob for days or something. We'll see.
This was a classy day, the second being "Culture and Lifestyles in Taiwan" which was the BEST CLASS, really. She taught us so much not only about Taiwan, but the difference between collectivist and individualistic societies in general. I honestly learned a lot about why I respond to certain things in certain ways just by finding out about how being raised in an individualistic society leads to certain a cultural consciousness. She even went into the theory behind all of it! I took four pages of notes instead of doodling. That's how interesting it was.
A good thing about today is that it was chock full of free meals (free for me, anyway)! We supped at a place called Din Taifung (鼎泰豐), a restaurant so famous it has its own wikipedia article. It's a dumpling house where all the big movie stars go when visiting Taiwan. I didn't see any, but the food sure was good! A shame that we bankrupted the Taiwanese government in the process of buying it!
Not many good pictures, we were eating the food as soon as it hit the table. A hard life.
After dinner we went and explored the Shida night market, a smaller and slightly classier version of Shilin. I bought a shirt with an owl on it. Instead of showing you that, here's some arty pictures for ya.
This last one is the wall of an ice cream (not really ice cream, more like shaved ice with condensed milk and flavoring on it, ridiculously good) joint we ate at in Shida. It was like Gino's East in the category of write-onable walls. We even got the coolest seats of the house in a little booth!
Leaving you with this thought:Reflect~