Jiu Fen

A city on a hill overlooking the ocean. This place is gorgeous if you do it right.

What to do:

Jiu Fen consists of winding streets on full of cute shops and food... after looking at shops and eating tons of cool street vendor stuff, my cousins and I went to a tea place overlooking it all! You'll just have to see for yourself...

Night Life - list of places I've been to

Clubs

Luxy - Wed ladies night is free, weekends are 500 NT ($15US) before 11pm and $900 ($27US) after and you get one free drink ticket. Its a big club with 2 stories and 3 dance floors. Pretty hot right now in Taipei.

Room 18 - Wed ladies night is free, weekends are 600NT ($20) and you get two free drink ticket. Its definitely smaller than Luxy. It has two rooms, one for hip hop and one for techno. It's the club where famous asian people go :)

MOS - still haven't been there, but its 30 minutes by taxi. I heard its HUGE and is the best club out there so far.

PLUSH - a very pretty place though I hear it just got remodeled (changed owners). The prices are still expensive like Luxy. Weekends are 700NT for girls and guys. But its definitely a place everyone goes to.

Bars (which are kinda clubs in themselves)

Lava - Wed. I don't know what they do, but Thursday is all you can drink night... ladies are 300 and guys are 600. Its right across from Room 18. A lot of international people like to go there so thats always fun. The drinks are definitely cooler than VS (vacuum space)!!!



These are midori sours and peach sours... and when they say sour... be prepared to pucker!

Lounges/Bars/Club type

Brown Sugar - its this very hip jazz club thats close to Room 18 and Lava. The atmosphere rocks because they actually brink in real jazz bands and singers from the US or wherever. Make reservations or get there early to get a table. Its a restaurant too so you can eat and drink. I recommend the Sangria.

MINT - this is probably the most expensive and most famous spotting club right now. Its at the base of Taipei 101. Weekends its $700 for ladies ($23) and $1000 for guys ($30US). Here you don't have to worry about getting a bad drink because they're ALL good. Its also the place to spot supermodels... not just asian ones, but european ones too. They definitely care about what you are wearing, so as the US says "dress to impress"... and here they smoke cigars and not cigarettes, so that tells you the level of this place.

TU (Taipei Underground) - this place is another all you can drink place... prices are the same (girls cheap guys not). Ladies night is on Thursdays and its 100 for girls and 500 or 600NT for the guys. This place is kind of small but bigger than VS. It's located right past the Da An stop, so you can take the MRT for 1 stop if you want to.

Cheers Ni Ni - its a bar located near Carnegie's (another bar) which is close to the FarEast Hotel. It's also walking distance from Tai Da. There's no cover and its decorated very modern or 70's cool with a lot of funky comfy furniture. The dj is good and it has a great environment.

Brass Monkey - its located near the 2nd to last stop on the brown line. It's around a lot of companies and cool restaurants. This area in general is full of "foreigners" so brass monkey by default has a lot of white people. Ladies night is Thursday and girls are free, drinks are not.

There were more, but that'll come later

School Life - The Process

I decided to wait awhile before talking about school at Tai Da because I figured that it would take me some time to get used to their system. At first you'll hate it, then if you have cool teachers you'll learn to enjoy class time, but definitely not the homework. Here's how it works

When you get to Tai Da, you take a language placement test. There's a written portion and an interview portion.

For the written portion, there's 1) listening comprehension... like tones and short short stories and 2) reading comprehension where you read through long passages and such. This test is hard. Most people leave a portion completely blank, usually the last parts of each sections because the questions get harder as you go along. The 2nd year chinese book definitely doesn't cover everything, but no worries, leaving things blank is expected.

For the interview, they ask your name in chinese, the meaning of your name and a series of questions. In cases where they think you don't speak that well, they will ask you to repeat sentences after them. This part is actually hard because its like 2-3 part sentences and personally I forgot parts of it once she kept saying more and more. hahah.
After all this, you'll find out what 3 classes you got placed in. One for speaking and two for reading/comprehension...usually. They also offer Taiwanese, which this year they had to make 2 classes. Even though we all "supposedly" took 2 years of chinese prior to Tai Da, they still have the ability to place you into level 1 out of 7 which is the very beginning. Most people I know are in level 2 and 3, and you can be placed in different levels for the 3 different classes. If you test well enough, you'll be able to talk Tai Da classes, although a lot of their departments off classes in english...so go look into those. The only problem with Tai Da classes is that they don't take their finals until about the second week of January.

Classes start in the morning at 8am or 9am. The majority of people start at 9am (8am is for the 1st Taiwanese class). You go for 3 hours until noon. You guys, or people from CA, are called the Jia Zhou Ban and pretty much get special classes just for CA and your own floor in the language center.

THE HOMEWORK LOAD
Taiwan's teaching style is definitely different from America's. There's more preparation needed, and more time spent on homework.

First of all, you MUST read the book before you go to class. You aren't allowed to open the book while in class and the teacher asks you questions about the passage expecting you to know what the book said. This definitely takes time to getting used to because you semi memorizing the book's content. Secondly, like the summer chinese intensive class, there is a Ting Xie (vocab quiz) every morning on the vocab words found within the pages you had to read. I heard it's a lot better this year because my classes only test 5 words whereas last year were tested on 10. Depending on the teacher, you might get the word straight up OR she gives you a sentence and you're expected to know what vocab word to put in.

For my speaking class, "Discussions on Chinese Culture," we have daily vocab quizzes, weekly homework, a grammar quiz after each lesson, a speech or debate after every 2 lessons, and a test after every 2 lessons. For my other class "Everyday Chinese III," we have daily vocab quizzes, weekly homework, and a weekly test after every lesson. This class' pace goes at 1 lesson per week, which is about 60-80 vocab words in a week for one class. Yes it's fast, and I guarantee you you'll forget the words after you learn them BUT the midterm will just force it back in your brain.

If you test into a level 3/4 writing class, be prepared for daily essays and tons and tons of homework. Also, movie classes (don't be fulled by the name) take up a lot of time and have a ton of homework too. The movie classes force you to watch the movies on your OWN time, so I know a bunch of students who have switched out of that.

ELECTIVES
They give you 3 electives to choose from (all taught in english). They are seminars so its only once a week for 2.5-3 hrs. This year we have Survey of Chinese Thought, Art in Taiwan, and Chinese Fiction.

Survey of Chinese Thought - I chose this class so I actually know how it works. There's weekly reading, although I don't necessarily do all of it. There's one research paper (6 pages), a presentation on the paper, and take-home short essay questions for the final. You discuss a ton of different people influential to Chinese Philosophy. I fall asleep in the class sometimes, but thats just my habit. If you're interested in it, then its a pretty chill class to take

Art in Taiwan - this is what I've heard. There's opinion papers every so often, which you can probably whip out in an hour or two. And there are class field trips to museums in Taipei (on your own time of course). I'm not exactly sure how the final works, but I know its more work and time than the philosophy class. If you don't choose this class, but want to go to the museums, you can pay to go with them on the bus...so you don't necessarily have to pick this one if you just want to look at the art and not analyze it.

Chinese Fiction - so far I heard that its the most work out of the 3. There are lots of readings (being a fiction class) and you have to do group presentations every so often. Thats all I know about this one.

ATTENDANCE
I don't even know if I spelled attendance right!!! (your english will become very sucky while you're here).

So out of the semester that you're here for... 12-14 weeks depending... you get to miss 4 days of class without penalty. After that they start taking it out of your grade. Here's the unfair part... the regular ICLP (people not from CA) get to miss 40% of class without penalty. That means that if they wanted to, they only have to go to class 3 day a week!!! No matter what EAP tells you, you do get Thanksgiving off because ICLP is nice to you. Apparently they give it to the rest of the students, and the teachers/staff don't want to come in just for the California kids, so we get 2 days off for the US holiday!!! Other than Thanksgiving, you may or may not have 1-2 Taiwan holidays off and thats it. It depends if it falls on a weekday or not (which MidAutumn Festival fell on a sunday for us...big disappointment).

Overall, since each class only has a maximum of 7 students, the teacher will definitely know if you're missing. Choose your missed days wisely, and if you're doing well, then go ahead and miss more than 4 days (although I know of no one who's doing that).

We all pretty much hate class when you first get it. I mean absolutely hate it! People stay up until 2,3,4,5,6 in the morning to do homework. You only have weekends to go and see Taiwan, so make use of your time wisely...

Night Life - KTV

Kareoking, of course, is HUGE here. One thing is that if you go out on Friday or Saturday night, then the prices are more expensive AND you have to make reservations because they'll be packed. We had a 12 person room and squeezed 15 ppl in it! Plus we had our own bathroom which makes it extra convenient. I would suggest you to go out in big groups because then it's cheaper. I heard of a case when there were only like 5 people and it cost them $1000 NTD per person (about $30 US dollars) whereas we had 15 and the entire night cost $370 (about $11).

When you go kareoking, they also each person some "credit" to buy drinks or food, so we just put all the money together and got a couple pitcher of beer and some food. The music that you enter plays randomly so you never knew which song would come up. It made it a little bit more inconvenient because some songs just never played. The entire night was a blast though, so to fully get into the asian culture... you must go KTV!!!

Dorm Life

If you're used to living in the residence halls, then the dorms here shouldn't be extremely different. It takes some getting used to, as do all things, but eventually you'll be very happy here. The first thing I noticed was that the homes and dorms here don't have carpet, so students just go out and buy these puzzle piece looking things to put on the floor and make it cushier. Since I am only here for a semester, I live on the 2nd floor, however people who are here for a year can decide if they want to live on the 4th floor (with your own bathroom). Here's my room and the hallway. I bought puzzle pieces with carpet while others bought thick rubber colorful ones.


The 2nd floor is split in 2 basically. One side is the guys and the other is the girls. Some students actually decided to not live in the dorms, but I feel that they're missing out on a TON of fun. Like regular dorms we all just mingle and go out and party... whatever you like to do, they're be someone here to keep you company.