Orientation and food stuffs

So, originally I had thought that the group and I had avoided the worst of the jet lag, but lo and behold it hit us hard yesterday. I think most of us had a five hour nap around mid afternoon. Good thing we didn't have anything planned for the rest of the day.

Today we had orientation, which consisted of us being introduced to our very helpful student teachers. They speak english very well and are not afraid to correct my Mandarin (which I really appreciate by the way). Speaking of being schooled on my Language ability. We took a placement test today that consisted of sentence construction and listening. I don't think anyone was very confident, but we got our results back all the same. We will be divided up into two classes. Intermediate and pre-Intermediate. I am proud to say that I barely scraped into the Upper division class. (Let it be noted that I was number 3 after the top two-- who are native Chinese speakers by the way...hahaha). I was glad to hear that our class will be forced to speak Mandarin all the time. That is what I am here for, so I am glad we can jump right in.

In other news, the group was treated to a really GREAT meal by the school. We had all of our new teaching assistants and professors there. It was an 8 course meal and it was delicious. We had, beef, gooey duck, bass, chicken neck, sea cucumber, shrimp.... you name it we had it. And, Yes real asian food is so much better that the stuff in the states. I felt like Andrew Zimern on Bizare Foods (its a T.V show btw). I was in heaven. The dinner was filled with some great conversations and interesting moments as we tried to speak with our teachers. For the rest of the day, our wonderful student guides took us into downtown Taipei and we had some very interesting Taiwanese ice cream.

**Say hello to our street vendor breakfast.... Oyster noodle soup. Yes these are real oysters and yes it was delicious.