Settling In

Tuesday morning, 8 PM, this twelve hour time difference will be a killer when the jet lag wears off. We didn't do a whole lot on Sunday because the school was closed and our Taiwanese buddies had other obligations. So Logan and I watched a few DVDs, he watched season 4 of The Office and I watched The Boondocks. We also went and used the "gym" on the first floor of our building, though it's not really a gym, just a couple of treadmills, cycles, and a stepper machine.

Yesterday we did quite a bit more, though I woke up with a cold. These beds are a lot different from what we are used to in the states. Hardly any padding and a hard wooden bed frame beneath. I blame the cold on my sleeping without any sort of cover but it is just a cold after all so no point in letting it hold me back.

Anyways, yesterday we woke up early like all days so far but each day we wake up later and later which is good. At around nine we walked to the NCKU campus and started the registration process for the school. I'm glad Logan and I came prepared with all the paperwork because even that wasn't enough. A huge cultural difference at least in a business sense from the US if that they expect you to bring the original and many copies of it. The same went for the lease and the other paperwork we had to sign for the dorm. We ended being the copier machine by filling out three seperate leases and the other paperwork.

I digress however, our first stop was the IIM office because Logan was trying to find Adam his Taiwanese buddy. The office was closed when we first got there since we were there right at nine when the school opens. Though an office worker was soon there and able to point us towards the international affairs office. We made our way to the IA office and started turning in peperwork, unfortunately for Logan he had misplaced the copy of his passport that he had and had to run back to our dorm, maybe a mile away, while he was gone I met a girl from Columbia who is also in the IMBA program. She was nice and already knew a far amount of Chinese because she had spent a year in Taipei under some sort of scholarship. When Logan got back we finalized all of the paperwork and headed to a local photo shop to get a few more passport pictures taken. This is where we stumbled onto another cultural difference, the local Kodak place can't give you pictures in ten minutes. They wanted us to come back at 2 PM, four hours away, so we headed to our room by way of 7-11. At 7-11 we paid our tuition fees... yes the convience store, which is another big difference from there to here.

I'm not entirely sure what it was but Logan was really keen on starting to learn the language when we got back to the room. So we both started working on Rosetta stone and spent about two hours going through the lessons on it. At one point I took a break and started day one of One Hundred Push-Ups. Who knows if I'll keep up with it for the next sixty days but we'll see. For the last hour or two of our four hour wait Logan and I played with Google Picasa. Since I had only inroduced him to it that day Logan was getting his feet wet while I was trying out a new feature that automatically detects like faces so you can tag them, a more advanced version of facebook's photo tagger. Finally two rolled around and we were off to finish registration.

We made a brief stop at the registars office where I was informed I needed another copy of my passport (I had given my only passport copy to the office we were at in the morning). Fortunately, the guy at the desk told us I could submit it today. Stop 3 of our registration was the IIM office so we could sign up for classes. It took a while to figure out how the class registration process worked but once we figured it out we started to register. One problem though is that we found out was that classes we had intended to skip all together, since we had taken classes related to them in undergard, credit hours had to be replaced with other classes. There is a more advanced process to avoid having to make up the credit hours but for now it's somewhat snagged by school politics.

Victor Chen, a friend of Dr. Chen from ASU, officed was our next stop in the whirlwind tour of the campus. The visit was short and sweet, we talked about how we ended up here, some local restaurants to eat at, and a bit about the origins of the IMBA program. Once our visit with Victor was over we went to meet up with Adam.

Adam had to finish working his job of helping people register so we waited around for a while. When he was done Jennifer met up with us and we went to buy Logan running shoes. Logan seemed to know what he wanted almost instantly so we went to eat at a local place. I think I've fallen in love with Milk Tea, it's simple to make but it's so good. Along with the tea we ate pork and rice. The last part of the day was spent hanging out with Jen and Adam showing pictures to each other of our travels.

A few notes about the blog, the pictures to the right are from an album I created for this trip. Also, Logan has made his own blog at: logan-reittinger.blogspot.com