Alicia's Report

June 1, 2007

Thank you so much for this amazing experience and here's my report for May.

So I know I promised a report in April about my Taiwan tours and I promise you will get that but for now, on to May.

May started off by going to the marble factory in my city. A little boring but not too bad. We got to miss a day of school and learn about how marble is produced and the different things they make from it. Later that week we got to go to the tallest mountain in my city and that was amazing! The ride up was long and the weather kept getting colder and colder the higher we went but it was so worth it. The air was a lot thinner up there. We wanted to climb up things but lost our breath so easily. There was a little wall around an area at the top that looked like if you looked over the edge it would be a big drop down to the bottom but really the was this super wide ledge, so we made this movie of us pretending to jump off of it and all that. Later that night we showed some people and they got really freaked, that’s how believable it was. The next day, one of our host dad’s took us to 7 Star Lake for the strangest holiday I’ve experienced her in Taiwan: Watermelon Day. We got to got o the beach, hang out, eat watermelon and sausage, make more stupid movies of us shoving sand in each others shirts and pants, and join a watermelon eating contest. That was a lot of fun. The next week on of the exchange student’s mom and aunt came to visit, so we got to meet up with them a couple time, show them around town, and eat. Then, three really big events happened. 1) Our winter to summer uniform switch. The school’s here obviously go by the calendar and not the weather when it comes to this, because it’s been summer here since March. 2) We lost two of our exchange students. One from Thailand and another from the States went home. 3) Moving day! For the last time this year, we were switching host families. The plan was that we would go back to our original host families for the end of the year, but things got changed around, so instead we went back to our second host family. It was really disappointing because I’d been looking forward to moving back. I’d gotten super close with my first family and not moving back was a bit of a shock, but my second family is cool and I like them a lot. Plus, they had just moved into a new house when I moved to my third family, so it’s awesome that I get to live here for real now. The weekend of Mother’s Day nice, I made my host mother’s cards and gave them flowers but it was really weird not being with my own mom. Seeing the host family’s kids with their mom’s made me really miss my own. The next weekend was our last Rotary district event. We had our Mandarin speech contest which went ok. I was super nervous and shaking the entire time I was talking. I’m still not very good at speaking in front of a large group. For 5 days I stayed in Taipei and got to see the city. All the other times I’d been to Taipei it was always Rotary, so I decided to stay this time and get a taste of what’s so good about Taipei. I stayed with another exchange student and went to so many different places: Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world, Shilin Night Market, one of Taiwan’s famous night markets full of great food, Ximen, an awesome shopping district, Long Shan Temple, a gorgeous building with an amazing indoor and outdoor architect, and so many others. However, no matter how cool Taipei was, it’s nice to be back in my beautiful city of Hualien. The weekend after that, we went to help out at a Rotary sponsored drawing contest in the really pretty park, which was super hot, but nice to hang out and relax again. Of course after wards, we had to spend our time writing what is supposed to be our last speech of Taiwan. Our school has an English contest every year and they wanted us exchange students to participate, but in Chinese. ARGGGGGGGG!!!!!! WHY?!?!?! I wrote about the friends I had made while on exchange, with my class mates and the other exchange students. It was a good speech but no matter how many times I do it, I can’t speak in public very well. Once again I was shaking and scared. The sad part is, I’ve spent an entire year with these people and I still get this way L Oh well. Someday, it’ll get better….I hope.