I woke up early today, and it looks like I'll be waking up early every day, which sucks. Isn't spring break supposed to be time to catch up on sleep? Oh well. I had breakfast at the hotel with my dad, one of his old classmates who donated funding for this study abroad program, and the Dean of the School of Management at Purdue. The meal was pretty nice; I'd never eaten buffet for breakfast before, but they had a tasty assortment of foods.
After the meal, we went to the National Palace Museum, which is supposed to be one of the best museums in the world. We met up with some of the other study abroad students and our Taiwanese student hosts, but didn't stay at the museum very long (I arrived late). Unfortunately, I'm not much of a museum person, and it was jam-packed with people, so I can't really say the experience was very notable.
After we left, our hosts took us to a Japanese restaurant, which was pretty good. I didn't know what to order (and I never do), so I just let someone order for me, though I have no idea what her name is, or if she even ever said. It was interesting, though, to see some of the other students from Purdue coming to Taiwan, since some of them were vehemently against trying out foreign foods.
Post-lunch, we visited some department stores, since we had an assignment to "observe Taiwanese consumer behaviors." Needless to say, there wasn't that much to observe, but based off of the ones we visited, they're a lot nicer than the average store you see in America. It's interesting to see that their "mall" isn't actually one giant building. Instead, it's a network of buildings that go up several (e.g., five) floors. After visiting the department stores, we went to visit Taipei 101, a giant, high tech skyscraper with lots of overly expensive clothing outlets. It was quite nice inside, but some of us didn't feel like walking around, so we just sat down and talked.
Our last stop before dinner was at the RT-MART, which is, I suppose, the Taiwanese Wal-Mart. Here, we "observed" more consumer behaviors before buying a bunch of snacks and eating them all. Our hosts seemed really interested in finding out of what we thought about their food, which I thought was great, but I'd tasted it before. The crowd I was with seemed to react well to the snacks as well (there was some Chinese beef jerky, egg tart, that one squid snack).
For dinner, we went to a Korean restaurant (funny how we haven't had any Chinese food yet...are they hiding something?), where again, I had no idea what to order. I had another girl order some random stuff for me, which turned out to be some spicy soup with kimchi and some other random stuff. After I got over the scalding temperature, it was a pretty good meal, but the same people at lunch weren't having a very good time at dinner.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel, where I zoned out for awhile with Queen playing in the background. After sufficient time was spent zoning out, I showered and passed out.
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