Week in Taiwan: Day 3

Thankfully, they provided more time between wake up and leaving to eat breakfast, so I did. Not thankfully, wake up was still at 7:30. The buffet was really busy, so I had to walk around for a bit before I found a seat with Matt F. I ran into kind of an awkward moment, because a waitress tried to take his "I'm sitting here, go away" card while he was up, and I tried to tell her that someone was sitting there in Mandarin. The awkward part was when she didn't know what the hell I was saying; I died a little on the inside.

The first class we had was pretty cool. We had to write papers about consumer behavior in Taiwan (which was 110% made up, in my humble opinion) and the lecture was tailored around stuff we wrote. We mostly had discussions about inane points that people made that were sometimes blatantly false, but it was still fun, because it was interactive (for them; I just sat there). It was also different in that in previous lectures, the MBA students from mainland China were asking all of the questions, but the discussions this morning actually fostered many more questions from the undergrads than MBAs. We also got to see one of our student guides, Bella, since she was a TA of some sort.

Lunch was funny today; we ate at the whitest restaurant they could find. Apparently they heard that some of our crowd couldn't stomach the local food, so we ate at a restaurant called Ken & ______, where the blank is another incredibly Caucasian name that I don't remember. Patricio ordered two filet mignons, two orders of fries, and two Cokes, and he was so happy. I think the only people that ordered Asian food were the Asians.

The afternoon lecture was mundane, but it was one I could understand (and therefore stay awake to), at least; the topic was SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises) in Taiwan, which is kind of interesting, but I guess my mind isn't entrepreneurial enough to care.

For dinner, we went up the local mountain (apparently they have classes up there!) to a tea shop. There were some Taiwanese students that rejoined us, which was cool. I sat at a table with Osiris, Raul, and a guy I'd never met; there were girls that sat at another table. The shop served us a ton of food and we probably didn't even finish half of it, but it was mostly good food. Post-dinner, we moved out to "tea tents" for tea, where we consumed vast amounts of tea over a span of probably two hours. I'm amazed that only one other person had to get up to go to the bathroom; I guess I'm just not man enough. It was a fun night, and we had some interesting conversation. We sat with three of the MBAs, so there were actually only two non-Asian people at the table. One of them, who calls himself Maverick, seems to really enjoy talking, but he comes off as being really, really smart, so he's fun to listen to, despite his insane accent.

After we got back from the tea shop, there was a group going back out to the Shilin market, but I decided against it. I never buy things and we'd just gone yesterday, so I decided to stay in and buy some Internet time and do some catching up (four fairly lengthy blog posts in one night--give me some props, here), and now that it's almost 1:00am, I should get to bed.