Shingo, Shingo's roommate and myself at lighthouse in Mazu

This past week was the most interesting week of all. I am still not happy with my Chinese class, as some of the material in it I feel is not useful. However, it is still getting better thanks to my good friend Shingo. I am just now getting to know him better. I hope that by the end of this trip we can be better friends, and hopefully we can start a language exchange, as I really need help with Japanese. This past week I also managed to set up a trip with him to go to this island off the coast of China to have fun and get some great photos so I am really looking forward to that. Other than that, I started tutorials with my student and made good efforts to hang out with CIEE members. Unfortunately by the time the weekend arrived the hurricane came in and messed up photo shooting plans for the weekend.

The week didn't start off so hot. After getting a "small" test back and finding out I failed for the 2nd consecutive time I became pissed and just left the classroom. I was still mad the next day so I didn't return. It's funny that you could be here and understand people when they talk and speak with them with decent proficiency and yet when you have stupid multiple-choice questions in front of you, you can manage to get half of them wrong. For one, the teacher's questions on her exams really don't make sense half of the time, even to native speakers. Second, my needs are very special and even in a class of eight people I can't learn the things I need to in order to be proficient unless I have one on one attention. She knows this, but I still think why bother. Frankly I really don't care about the class anymore.

Sunday soon came and so did the hurricane Jangmi, the strongest storm of the season. It packed a larger punch right before it came into Taipei, bringing strong enough winds to shred my umbrella apart as soon as I walked outside. In both hurricanes that hit I lost umbrellas. So there is a price to pay for trying to go out in the middle of such storms. The reason I went out in the first place was to go to church with my Korean friends. It was really nice to be there and listen to Korean all the time, on the other hand, I hadn't spoken Korean in so long it was awkward for me to get back into speaking. It goes back to the saying "if you don't use it, you lose it." Even more exciting was the fact that the church has a family to prepare food for everyone! Good Korean food that is free for everyone; who could deny this as one of the greatest things ever!