View from my quarantine hotel room
First Quarantine Experience
To summarize my experience in quarantine, it was not the worst experience in the world, but definitely not the most fun one either. I am beyond grateful that we only had to quarantine for a week as opposed to 14 or even 21 days as was the case before. All of CET orientation took place online over Zoom. When I wasn’t occupied with that, I spent most of my time watching TV to get in some language input. My favorite channel was MTV Taiwan because they would stream a lot of Taiwanese pop music videos which usually included lyrics. I also surprisingly enjoyed watching the commercials that, while repetitive, were so catchy and fun.
I kept the blinds in my room wide open during the day to help adjust to the new time, and while I had no trouble sleeping the first few days, jet lag was rough in the latter half of the quarantine. I would find myself waking up at 5am and unable to fall back asleep.
Since we were not allowed to leave the hotel room, all three meals were delivered to us during our stay. We did have the option to order UberEats or FoodPanda to the hotel which turned out the be a blessing because my stomach did not always agree with the hotel provided food, or sometimes I would be so hungry between meal times.
Please enjoy the following food dump:
First Week of Chinese Class
The first week of Chinese class was a bit of an adjustment for me since having spent a semester in Latvia in full Russian-language immersion, my Chinese was definitely rusty. Additionally, due to now studying in Taiwan, all of our textbook and homework assignments are written in 繁體字 (traditional characters), so adjusting to using these has been a bit of a challenge. I am really enjoying the small class size however! There are only six students in my class, three of us from the U.S., and the other three from Europe.