大家好！Despite writing the title and greeting in Chinese, for the sake of readers and myself alike I will be proceeding to write the rest of this post in my new favorite style of writing, Chinglish. My name is Orly, 我的中文名字是阮丽星, and I am spending the summer learning Chinese in Taipei through 哈台班 (Harvard Taipei Academy). I am both really excited for the summer to come and also 一点儿紧张 as I’ve looked through the textbok and it looks like A LOT of material to cover in 四个星期. I arrived in Taiwan a few days before the program started so that I could get acclimated to the time zone and go explore on my own (and by explore I mean find as many fruit stands as possible and eat 很多很多芒果和百香果). What I was not expecting in those first few days was to experience my first earthquake, but that also did occur. To be honest it happened at 7pm and I was like half asleep because I was still so jetlagged so I just remember thinking this is so weird why is my room shaking? Is this some really strange 噩梦？Don’t worry though, everything ended up just fine, Taipei is geniusly designed so that all the buildings here deal with 地震 really well as they are a fairly frequent occurrence.
Two days ago I signed our language pledge (don’t worry I’m allowed to write in 英文 still), and to be honest I think I’ll have to update you on how it feels in the next couple of posts, right now its just a little unreal. I’m also a little overwhelmed with the start of classes just because its a 新课程制度 thats pretty different from what I’ve done at Williams, so I may need a minute to adjust to it all. I am having so much fun though and I already 爱台北 a lot, so I can’t wait to keep updating you all! See you later! -Orly