The second week here has been a bit more quiet. Not so much happened as the first week I were here.

I put up a few of the pictures I took during this week on flickr already, clicky! 

Still, this week has been a bit harder on me because I haven't been feeling very well all the time. It's not because I have been sick, but I think my system is not really used to the food yet and since I have been eating the food and breathing the air here for a long time now, my system is about to run out of danish.

So this makes me very tired every time I haven't eaten for a while, and I can get headaches if I breathe polluted air directly from the streets below for too long. Especially the previous two days have been hard on me, but today I actually feel very well. Perhaps my body is finally adjusting to the environment, and if it is, it wasn't that painfull actually.

During this week I got to meet the other exchange students in my district, although only very brief.

A good advice I'd like to give out for anyone else going to do the same as me: (suddently jump from a north-european country like Denmark, to a tropical country on the other side of the globe like Taiwan,) is to make sure to drink a lot of water and have a lot of snack with you so that you can eat something every few minutes, and when you eat a meal, eat a lot. The food is very delicious down here, so there's no reason you shouldn't - however, try to stick with the soups, rice and noodles, perhaps eat some sushi or cooked chicken and a lot of vegetables for starters. Some of the rice cakes can be hard to digest so they're better to save for a time when your system is more used to the food, and also meat is always a good thing to limit when you're in another country.

Oh, and don't buy the cakes down here if you're looking for something that tastes sweet. If you're lucky, you get a crunchy bamboo-something, and if you're not, you might get yourself something with some rice powder that has a slightly sweet but absolutely horrible taste. (But if you really crave cakes very much, you can probably find some cake with actual sugar at a japanese store if you're willing to go and look long enough.) 

Today I finally managed to get really lost.

My route is quite complicated, because in the morning I have to take first a bus to the MRT (Metropolitan Rapid Transit - or the metro railway) station in ShiPai, then take the MRT to C.K.S. Memorial Hall, go to the Mandarin Daily News Language Center and have a 2h lesson, then go find a bus to KaiNan Highschool near Shandao Temple, stay in the school untill I get off, then go to Shandao Temple MRT Station, drive back to ShiPai MRT Station and take the bus home.

Today I was going to do it all on myself, and it went pretty well, just untill I went out of ShiPai MRT Station. From there, it's 5mins bus drive to my home and around 15min if you ust walk there, but I went and took the right bus, but on the wrong side of the road, so I went to the western border of Lujhou City and Joni decided to drive 40min to pick me up so that I didn't get more lost. I was lucky I only went 40 minutes away.

If you're ever going to visit Taiwan, try to stick close to the MRT, which is easy and fast to get around with because the bus system is impossible to comprehend. Everything is in chinese and when they write a map of the bus route, they just make a long line with some dots and squares on that isn't formed like the actual route at all. 

So after answering quite a number of calls and messages from people worried about me, (I have such a nice family, thank you everyone,) Joni took me to eat some steamboats or taiwanese style hot pot.

So, you get a bunch of vegetables and weird meats of every imaginable and unimaginable kind as well as a plate of extra meat you choose yourself that can be beef, pork or chicken, then you boil it in a bowl of boiling broth, which is heated from underneath the table. There's even a control so you can adjust the heat where you sit.

I chose beef, so I got these. Didn't know beef had shells and strange feelers, but I'm so used to see strange stuff I didn't ever try, know or eat before, so you I doubt that even something like cooked martian will make me surprised anymore.

Before you cook your strange stuff that you don't have any idea what is, you take a bunch of random seasonings you haven't really heard about before either except for perhaps the chili and soy sauce. You then put it in a little bowl and mix raw egg into it.

You can then use this rather spicy soup for dipping the stuff you cook in the broth, so that it can be mixed with all sorts of tastes and let you have an overload of new culinary impressions.

And if you're not used to eat a lot then you can ask the waiter for some plastic bags to put the rest of your stuff into, because that's pretty normal around here.