Fin - The End!

Well I finally made it back in Los Angeles. Aside from my garbage disposal not working and one burned out light bulb, everything else seems to be ok and in working order. I even drove my car to the post office and picked three months worth of mail that they held for me (that should be fun to go through). So all in all, everything is ok back home in the USA. A few days off to rest, and then back to work on Monday...man it all seems like a strange dream.

I want to again thank my family and friends in Taiwan and the USA, but also thank my bosses and coworkers at Line 6 for letting me take this break and for picking up the slack while I was gone. It was a trip of a lifetime and I learned and did a hell of a lot of things. I'm also going to continue to learn more Chinese. I've worked very hard and come a long way in the past three months and I'm not about to give up on it.

Thanks for reading the blog, it was certainly a fun and interesting way to document my journey.

Now off to Carl's Jr to get me a Western Bacon Cheeseburger and some Chili Cheese Fries...mmmmm.

Jim

Last post from Taiwan

24 hours from now I will be on a plane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean flying back to Los Angeles. It's been an amazing three months, that have gone by very quickly. I'll answer a few questions to document this crazy event:

After 11 weeks of classes, 4 hours a day of additional studying, and living in Taiwan for 12 weeks, can you speak Chinese?

I can have a very basic conversation with people using only Chinese. It is frustrating, slow and humorous, but I can communicate with others only using Chinese. The unfortunate thing is right now, as I am leaving, I really feel like I am starting to pick up the language at an accelerated rate. If I could stay here for six months instead of just three months, I'd say I'd be able to speak the language at a very basic, but comfortable level.

When are you going to return back to Taiwan?

Honestly, I have no idea. Over the past 10 years I've visited Taiwan 10 times, perhaps the law of averages knows better than I do, but I really have no idea when I will be coming back. With a house, job, car, music and other commitments in Los Angeles, I'll have my hands full in the near future with a lot of things.

Are you going to continue to study Chinese in the USA?

Absolutely. I have a few books and DVD's that I will be working with to continue my studies. I've worked so hard and come so close to speaking the language at a comfortable level that I just can't see myself giving up. UCLA supposedly has some very good Chinese classes and there are three people at my job who speak Chinese, so I have no excuse for not continuing my studies.

I'm going to post one last blog when I return to the USA, but this is it from the Far East. I want to thank my wife Charlene, her family, my teacher Tian Lao Shi, my classmates and my friends for showing me a wonderful time in this great country of Taiwan.

"Zai jian wo de peng you!"

Jim

Going away party

We invited a few friends and classmates to go out to dinner to celebrate my "going away" back to the USA. Most of us met up and had some great food at a Korean BBQ restaurant a few blocks from our apartment. After eating we all walked back to our apartment for a few drinks. For fun I took out the guitar and played a little. Led Zepplin, Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac and even some old Van Halen. The best part of the party was jamming with the five year old son of Charlene's friend from college. Me on heavy metal guitar and he on a small percussive instrument we bought in Thailand.

We had a few more drinks, surfed YouTube for some hilarious versions of Chocolate Rain and ended the night. It was a nice way to hang out with friends, practice my Chinese, play some music and say goodbye. Everyone in Taiwan has been extremely kind and friendly to me, it's been a great trip.

Back to the USA in three days.

Jim

Chinese class completed

392 Chinese character flash cards, that's the final total now that the class is completed. Today was our last class and Final Exam.

The final exam wasn't too difficult, but it certainly wasn't easy. Everyone in class was given a different one page story written only in Chinese characters. We had 20 minutes to read and research our one page story. Then we individually stepped outside of class and had to read our story (with proper pronunciation and tones) to the teacher. Then after this, we were asked five questions by the teacher in Chinese about the story and had to answer these questions in Chinese. Out of the six students I was the second to go. I was a little more nervous than I thought reading the story, but I ended up reading the story OK and answering all five questions correctly. I was told "hen bang" (great or awesome) by the teacher so I guess I did well.

The class was pretty crazy because we studied all 12 chapters of the book in the time when they normally only study 8 chapters (our class was the first to try this new compressed schedule). The last few weeks I couldn't review or practice the older material because I was just trying to stay caught up with the newest material. I feel like my Chinese got a little worse the last few weeks, but we were all very lucky to have an amazing teacher, Tian Lao Shi, pull the entire class through this extremely difficult and fast paced material.

I knew the class was not going to be easy, and I had studied a little on my own a month before I came, but beginning Chinese is EXTREMELY difficult, and was much harder than I had imagined. It was probably the second most difficult class I have taken in my entire life. The only more difficult class I have taken was Astrophysics when I was getting my electrical engineering degree (I mistakenly thought I signed up for Astronomy, but that's another story).

Well I'm finished with my class, but I have a number of books that I'm going to continue learning from when I return to the USA next week. The initial learning curve of Chinese is very tough, but I think if you can make it through the first few months, the rest will become a little easier. This Chinese class was an amazing experience and I consider myself very lucky to have had the taken it with such a great teacher and classmates.

One last weekend to enjoy in Taiwan, then back to the USA on Wednesday.

Jim

Last week of classes

This is the last week of my Chinese class. It is sad in a way because in the past week I've really started to hear things better. I'm hearing and understanding a lot more phrases and words in conversations and television than when I first arrived 10 weeks ago. Instead of just random sounds and a few occasional words I understand, now I'm beginning to at least have a general idea of what people are saying. I'm still not very good at speaking, but I can get my point across to most people, albeit with horrific grammar.

It's strange to think that two weeks from today I will be back at my job in Los Angeles. No longer a student, and back to an electrical engineer; I don't think it is going to be an easy adjustment.

The last few steps of my thousand mile journey are quickly approaching.

Jim

Hualien

At 7:00am on New Year's day, after three hours of sleep, we left for the Taipei train station to go to Hualien. Everything went well, we arrived early for our 8:15am train. We boarded the train, took our seats, and the train left the station. While we were sitting a man came up to us, showed us his ticket and said we were in his seat, we showed him our tickets as they both said the same seat number. He left and we felt bad for him. He returned with the ticket man from the train...apparently we were the unlucky ones, we boarded the wrong train. I wondered why we boarded an 8:00am train when the ticket said 8:15am, this explains the conflict. This is a picture before we found out we were on the wrong train. The guy standing in back is the guy whose seat I am sitting in.

This was a major problem because every train was sold out this weekend going to Haulien. We got off at the first stop and took a taxi back to the original station but we missed our "real" train. We ended up getting on a 9:30am train and stood in the middle aisle for two hours and finally got to sit in a seat the last hour of the three hour train ride. Not the best way to start the trip.

We arrived at the train station in Hualien and were picked up by a driver from the hotel we were staying at. Our friend Ping is originally from the east coast so he hooked us up with a very nice and friendly hotel. We dropped off our bags and went out to downtown Hualien for lunch and a little shopping. We played some games at a fake gambling video game store and I even bought a DVD of my favorite show in Taiwan from the MOMO children's television channel. We went back to the hotel and then basically passed out for the night. The next day was an all day tour of Taroko National Park, the biggest attraction in the area.

Taroko National Park was beautiful, it reminded me a lot of the mountain areas of Colorado and Northern California. Many beautiful mountains, rivers and cliffs.

The road driving through the park is very narrow and quite scary on a large tour bus. The road took four years to build and 450 men died in the process. There were mountains, a river, rocks, gorges and marble was everywhere. I can see how this is the largest marble gorge in the world, it is literally everywhere you look.

Later that night after returning from Taroko National Park, we went out to the Hualien Night Market. There was food everywhere and many games to play. You could toss rings and win a giant Sponge Bob doll or even baby piglets.

Charlene got down to serious business and won some more dolls from the "crane game".

Before we went home from the night market we went to the back area on the beach. Everyone was lighting fireworks. We bought a "red lantern", wrote our good wishes for 2009, lit the lantern and sent it on its way.

The next day our train left at 5:00pm so we had a few hours to kill. We checked out of our hotel and took a trip to a Liyu Lake. We ate some local food and had just enough money to take a one hour paddle boat ride.

We got off the boat, walked around the the lake a little and got into a taxi to go back to the hotel and then the train station. We stopped by the hotel, grabbed our bags, said our thanks and goodbye and off we went to the Hualien train station. Charlene triple checked that we had the right tickets and the right train for the ride back. These are the right tickets and the right train:

This time we were able to sit in seats for the entire three hour train ride. We had to deal with around 15 screaming children in our train car, but that's the price you pay for public transportation and bad parenting. Either way Haulien was a beautiful place and we were very, very lucky to visit it with such great weather. It stopped raining a few hours before New Year's Eve at Taipei 101 and started raining about 2 hours after we got back from our trip to Haulien.

That's a pretty good start to 2009.

Jim

Happy New Year 2009

Wow, in world record fashion we left for the Taipei 101 fireworks display at 10:30pm, got there at 11:00pm, waited for an hour, saw the show (with a few hundred thousand other people) and got home at 12:35am. This might not seem like a big deal, but everyone was telling us we would be stuck downtown for hours after the fireworks display waiting for the subway and get home around 3:00am.

We arrived at 11:00pm and found a nice spot on the street to watch the show. It was about 5 blocks away from Taipei 101 and conveniently located in front of a McDonald's. We even enjoyed a delicious 6 piece Chicken McNuggets extra value meal while we waited.

Every minute the street filled up with more and more people. There were thousands of people around us setting off firecrackers, lighting sparklers and taking photos with their cameras and cell phones. One guy offered a sparkler to Charlene and me. What the hell, the Chinese did invent fireworks right?

At 12:00am the building went completely dark and the fireworks started. The show was short and sweet lasting about 3 minutes. Here's a pretty good picture I took:

Literally seconds after the fireworks display ended we ran to the nearest subway entrance. We were lucky and were one of the first hundred or so people to get there after the show finished. Here is a picture of everyone behind us waiting to get into the subway station to go home after the fireworks display.

We ended up getting on the subway at 12:15am and actually back inside our apartment by 12:35am. Everyone said it would take us two to three hours to get home...ha! I might not be the best in my Chinese class but I sure as hell am good with directions and getting in and out of places.

Six hours from now we are going to get on a train and ride to the east coast of Taiwan and visit Hualien for three days. For years I've heard about how beautiful the east coast of is, now I'll finally get a chance to see it.

Happy 2009!

Jim