#19 Back to Kindergarten :)

I started taking a Mandarin class to learn some words or short sentences to prepare for my trip to China. I feel I am like Adam Sandler in Billy Madison :), luckily, I am the only one in the class, and I don’t have the big yellow school bus to pick me up in the morning 🙂 I found learning Mandarin very difficult especially here in Taiwan, I have to learn some alphabets that are different than the Chinese characters you see on some stores. These alphabets would allow the student to properly pronounce a word. In china, they use what’s known as pinyin – western alphabets- to teach Mandarin but not in Taiwan. The tone on how you say the words affect the meaning, so a rising tone for the same word can have different meaning than a falling tone, and Mandarin has 4 different tones. It’s very challenging especially for someone like me who’s very monotone but I am not expecting too much, it takes a long time and a lot of dedication to learn any language and learning Mandarin will take even more. The teacher has been very helpful and flexible; she tries to speak to me in English sometimes.

It’s interesting to read sometimes the news. Two recent events in Taiwan made it to the news headlines, which I found interesting. The first was the recent food scare. Some food suppliers were caught adding some chemical products DEHP and DOP to juices, jams and some food supplements. Instead of using palm oil, these suppliers were adding DEHP which usually used in coloring plastics. The government has been cracking down on these businesses and they’ve been pulling many products from supermarkets and some night-markets. I heard some of these products made their way to Europe and North America. Taiwan prides itself with producing high quality products that’s not like Made in China and this incident made some people ashamed that this happened. You can see in one of the caricature pictures and many editorials have been critical of the government who allowed this to happen.
The other event is about the youngster in China who sold his kidneys to buy IPad 2, it makes you wonder how stuff and money making some of us forget our humanity, and how our life get sucked into these things as we grow up.

I visited Shifen waterfall close to Taipei, about 2 hours to the east, it’s really nice. Especially these days, it’s really nice to be close to the water. The temperature is going in the high 30s with a lot of humidity.