明德高中aka Mingder aka The school of marshmallows

Do you want to look like a giant marshmallow? Then this is your must choose high school!

Okaay so I haven't really introduced my dear school to you, have I ? Yeah that's what I thought. So here. This post is dedicated to the school of marshmallows.

Let's start with the official name. 新北市立明德高級中學. But we call it just mingder because it's so much easier and more convenient than thiiis...

In our school we have junior high school and senior high school and also a kindergarten. In our senior high school side we have three buildings and gym. And basketball court and running track. The school building is nowhere near finnish school buildings. We don't walk in from the doors and that, we just walk in and up the stairs and then we go in to classroom. So we are like "outside" all the time.

This is the library building. Our chinese classroom is here. And we spent most of our days in there doing nothing...

This cat lived at our school earlier but now I haven't seen it for a while :(

The school uniform! Prettyyy neh? The knee high socks are must and black or white shoes. No make up or hair accessories. No jewellery. No rolling up..pants? (umm I don't know english word for "lahje" haha) We have a scary military teacher who sometimes checks that we are following the rules. Our sport uniform has purple pants and grey shirt. The winter shirt is purple and when wearing it everybody looks like they're wearing pyjamas :DD Oh and I gave our school that marshmallow name because we have white puffy coats and we look exactly like marshmallows with them on! We also have school bags that keep annoying squeak sound and it has our schools name on it.

School lunch. It's free for us exchange student but others have to pay for it. Everyday rice, green vegetable thing and maybe tofu and chicken or fish. Often deep fried. And also a fruit everyday! And soup!

This is how I go to school and back home. Schoolbus! haha. On friday that whole road is full of busses. It's crazy. But we need alotof busses because there's so many students haha. And during the week some of them live in the dormitory or something.

I'm going to write a schedule of my normal school day.

5:45 Wake up! have to catch a school bus at 6:20!
7:00 Breakfast at school. Mama always packs it for me.
7:30 It's time for self study in our own classrooms. This is also the time that school actually starts. Usually I don't have anything special to do.
8:00 Starts the first class. If I don't have a class I go back to library to sleep.
8:00-11:50 There's four classes in the morning. We often have our chinese class at some point and we might have some other classes too. Or we just do homework or watch movies or sleep.
11:50 Lunch! Yay! We go to our classrooms to eat. ( the other students have 12:20 the cleaning time, when they clean up the whole classroom. And 12:40 is NAP TIME! everybody sleeps for half hour haha!)
13:10-17:00 The afternoon classes. Blah we do the same things as we do in the morning haha. Usually homeworks so that we wouldn't have to do them at home.
17:00 School ends yaay goo hooome! My school bus takes very long time and I'm home usually at 18:10 That doesn't leave much time to do anything in the evening bhah.

The classes that I go with my classmates are english, art, music, sports and some weird class where we learn sewing at the moment haha. Sometimes I go to other classes like I've been to a math class and physics. And oh yeah I have korean class every monday morning! And every second friday we have club time which means that everyone has a club they've joined and they do stuff they want. I'm currently in the movie watching club but we are allowed to change if we want. The other clubs we have are dancing, skateboarding, calligraphy, different kinds of music clubs, kendo, cheerleading and other stuff. I don't even know them all.

In our school there's also a convenience store! They sell noodles, bread, snacks, candy and lot's of different drinks. I always buy chocolate milk and fake oreos.

All these papers(it's very old photo there's a lot more by now haha!) is all the chinese we have learnt. In three months. We usually nowadays get something like 15-20 pages of homework. Earlier it was possible to get 40 pages. Crazy?

We also do this "copying" thing. We take a book that has bopomofo(those tiny symbols next to character, they tell us how to pronounce the word) and write it dow to our notebook. I've written already three children's books and now I'm writing Totoro! ♥ It's boring but it helps me to remember the characters. It's funny how I know the characters and pronounciations but I have no idea what it means haha.

And these lovely papers are my score lists! Haha. A+ A+ A+ A+ :P

Now do you know enough about my school? If not, aaaask! :)

ps. jooo kivoja netti ongelmia taas sunnuntaista lahtien blaaah. se suomenkielinen postaus saa odottaa nakojaa sit viela hetken. ja joo mulla on valmiina kaks muutakin postausta jo haha :P ylikuormitan teitat.

International Coming of Age Ceremony

I finally found more photos from the coming of age ceremony so heere. It was last sunday and weather was luckily awesome. We performed taichi there and we crawled under the table and some other cool stuff. First photos and then some more about those maybe haha.

Taichi. This is only rehearsal for the actual performance. I don't have good photos(well I have but you can't see me well in any of them) of it and the video is not up yet so maybe some other time!

Waiting... waiting... the day was full of waiting.

Washing hands. It was like washing yourself away from old habits or something.

Two performances of other district.

Me getting my hair pin and encouraging diploma

We also got our names as a stamp which means that you are a grown up now. And that stick is the hairpin yes.

So umm the purpose of this ceremony is to celebrate you growing up and coming to the age 17. It's very old traditional taiwanese ceremony and not even the taiwanese do it anymore :D So this was kinda rare opportunity.

First we washed our hands and said thank you to someone with fruits and gifts. Then there was lot of people from Rotary giving speech and then the performances I mentioned in the photos. Then we crawled(more like just walked) under the table haha. And then our host families gave us the diplomas and for girls hair pins and for boys hats.

The whole ceremony was held at Taipei Confucius temple. And the ceremony was quite interesting and meaningfull but unfortunately some exchange students seemed to take it as a joke.

Choool there will be also another post today or tomorrow haha. And half of it will be in finnish! So just wait and see how crappy my finnish is already haha!

Ps. Some photos are from facebook and the rest is from here Rotary D.3490 flickr there's also more photos if someone is interested.

Taipei Zoo!

Goood evening!
I'm happy that the weather has been so good the last couple days! Sunny! It's been raining everyday for two weeks. 我不喜歡下雨. Last friday I went to Shilin night market with Aoi and Minyun. Our visit was really short because it was raining and we got there at 8 and I had to be home at 10. And it takes 40 minutes to get home from Shilin. Huh. We spent our time well, eating of course! Dry noodles and bubble tea. Perfection. Aoi slept over at my house because we had great plans for saturday. Okay in the morning we had to go to my taichi practice which wasn't so great but after that we met Gillian, ate lunch and took MRT to Taipei Zoo!

The weather was rainy and of course I forgot to bring my umbrella. Oh well I bought one from the gift shop there but it got broken in the middle way through the zoo yaaay. So yeah we were soaking wet when we got back to MRT 4 hours later.

The zoo was huuge. And usually it's very crowded during weekends but we were lucky that there was not so much people because of the rain. We were able too see everything we wanted yay. The main point was giraffes, elephants and lions. Other cool ones were panda and penguins. There was kind of like own sections for animals from different parts of world. And a house for night animals and a house for lizzards and stuff.

The panda was boring. It was sleeping. And it's like you have to have a ticket to see the panda and you can only see it once. We didn't know that haha.

I didn't get any better photos. But yeah it was my first time seeing a panda.

Monkeys!

Zebras!

someone mentioned that there's no giraffes in the zoo so I wanted to at least take a photo of this fake giraffe but then after we walked little...

WE SCREAMED "GIRAFFES!" 

It probably looked funny, three foreigners running with umbrellas.

Happyhappy! Haha. 

Gillian being eaten by hippo!

Hippos! All of these photos are so bad quality ;__;

Rhino! They were HUGE. o___o

It's the "lizzards and stuff" house haha

Elephants! They were the other must see on our list yay! We saw lions too(they were third one on the list) but I didn't get any good photos of them.

Yea I know they're not real haha!

But these are! Penguins!

Soo cool haha! Oh and we saw Koalas too but I didn't take a photo.

After we got back to my house we went to buy dumplings and bubble tea for dinner. Perfect dinner to end the perfect day huh?

And of course I had to buy something! Froggy pillow! I've meant to buy a small pillow to school(yes to school!) and this was perfect! 好可愛喔 ~♥

On sunday was the Coming og Age Ceremony at Confucius Temple but I'm going to write about it when I get photos! And our taichi performance video haha!

晚安!

Singing competition & field trip

Yayaa! Today was awesome day. Oh well I'm coming back to that later!

Let's start from last monday. So like I mentioned in the last post I went out with Gillian and her classmates. We went to Fuzhong to eat lunc and have a good time :) It was fuuun haha!

This icecreamthingy looks huge but there was only two balls of icecream o__o

Yeah it's our dirty, broken converses... Don't even aask. I went to see Gillian off to the bus stop at Yongning and we went to get bubble tea yaaay!

The week was kinda boring I guess. Oh now I remember one thing. We got interviewed and photographed for a book. It's a book about New Taipei City and we are going to be in there huh... Scaryy.

On friday was the final part of the singing competition in our school. All the performances were good! Haha.

They look so beautiful! ♥

Oo the stage haha. Because of the lightning these photos are kinda baad.

Gillian's performance! Sooo good! No wonder she won the first price :)

Aoi's song was also soo amaazing!

All the singers

And the final performance they did together

On saturday I had 3hours taichi practice. I almost died believe me. And then kinda randomly I decided to go to see a movie with Maura. Taipei 101 looks so cool when it's cloudy. In the evening we went to nihgt market with my host family. I'm soooo perfect at those games there haha.

This is what I won yay :D

Aaand finally today! So our chinese teacher had something to do in Taipei and he took us to Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. We had fun. There was lot's of funny statues outside of it haha. And no, nobody stared at us! It was raining a little but it was okay.

Love these two ♥

We asked one foreign lady to take a photo for us but insteeead she took...

A VIDEO XDDD ahahah. Yea I know that it wasn't even funny but still haha.

Yoga master

From CKSMH we decided to go and see Longshan temple because none of us hadn't been there before. It was... scary? The area where it was was that kind of where I wouldn't want to go alone. Not even in the day time. Creeepy.

But the temple itself was nice and so beautiful. There were lot of people singing weird songs. It felt kinda awkward to walk there.

After we visited in the temple we walked through some creepy shopping street (we saw a dead turtle there) and quickly back to MRT haha. We had some time before Gillian and Aoi had to go to the bus so we went to eat icecream to Banqiao station. APPLEPIE ICECREAM ♥ And some guy there gave us a /eleven thingy so we got two icecreams and paid only one! Lucky daaay.

Let's see how long it takes until next post haha. This time it was only a week! Yay we have already planned to go to Shilin on friday and shopping on saturday or something.

p.s. Omg I just realized that the Coming of Age ceremony for what I have practiced the Taichi is on sunday o_______o I thought it's next week. oops.