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.

中秋節 !

Moon festival was nice! BUT I DIDN'T GET TO EAT ANY MOON CAKES? ;___;
So in Taiwan they celebrated moon festival this weekend. It's a tradition that everybody does barbeque. It was funny when we drove around in Sanxia everyone had gathered around with family or friends to do bbq. It's very different here than in Finland. And ONLY once a year at this time!

On saturday I had babeque party at my friend Nash's place and yees I had fun. AND YES I'M STILL SHY. But it's getting better huh?

These photos are very good quality btw. I know how to use my new lovely camera.

On sunday we went to Daxi and I have no idea where else haha but there was really nice views. And on the evening we had family bbq at my mama's brother.

The actual moon festival was on monday but guess what i did the whole day. HOMEWORK. For seven hours. 43 pages. I almost died. Just kidding of course I love my chinese homework and for sure I remember every single character I wrote ♥

And just to show you this is the pile what we have studied in two weeks.

And my text books! I have THREE of them wow. The pink one is for korean classes and blue for chinese. Purple is music book! There's Sibelius haha!

晚安!

My first days of school!

Heyaa!
It's not even been long time since I wrote but I have some photos for you! ( And they might be last photos for a while since my camera broke and I wait it to be fixed)

My school started on tuesday and I have to say that I love my school! Everyone screams hello or I love you when I walk past : D haha it's funny. And I met the other exchange students. Everyone's so nice and we come along really well! This is our chinese class where we spent most of our time.

I have very clean desk!

And this is what we do on chinese lessons.
Calligraphy!

Everyday we practice a lot of characters.

And now in the beginning of course BoPoMoFo!

Other than chinese in my schedule I have english, sports, art, music and some random things : D On the first day of school we got our uniforms. There's two uniforms the normal one and sports uniform. ( We use the normal uniform only once a week : D) And we had to give a speech in front of whole school! I was so nervous my hands were shaking.
Here it is!

大家好！
我叫周茉。我是芬蘭人。
我喜歡彈鋼琴，也喜歡打籃球。
我在芬蘭有一隻狗，我很想牠。
我很高興來到台灣，希望很快把中文學好。
很高興認識大家。謝謝你們！

And this is my class! Everybodys so friendly and curious even though most of them can't speak english so well : D

And finally the uniform! It's not good photo because I didn't have shoes or socks yet and now I don't have camera.

Tomorrow we have a Rotary meeting and I don't know about the weekend.

I want my camera back!
Cya!

Chinese studies

It's been a while huh! I'm still waiting for my guarantee forms (not so patiently anymore ) and I decided to do a post about my chinese studies.

I started studying chinese last september and during that time I didn't know that I'd be going to Taiwan. I started studying just for fun and to see if it really is the hardest language in the world like everyone says ≧ω≦ And yes now I can tell you it probably is haha! The four tones are hard to learn and in the beginning I couldn't recognise the sounds for different letters so well. And I probably don't even need to mention the number of the characters? Over 106,000 u_u"

This is my chinese course book and the first 6 charcters I learned. In my class we studied the simplified characters so I had to do some research on my own to find the traditional characters.

My current character book! (~￣▽￣)~ I love this haha.

There's both the simplified and traditional characters. And there's some example sentences and some exercises too.

My visual dictionary. Too bad it's only in pinyin and simplified characters >.<

And not related to studying but my chinese teacher gave me these Travel in Taiwan magazines. There's lot of beautiful photos and information ^^