很惡心

Hot Pot!  A delicious restaurant where you're given a pot of
soup and you boil your food in it yourself!

Hiking some trails with Hsiu-Li

My classmate/roommate, Lauren, and me practicing our
calligraphy!

Calligraphy class

The most amazing dinner I've had here so far.

A very small portion of an extremely long and gorgeous painting
Hsiu-Li took me to see.

The title of this post is a phrase that Hsiu-Li taught me.  Taiwan has this food called "stinky tofu."  It's basically aged tofu and it smells like baby poop.  I was trying to explain my absolute disgust for it and Hsiu-Li taught me 很惡心 (Hěn ěxīn) which literally translates to "I'm going to vomit my heart out."  I thought it was really interesting...

On Sunday, Hsiu-Li and I hiked some trails.  It was very hot and we had to take a lot of rests.  We actually decided to hike a mountain and got about halfway up and decided to turn around.  There was a river along part of the path so we took our shoes off and cooled down.  It was very sandy but there were large rocks covered in moss so it was very slippery getting in!

Monday we had a calligraphy class!  Chinese calligraphy is very different from American calligraphy.  A special paint brush is used and you have to hold it a specific way.  It was very difficult, but we all learned how to write the blessing "may your dreams soar."  Our teacher was a man who is among the most famous calligraphers in Taiwan!

We celebrated the 4th of July by going out for burgers and only drinking American beer!  We also made our best attempts at speaking Chinese in American Southern accents...

Today we went to Yingee which is famous for it's pottery.  While we were there we got to make pottery ourselves!  It was very very difficult to get your clay into a workable shape, but once you created the basic shape it was easy to work from there.  I made a saucer type thing...  I don't have any pictures to share because I wasn't able to take any, but my professor did.  So when he uploads them I will put the on here, but we won't get our finished pottery until the final ceremony at the end of the trip.

I love you guys!

Kar