New University and new friends

Our initial tour of the Tamkang University

Today had us going to a brand new university called Tamkang University. We took the train and met up with a professor from the University at the train station. From there, it was a short bus ride to the campus itself. Waiting for us was a large group of students from Tamkang University. All of them were either freshmen or sophomores and all were accounting majors. The students then gave us a tour of their campus, which included us stopping at different points in order to learn a little bit of the history of the University. Walking to each destination also gave us time to talk to the students. Personally, I don't think I've met a friendlier group of people before. All of them seemed really excited to meet us and all of them wanted to talk to us. Pretty much every single one of the students that were with us made sure to introduce themselves to all of us and wanted to get pictures with us. I ended up meeting two girls named Peggy and Jenny and one boy named Peter who I would spend most of my time hanging out with.

After the tour we went to a classroom to have a special lecture titled: When East meets West - communication in Eastern society. This was not a typical lecture though as most of the lessons were taught through various games. The first game had us looking at different images and writing down everything we saw. We were scored based on what we noticed about the picture. Lower points were awarded for the foreground and higher points were awarded to the background. The point of this exercise was to show that most people do not really pay attention to the background and instead only focus on the foreground, or what is in front of them. The second game split us into different groups. The first group was just seven UofM - Flint students. The second group (which I was in) was six UofM - Flint students and one Tamkang University student. The third group was three UofM - Flint students and four Tamkang University students. The last three groups were all just Tamkang University students. The game had us playing telephone with predetermined sentences. Our team did not do that good, but then neither did the group of just UofM - Flint students. After this game is when the professor explained that this game was almost rigged from the beginning. The first phrase was written in the manner that English is spoken, while the last two sentences were written in the manner that Chinese is spoken. This actually made it harder for us to remember the sentences. The professor used this to explain how, because of the different manner of speaking, how easily we can judge others based on the manner they talk. Or rather, the order of the information. While I was not overly sure if I was going to like this lecture in the beginning, I realized how clever the information was actually presented to us and I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

Giant ice cream!

Following the lecture we had quite a delicious lunch that was paid for by the Tamkang University students. After eating and having our second group discussion, we headed out with the students from Tamkang University on a tour of Tam Shi, which is an older town. Like last time, we would stop at different points in the town and the students would explain some of the history of the town. At this point, my favorite part was when we walked down by the water. The view was beautiful and we bought an ice cream cone too. The ice cream was bigger then any I've ever been able to find in the United States and it was only 59 cents (in USD)! It was interesting to see all the different views and I was still shocked just how friendly all of the Tamkang students were.

Once the tour was completed, we were told the meeting time and place for the next day and were told we had the rest of the night to do whatever we wanted. Dani and I invited Peggy and Jenny back towards our hotel so that we could hang out in the night market. We ended up exploring the night market some more and I even played one of those carnival type games where you have to shoot little rubber balls with a airsoft gun (which I got like 7/9). This meat I got to choose a prize. Unfortunately there wasn't that much to choose from, so I ended up getting the game UNO. At this point, we were all pretty worn out so we went back to our hotel and just hung out, talked, and played UNO in the lobby. It was really nice getting the chance to just sit down and have a normal conversation with them and we all became pretty good friends. I had Peggy write down my name in Chinese (which is 克里斯托福 費里 高登 by the way). I was sad when it was time to say goodbye to both of them, but I knew that, thanks to technology like facebook, I would be able to keep in contact with them and we'll hopefully be friends for a long time.

Peggy (left) and Jenny (right)