Please do not feed the toilet

Hello dear readers (should you exist), I apologize for the absence, my head has been happily buried in my Chinese books. The first week or so of ICLP threw me for a loop because the courses were quite intense and I was studying every waking hour to keep up with the pace of my classes. I haven't been in school for two years (the classes at the NIH don't really count in my mind) and so I had to relearn how to study efficiently, which is great since I'll be able to use the skills I've sharpened when I start med school. Now it's week four of eight and I'm accustomed to the coursework and the classes. I'm not circling as many characters when I read my assignments which I take to be a sign of progress because that means less characters to look up in the dictionary. Does that mean I'm actually recognizing characters and remembering them? I don't know, but I certainly hope so. I'm disappointed with my scores on the writing tests so I'm going to work to make sure I get better marks for the remainder of my time.

Sometimes I feel a bit fatigued from all the studying but when I'm about to complain I remind myself that I'm living a dream. To be studying a subject which I find interesting is such a joy, and a rare one at that. In college I had a few courses that really excited me and that didn't feel like work. Sometimes I think students don't take courses in subjects that really interest them because they may not be practical in terms of their future employment. It's unfortunate because the college experience is infinitely better and more memorable when one is studying something one truly finds interesting. So, to have this opportunity to study something for which I have a passion, I feel very fortunate. Not to say I'm not passionate about medicine, but I feel like the stress of grades will take the joy of studying away.

I'm not sure if I wrote about this before, I think I mentioned it in a post about China, but Taiwan is like China in that toilets are not meant to take anything aside from human excrement. I'm always amused by the sign in the bathroom stalls at ICLP that say, "Please do not feed the toilet,' which basically means don't thrown any toilet paper or trash into the toilet. If you do, very unhappy things happen in the bathroom, i.e. clogging.

It is exceedingly hot and humid in Taipei. It's amazing that I survive without using the air conditioning in my cousin's place. To get relief, I usually take cover in a place that will be using air conditioning anyway, so it's not like extra energy is expended for my behalf. Just trying to do my part to stop global warming. I figure, if Starbucks has the air conditioning on anyway, why not use it instead of turning on the a/c unit in the house and adding more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere? That reminds me, my speech topic this week was global warming. I don't know why I choose rather hard topics to talk about since the topics are up to us. But I seem to the unable to write a speech on something simple like, "Why learning Chinese is hard." Instead, I've spoken about the quarter-life crisis phenomenon (青年危機) , the path to becoming a doctor (從醫之路), and global warming (全球暖化). Never fails, I enjoy making life hard for myself. >_< At least I'm learning in the process!