I like Taida, but this first week seemed really, really long. I'm gonna chalk it up as it being an adjustment period, as the class finds its rhythm. My teacher is young and seems inexperienced, but where I felt Shida teachers were horrible, the feeling was more adversarial. With this teacher, the feeling is that I want to work with her, help her become a better teacher and get her acquainted with students' issues.

The first week ended with a campus tour on Thursday and a reception on Friday. Nothing like that at Shida. At Shida, it was more like, "Welcome to Taiwan. Good luck, you'll need it." We even got out of class early for the reception.

Thursday, December 7, 12:52 p.m. - Taida main library

Friday, December 8, 2:43 p.m. - Reception for new language students.

I'm not sure I'll relate to the students at Taida any better than at Shida. That's my issue. I had some forced conversations at the reception. I like my teacher. She looked a little uncomfortable, too, and we slogged through it together. I met some Asian American college students, one of whom was also Taiwanese American, and her experience with the language mirrored mine almost exactly.

December 8, 4:10 p.m. - Taida campus. I saw this group riding bikes and I think it was a bit of Critical Mass idea and they didn't mind me taking pics. I can't imagine a S.F.-style Critical Mass in Taipei.

4:18 p.m. - I went to a movie theater in the same building as a rock club called The Wall and saw that indie band +/- was coming to Taipei. That's James Baluyut's (guitarist of Versus) splinter band. I ended up not going because I was trying to not fall into old habits of things I "used to do".

Afterwards, I went to see a Chinese movie called "The Knot". It's not even listed in IMDB or rottentomatoes. It was OK. There was a point that I was ready to walk out, though. I feel it was the director's fault. It was epic material, it needed to be treated in an epic way, bigger than our small lives. This is history. But as if the director was used to doing television soap operas, he concentrated too much on the melodramatic human moments, and languished in them too much. There were plot problems, too, which could have been forgiven if the director got the epic part right.

It was a love story, a young couple begin a romance in pre-2-28 Taiwan, but the guy is a left-wing activist. After 2-28, he's forced to escape to China, while the girl is left in Taiwan with dreams of meeting him again, and taking care of his mother as if she were her mother-in-law. He is a doctor and is drafted into the Red Army.

The frame of the movie is that this story is being pieced together in current time by the woman's niece. The woman is now an artist in New York. I'm not sure that plot gimmick was necessary. I'm not sure it served the story.

It was worth watching. The movie had moments and did manage to hit some good emotional chords. I'm just glad that Chinese language movies tend to be subtitled in English. These are movies that I would be seeing if they came to San Francisco, so I'd might as well catch them as they are shown here.

December 9, 11:17 a.m. - Heping E. Rd. and Keelung Rd. intersection. Heading up Keelung Rd. goes directly to the Taipei 101 area in Xinyi District.

3:16 p.m. - Xinyi District. Looking north from the Taipei 101 footbridge at the Eslite building directly ahead.