on top of Taipei 101, extreme-hiking and partyparty!

It's time for an other post!

So last Friday we had some pretty awesome sunny weather, so Anker and me thought it to be a good idea to make a biketour to the citycenter. There, catching sight of Taipei 101's gigantic architecture we spontaneously decided, "yeah ... lets go up!!!"
And it was extremely cool on top. Up to a few years ago it was still the tallest building on earth - and you know my motto: the taller, the better ;-)
Check out the pictures:

on top of the world!

Babam!

the wind blowing through this metal fance actually made a pretty fancy melodious tone. What a cool little feature!

I'll definitely go up again before leaving Taiwan. Sooo impressive!

An other evening, Anker and me did some random sightseeing - just taking the metro to a random station and walking around at night. At some point around midnight, we decided to take a taxi back to the dorm and trying to fnd one, we managed to walk over a 1km long bridge instead^^
And on the other side, we had ended up at the probably single place in Taipei, where there were no taxis coming by... huge fail!

waiting at this pleasant bench about 15min for a taxi :D

However after walking some more and finally getting a driver I had an other of these situations that make me love the Taiwanese people:
During our ride home, we noticed that the taxi driver had accidentally taken a wrong way. Anker and me where already a bit annoyed that this would make us pay more and that we could hardly complain about it because of our lacking Chinese skills. However when we arrived, the driver apologized from his own initiative and gave us about 40% discount on the price, what left us way better off, than if he had taken the right way in the first place! Taiwanese taxidrivers are the best! :D

Last week with a Taiwanese friend I have also been to Danshui, a coastal town close to Taipei. My favorite thing there was one of these Turkish ice-cream places where the vendor is playing pranks with the people when they want to take the waffle from his hand. He had the most whimsical grin you could imagine. His mouth was a bit skewed from the 20 years of grinning while doing those pranks (thats what I guessed at least :D ) Here I found him on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu8kN-jHBl8

In Danshui with my Taiwanese friend Polly

An other highlight of last week was a pretty extreme hike on Sunday - definitely the most intense I've ever done.

my Taiwanese friend Lee Johann Gemüsemann - awesome name!

it was recommended to wear gloves because of all the ropes there

rockriding

However, I had slept rather bad the night before and after the 5h hike I was completely dead. Even though the hike is about 1h away from Taipei city I was seriously considering to take a taxi back to my dorm (instead of public transport) jut to get in bed quicker^^

some more impressions:

rainbow!

And I've finally been partying again twice in the last days! To two pretty fancy clubs, Luxy and Myst. One had a 20€ cover charge but they had quite a lasershow there.
The next morning though I woke up with a mild hearing damage... Why does the music in clubs always have to be so fucking loud?! I'll probably buy one of those special earplugs for concerts that just decrease the overall loudness before going out next time... :-/

Lastly some stuff about my courses. to be upfront, the current situation is pretty disappointing (This here might sound like an other episode of "Lino klagt" ;-) ).
So, apart from my Chinese class by now I'm only left with one other economics class. I had started with 3 more classes but had to drop one after an other for various good reasons. And there were just no decent alternatives because there are not too many graduate classes offered in English.
So besides Chinese, the only course left is Applied Macroeconomics and now I am extremely close to dropping this as well -.-

We had a midterm assignment due to last Wednesday and were supposed to use the program Matlab to simulate a macroeconomic economy. The problem beeing however that I've never worked with this program let alone any other comparable program and that the professor had only given us a supershort introduction in the first lecture like how to calculate plus and minus. After the professors email support beeing a one-sentence answer to a 4-question email, massively frustrated I had finally written the professor an email about my frustration about the midterm (in a quite dimplomatic tone though of course) only to find out in the next lecture that he had taken this as a personal insult and was kindof attacking me what my problem is... yay
I guess this won't have a very positive influence on my final grade...
Now also take into account that from about 12 people that had started the course, we are by now only 6 left with an other girl in exact the same situation as me. This might be due to the hard to top dullness of the lecture style. The professor just writing complicated formulas on the board for 3h straight (and in a 6 people class, you have to pretend attention of course -.-). And lastly regarding the contents I could hardly be less interested. Its again one of those completely unworldy mathematic model courses that make me too often think that I sometimes really hate economics. I feel that I'm learning nothing about how the real world economy works and instead loose with every single lecture just 3 more hours of my life.
On the other hand though, if I drop that class, I could focus 100% on studying chinese, what I would have planned to do anyway sometime in the near future...
But well, I'll decide on this matter in the next days when we hopefully get the midterm results.
And on this bombshell... ;-)