My Exchange Semester in Taiwan: Taipei

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Sonntag, 18. Januar 2015

Weeks 17-19: New Year & Last days in Taiwan (29.12.2014 - 18.01.2015)

Went to see the new year fireworks with some friends and our location was pretty good. This was a fun evening and a good way to end 2014.

At university I had to write two finals. One was in Japanese Business and the other in Chinese (which had a writing and oral part). I am interested in seeing which grade I get for this exams. So the last weeks were not as busy as the December. But still there were many things to do. At NTU it has a check out process where I had to go to some places to get stamps and get my student card stamped. This is necessary that they send the transcript of records to me.
Furthermore I could go to get my deposit back which I had to pay at the beginning of the semester. So most of the things are done and I am ready to go traveling.

This semester was a great experience and I will leave Taiwan with many good memories. So I would definitely go for an exchange again!

In the last weeks I went to see some places so I post many pictures this time.

Fireworks at Taipei 101

Happy new year 2015 !

Crowded street

Xindian

"Hiking" in Xindian

Gongguan Riverside

CKS

National Concert Hall

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall

Sunset

Gogguan Riverside park

Sunset

Mittwoch, 31. Dezember 2014

Weeks 7-10: Studying at NTU (20.10 – 16.11.2014)

I take 4 courses from the collage of Management and the General Chinese Course. All together this makes 15 NTU Credits which equals 30 ECTS credits. My timetable looks like the following, school on Monday morning, Tuesday to Thursday afternoon and the Chinese course on Monday and Wednesday evening.

Comparing the course level to my home university (FHNW) I would say that the level of the courses is higher at the FHNW. Here the lectures are not that interesting, and in around 50% of the courses I did not learn that much. But all of my courses have at least one group work with a presentation, some require term projects and final projects. Two of my courses had a midterm and a final, and that are the only exams I will have here (one of them is the Chinese course). The midterms were held in the week 10 (10.11 – 16.11). In the other courses the grades are made through the group work presentations and assignments / homeworks.
In one course I was busy over the whole semester because we had to do a presentation or a case report almost every week, and it even had a term and final project.

To learn Chinese takes for me a lot of time to learn to write the characters, normally every lesson has a dictation or a review test. In addition to this we have to do homework as well, so learning Chinese really needs a lot of time and effort.

Here are some pictures from hiking and the university + campus.

Maybe not the best weather

Yangminshan

Hiking in the fog

Mt. Cising Main Peak

Way down

NTU Main Entrance

Library

NTU Sports Complex

Drunken Moon Lake

College of Management - Building 1

College of Management - Building 2

Street in Gongguan

Taipei 101

View from the roof deck of the dorm

Donnerstag, 6. November 2014

Week 4 & 5: 29.9 – 12.10.2014

03.10.2014 I went to Maokong which is a suburb of Taipei and there it has some tea houses and hiking trails. To get to Maokong one can take the “Maokong Gondola” from the Taipei Zoo station.

04.10.2014 We wanted to go hiking at the Lion’s Head Mountain. To get there we had to take a train and a bus. The local train took 1.5 hours and the bus ride was another 2 hours, on the way back we took the high speed rail from Hsinchu station which took only 30 minutes to Taipei. So I think it is definitely worth to take the high speed rail over the local train.
The way was much longer than what we expected it to be and so we could not start the hike before 3 pm. Because we had to be back in Taipei at 7 pm, that left us only around two hours for hiking. But the hiking trail and the view were beautiful.

In the 5^th week there was the Taiwanese National Day on the 10^th of October. We planned to do some travelling outside of Taipei for this weekend but when we checked the flights and train tickets it turned out that everything was fully booked. We checked different places and sometimes it was even not possible to find a bed in a hostel. So we stayed in Taipei for this weekend.

On the morning of the National Day we went to see if there was something interesting going on. In some places the streets were closed and the air force did a fly-by but that was all we could see.

Tianen Temple

A insect

Hiking Trail in Maokong

A wooden squirrel

Flowers next to hiking path

Maokong

Huge Spider

A Butterfly

Hiking at the Lion's Head Mountain

View from the Lion's Head Mountain

Another insect

Flowers

Empty Zhongshan South Road on the National Day

Taiwanese flag

Front gate of the C.K.S Memorial Hall

National Theater

National Concert Hall

Mittwoch, 22. Oktober 2014

Week 3: Taipei and Keelung 21.09 – 28.09.2014

The third week in Taiwan and this week was the first “real” school week.
I was enrolled in a math course called “Management Mathematics” and I attended the class in this week. My math background was not on the level what it should have been and I thought that I would need too much time to fill the gaps. Furthermore the teacher said that he is not sure if he will continue to do this course in English after the mid terms so I decided that it is not worth the effort and dropped that course. And with this I had my schedule together.
This week was also the start of the general Chinese course. I have Chinese classes twice a week on Monday and Wednesday from 18:30 – 21:15.

On Saturday I was in Keelung City and also visited the Yehliu Geopark. Keelung is one hour train ride away from Taipei and to get to the Yehliu Geopark from Keelung it took around 45 minutes by bus. In the Geopark you can see many stones and rocks but it is definitely worth a visit.
Keelung has some temples but they close at 5 pm and I was there too late so they were already closed. I think from there you might have a good view over the city so next time I should make sure to be there earlier.

On Sunday I went to the Baishawan Beach (white sand beach). It is close to the MRT station Tamsui and from there you have to take a bus. The beach was really beautiful and the waves were not too high.