Day 2

Friday, 6 September 2013

15 NTD : rice for breakfast. Yeah, just rice.

Uki and I met Teh Ela & Teh Icut (I called them ‘Teteh’ because there’re from Bandung) in canteen-3. They brought sambel, dendeng, chips, etc. for side dish. They shared their meal with us so we didn’t have to spend much money :3 How nice they are! I didn’t bring that kind of food from Jogja because of limited space of my suitcase.

The plan for that morning was going to bank to exchange money and shopping in “Toko Kuning”, in Gongguan. Uki and I challenged ourselves to find those places and to interact with local people without being accompanied by Indonesian senior student.

The day before, when I was in the return trip from badminton match, Mas Rendi showed us where Toko Kuning is. This shop is famous around Indonesian student because of its cheap prices, completeness, and the close distance from campus.

Maybe you don’t know that I have terrible skill of remembering something. Moreover, most of the maps were written in Mandarin characters.

So, we just followed our feeling to walk and look around the city. The priority destination is Toko Kuning. We went to Gongguan through NTU Taiwan (NTU is across NTUST. It’s larger and greener). We kept walking and searching for yellow shop, but we couldn’t find it until we arrived at Taipei Power MRT Station! Oh, it seemed that we took the wrong way. Hahah.

So we went back and stopped by bank to exchange money. We found a yellow shop, but it’s apparently a glasses shop. We stopped by Watson to buy daily necessities such as body soap, shampoo, and tissue.

100 NTD : money exchange service
89 NTD : shampoo (200 ml, the only small package I found)
159 NTD : body soap (1000 ml)

12.00. I planned to go to NTUST Mushala. But the map was blurry and I have said to you that the map was written in Mandarin characters. I searched T2-building, but I just found T1, T3, and T4 building. So I prayed in my room. It turned out that T2 building is…

Can you see T2-building?

16 NTD : lunch (just rice, ca jamur, and ca sawi)

13.30. It’s time for university registration. mba Yeni & mas Rayi guided us to do the registration step by step. Their help was truly helpful!

Steps of NTUST registration for international students: http://www.oia.ntust.edu.tw/files/11-1017-3794.php. Before registration, make sure that you:

1. have the copies of all authenticated documents.
2. have authenticated health insurance. If you don’t, you can buy NTUST assurance in …(?)
3. have paid the dormitory fee (go to Dormitory Administration Center, pay the fee in Cashier, keep the receipt)

If you check the site above, the steps seem so simple. Yeah, those are. But doing all of them was quite exhausting. We started at 13.30 and finished at 16.30 because some of us were not fully prepared (I hadn’t had copy of insurance, some of us hadn’t paid the dorm fee and hadn’t had the health insurance).

International Building Park

6500 NTD : dorm fee
220 NTD : student insurance
about 30 NTD : health polis copy (@1 NTD per sheet)
23 NTD : green milk tea, a reward to myself after getting exhausted because of student registration =))

Finally, I got username & password for using internet! But I couldn’t be happy yet because I had to do some internet setting configurations. Each NTUST student who live in dormitory get one wired LAN connection. The IP from cable port should match with laptop MAC address. So my laptop network setting should be set manually. The WiFi setting is quite belibet too. We had to download the security certificate, install it in the right place, verify, and so on. Mas Rayi helped us to do settings. Thank you so much! But I still cannot use the WiFi, I don’t know why…

And then, I spent the night chatting and browsing. Ah~ Internet~~ :*

Ohya, some interesting things I found in the last 2 days were:

“Terima kasih!”

So, this was taken in front of OIA (Office of International Affair). The responsible person of OIA for NTUST-ISA (Indonesian student) and NTUST-Vietnam student want the other students to learn our language. How nice! :”)

• There is NO manual motorbike here. Every motorbike was automatic.

Sepeda. Parkir sepeda penuh everywhere.

• Many many many people use bicycle. You can find a lot of bicycles which are parked everywhere…

The trashes have to be separated. Sadly, I haven’t been able to read the characters so I have to open the wastebaskets and look into them one by one before throwing my trash.