Getting Settled, Getting Soaked

Bonjour mes amis! The settlement process in Kaohsiung is in full swing. We have most of the things we will be requiring to survive, except the AC which will hopefully be put in by the end of the week, what week? That is the question. Yesterday we took a strole around Kaohsiung and did some touristing. Fine and dandy you might think but its a far more tricky process than you might expet. You see, nobody speaks english here. The taxi drivers stare at you like you are from jupiter and simply smile and shake their heads as one tries to make oneself understood. The only way to get around is to have pieces of papar with the chinese characters depicting the desired location. The language barrier is very tough and despair is close at hand but soon our chinese courses will start and then just maybe we might be able to get by. The campus restaurants offer the same problem. All the menus are in chinese but some dishes are translated, but this offers little in the way of comfort when there are 4 dishes called rice with pork, another 4 called noodles with pork and finally 5 dishes called noodles with chicken (thought you might enjoy a photo of the menu).
The dorm we are living in is for exchange students only, all the taiwanese students are jealous because there dorms are not quite of the same standard. Because the dorms are so nice, we sort of forgot that we in fact were in the middle of the jungle. We were however quickly reminded of this when a bat flew into our room. This caused a minor stir and much laughter from the other students. Pay back was however swift as two of the french students came home to find a monkey in their room. It had caused a minor mess but no serious damage. Don't ask me how they got it out but they did after a while. I wished I could have witnessed this but we were out at the time.
Today in the evening we played basketball with the czech guys a couple of french guys and some other exchange students that we don't know very well yet. This was the sweatiest experience of my life. It was really good fun, don't get me wrong, it's just that we were all drenched within 6 minutes, actually more like 6 seconds. We were literally drenched (tropical rain drenched, swimming with clothes on drenched, you get the picture). This made it slightly disgusting to play defense as it ment a lot of body contact :|. Basketball is very popular here (second after baseball) and we have decided to start a team and challenge the school league which is made up of teams from all the different faculties. There are many courts (about 12) complete with flood lights and bats as spectators in the evening :D
The Final photo is of the campus area from the beach road. Furthest away are the dorms (up on the hill) which makes for a lot of malking, but thats a good thing. The rest of the campus area is great and ofcourse i will post some fotos however as in everything in asia so far, its once you get up close that you see the cracks. They are small but they are still there. Tomorrow we have an intruduction day, guided tour etc.

Rants:

1. Hot, hot, sweat, sweat, shower, sweat, hot, shower, sweat, hot... constantly hot. We are planning a trip down to hell for some cooler weather.

2. No air-con yet, hopefully we will have it before we return to Finland :|

3. Hang-overs here are like nothing i have ever experienced, major dehydration and no comfort :(

Bonuses:

1. Really nice exchange students, good friends and a darned good party last night.

Movie of choice:

"Alive" & Anything with polar bears and penguins in it.