Today was the third day of our trip to Taiwan!! We visited Jianguo Municipal High School, and i was quite nervous before that as the students there were much older than us, and i was worried i would not be able to understand their lessons, which are mainly conducted in Mandarin. However, it turned out that there wasn't much to be worried about as the students there were very friendly and we did not attend classes today!
When our bus pulled into the gates of the school, we saw a huge group of students standing at the foyer and welcoming us. :D we were brought to a conference room after that, and students introduced their school to us. I remember something from their presentation really clearly, and that was the word "freedom". The word was flashed onto the screen, and the students told us that their school emphasized a lot on giving students freedom. At that point of time, i felt a little jealous. They could do anything they wanted to do in school, and are not restricted by many rules unlike in Singapore. Besides, Jianguo High is the top school in Taipei. How do students not pay as much attention in class yet still achieve good academic results? My guess is that they had good time management skills and probably studied to catch up on the lessons that they had not paid much attention to outside curriculum time~
We were given a tour around the school by our assigned buddies, and my buddy and i set off with Ruo Qing, Yu Qi, and their buddy.
Along the tour, we asked our buddies if there were fruit trees in their school (so we could complete our CID group mission LOL) but unfortunately they said there were none :( their school library was two storeys high, like RV's.
We were also brought to view a perfomance by various instrumental sections of their school's band. We were also taught some simple magic tricks by a student, and it was pretty fun ^_^
In return, we did our dance perfomance for them. We prepared for the performance weeks before the trip, and often used our free time to practise. On the first and second night, we practised at the breakfast area in the hotel as well. Though we were all so tired, we still managed to complete a few run-throughs each night and from the rehearsals, i felt that our class bonded a lot :D
Besides the perfomances, we were also treated to shaved ice, the Taiwanese version of ice kachang! We were each given a plastic bag with a huge chunk of shaved ice in it, as well as a bowl with the syrup and other toppings in it. We started by using our spoons to scrape off small blocks of shaved ice and putting it into the bowl, and then we ate the sweet shaved ice. It was pretty nice as i love cold desserts and besides, it was rather cooling as the weather at that time was quite warm. :)
Afterwards, we went for lunch where we had dimsum!! The food was pretty good and we met a bunch of students from singapore there at the resturant haha! It was a good change from the usual rice we had. :)
Then, we headed to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. We made it just in time to watch the changing of guards ceremony! Afterwards, we went to the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall and saw another changing of guards ceremony. We were told that the guards were there to protect the leaders from evil. The guard changing was really complicated, and the guards were not able to move for an hour before changing shifts. However, it wasn't really interesting as there was an information overload because we had to learn about both Chiang Kai-Shek and Sun Yat Sen in a day. It would've been better if we visited the memorial halls on two different days~
We then went for dinner, and Ximending at the end of the day. Ximending was a pretty good place to shop haha :D it is definitely one of the best places on our itinery! It was like Bugis Street in singapore, with stalls selling affordable clothes and accessories etc at affordable prices! Many teenagers patronised the stalls there. However, Ximending wasn't sheltered unless we walked along the corridors of shops, and parts of the shopping district are linked by roads, unlike singapore, which Bugis Street has mutiple storeys. This is probably because singapore has a smaller land area as compared to Taiwan, resulting in multi-storey buildings to save land for other developments such as housing estates.
Overall, today was a pretty good day (and we spent the night rehearsing for our dance and skit performance again haha). I feel that it's good to interlink our history lessons and CID together, and we learn about China's/Taiwan's history all in one go :) and today's trip to the memorial halls have definitely given me more exposure to China's/Taiwan's history, and we learnt more about Taiwan's education system from our immersion programme with Jianguo as well :D
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