Ni hao, y'all

After five days in Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second biggest city, I'm finally making good on my promise to start a travel blog. While I already have in mind topics on which I'd like to focus more later on - food, religion, and scooters, off the top of my head - for now I'll just throw out noteworthy points from the past few days:

1. The city is huge and the most metropolitan place I've ever lived (albeit compared to Lafayette and Jackson).
2. "Kaohsiung" (高雄) literally translates to "tall hero."
3. This county was the hardest hit by Typhoon Morakot about two weeks ago, but the city itself is largely unscathed. Other areas of the island are still in pretty bad need of relief, and apparently many in Taiwan are calling for the president's resignation due to the dismal response.
4. I'm studying Mandarin 12 hours a week at the Taipei Language Institute under four different teachers, and all I've done so far is repeat syllables and occasionally whole words after them while trying to speak something that sounds vaguely similar to Mandarin. One of the teachers, Shi Laoshi, told me that I'll "struggle with pronunciation for three months." So I at least have a timeframe.
5. In Chinese and Taiwanese culture, when addressing a person you know as a professional, you refer to them by their surname followed by their title. For example, the above mentioned teacher is surnamed "Shi" and "laoshi" means teacher. Default titles are "xiansheng" (Mr., husband, gentlemen), "xiaojie" (Miss, young lady) and "taitai" (Mrs.). Of course, these words are meaningless if you don't pronounce the tones right.
6. Tones are hard.
7. I can recognize maybe thirty or forty written characters so far, but often two separate characters go together to make a different word (the characters for "small" and "heart" together translate to "caution") so I don't really have any idea what I'm reading.
8. Thankfully "tea" (cha, 茶) just means "tea," and there are signs for tea stands on nearly every street! Taiwan's climate is tropical, so every place mainly serves very sweet chilled tea, but there's green tea galore and Taiwan is famous for mountain teas and oolong (a tea that's between green and black in flavor and oxidation). I'm still keeping an eye out for any place that serves more traditional teas, but for now the fruit infused chilled greens on every corner will have to do.
9. I am in fact writing to you from the future. If anything cataclysmic happens, I'll contact those of you who I believe will be capable of altering history and saving our timeline in 12-13 hours. In spite of this, I don't believe we'll be able to prevent either the rise of Terminator-like robots or the assassination of Jon Stewart; both are inevitable.

I promise I'll try to keep things entertaining as I write about any adventures or interesting cultural points I come across. Feel free to let me know if you want to know more about something, or if you've got any questions or comments.