School Life Pt. 1: Night Market and Phone Games

The title of this post is designed to force me post more about school in the future.

My school has about 3,000 students, which is 10x bigger than my former high school. It is a public, prestigious high school with many students going on to attend good universities in Taiwan…. But I’m going to focus on the interesting stuff.

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I was put into a high school first grade (sophomore) class in my high school that is a science-math gifted class. The class as a whole is full of very lively, rule-breaking kids. Every day at school is full of laughter.

For the last week, my classmates have been addicted to a smartphone game called 刀塔傳奇, which is “Legend of the Turret” when directly translated. I have no idea what the game is about but whenever I look at a phone screen it looks like Candy Crush Saga, with different colored tiles that you arrange to destroy.

There’s no wifi in my school but a couple classmates have cellular data and they can somehow share the cellular with other classmates.

The passing periods are put to great use. The phones have to be concealed from the long-line of windows on either side of the classroom (much more exposed than a classroom in America: you can see every bit of the classroom from the outside). If a teacher sees a phone, it will be confiscated. Students have resorted to sitting on the ground behind desks:

Or creating large groups of students so that the phone is completely obscured from a teacher in the hallway:

My classmates have even developed a new way of cramming for tests during lunch:

I can’t wait to see how the class evolves over time !

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My school is close to Le Hua Night Market (樂華夜市) and after class there’s always a good portion of students who go to the night market. A night market is a lattice of shop-lined streets, usually two or one-lane streets, with a main street that has a big chinatown-style gateway on either end of the street. The night market is born around 3-4 pm every day and reaches its full maturity around 8-9 pm, when the streets are lined with food carts and the street narrows considerably. I’m not sure when the night market retires at the end of the night, however, because I haven’t gone to one after 9 pm.

My classmates took me there after the first week and a half of school, after the last class which ended at 5:00 pm. We went there after going to a classmates house but got there at 6 pm, which is the night market’s adolescent stage. There were a few food carts lining up but there were still scooters zipping by, making it a little uncomfortable.

I’d told my classmates that I hadn’t tried stinky tofu yet, so all 9 of them sat down at a food cart and we each got a plate.

The smell of stinky tofu is just a more severe version of the taste, which makes it unbearable to smell. Once you taste stinky tofu, you’ll understand that the smell is just a heavier version of the taste.