We have a guest writer for today.

Me
a guinea pig chemistry faculty exchange student at National Taiwan University who has 20hrs of lessons per week

My room
106台北市大安区辛亥路三段30号 国青宿舍201号房

My roommate
22 years old, studying Chinese, translation and 台語 in NTU;
exchange student for 1 year who has been here since September 2007 and can speak Chinese rather fluently;
a genuine 宅男, who can spend his weekend playing retro games like FF7 on the laptop, reading a lot of comics and watching a lot of animes;
enjoys talking about the history and culture of China and Japan and his favourite political figure is 孫中山;
drinks;
drinks his tea noisily;
very passionate about politics and supports the 民進黨 (he puts the 國名黨 election flags in his shoerack);
dun like to turn on the air con even when it is damn hot;
makes small talks with girls but generally ignores guys and put up posters of cute Japanese cartoon meimeis;
plays the guitar and has performed at numerous events even though I have never heard him play before in the room;
don't turn off the lights when he wants to sleep bcos he’s afraid it will be too dark for me;
types on his keyboard damn hard and loudly;
wears a Taiwan No.1 shirt to sleep and will leave me a message whenever he is not coming back to sleep.

But…despite of all the seemingly negative opinions, I’m very glad I got him as my roomie mainly because we give each other a lot of personal space and I learnt a lot about his culture!


I cannot eat in the room, video call too long, stay up too late bcos he will throw things and bang the door loudly as a way of expressing his disapproval and displeasure;
super absent-minded, goes out of the room and never fail to come back again bcos he forgot something;
sleeps when playing computer game (c/f above);
snores like a pig at times;
locked me out several times even when I'm just going out of the room to bathe or refill my bottle for just 1 min;
force me to bring my keys along even if I need to leave the room and pee for 3 mins;
low level of tolerance for noise;
dashed out of the room and sputtered some Japanese vulgar at the crowd cheering for Man U during the Champions League Finals bcos they were making too much noise;
takes up all the space in the room and leaves all the spoilt things for me; and
I had a hard time accommodating someone who only expects people to accommodate him.

(Bottom section was written by me)