What is beyond?

I know 30 or 40 characters and can write about 25 of them.  There are thousands.....

 The path continues, but its level is different - a journey of the mind.  For me the task of learning mandarin is indeed "The road less traveled" because I know very few people who have walked this path.  Never mind that Mandarin is spoken by more people than any other language on earth - the point is that people don't usually learn it at age 64.

In spite of the fact that every other student knows more Han zi characters than I do my teacher felt I ought to be able to handle this (basic) class.  There are about 12 of us, from many different backgrounds.  The photo above shows some of my first night's study as I attempted to learn the characters we will use the next day.  A young guy from Toronto, Nolan, is also staying in the guest house so we studied together.
While we were puzzling over the intricacies an elderly Taiwanese man came in and asked to join us.  What a treat!  He's a visiting professor lecturing on Business administration, but it turned out his real passion is calligraphy.  He proudly showed us long scrolls of his own work.  The poetry comes from a Prince in the Ming dynasty which he had lovingly painted in Han dynasty style characters.  Beautiful!  It led us into a lengthy discussion about Chinese history and the variety of places we collectively had visited.  One of the advantages to studying traditional characters is that you can sometimes grasp the pictographs out of which they arose.  Parts of complicated characters are replicated in other characters.  There are patterns; mysterious threads that Nolan seems to recognize more easily than I.
This morning I visited the bookstore above called Cave's.  It has a wide collection - in particular, many books created to help Chinese speakers to learn English.  Like all Taiwanese bookstores they have worked hard to create spaces where people can just sit and read a book without buying it.  This creates a bit of a social centre where people can meet and exchange ideas.  I met a woman whose husband is from Vancouver and another Taiwanese woman with a charming baby whose husband is French.  Apparently they communicated in English - the second language for both of them.