Adventures!

In case you were wondering, they celebrate the regular old new year here too, in addition to Chinese new year. I hear that they set off some sweet fireworks from Taipei 101 (the world's tallest building! for now), so I'm going up to Taipei this afternoon for that. After that, the adventure begins. It's a long weekend, so Gered and I wanted to go somewhere a little more inaccessible that we wouldn't be able to get to on a normal weekend, but we haven't nailed down a place yet. We're going to try to go to the Matsu Islands, but if that doesn't work out then maybe we'll poke around some mountains in central Taiwan or something else. There is a lot of potential adventure (potenture?) here.

CUTENESS:
Some of the Little Angels were actually angelic for once and made me a fancy paper bouquet. The bouquet was decorated with koalas and a note saying "thankful your teach! Happy New Year!" on it. Witness:

We wish you a lot of peace in the new year. Peace is abundant in Taiwan (especially when cameras are present), so I am happy to share.

It's April 27th, if you were wondering

On the bus today I saw a poster for a day to encourage people not to hit their children. The English name: International SpankOut Day.

I'd like to know who was in charge of translating that one...

聖誕節...

...a.k.a. shengdan jie a.k.a. Christmas a.k.a. a strange time to be abroad. Christmas didn't seem like Christmas this year, because there was no Christmas break to look forward to, and no snow, and not even any cold weather (Christmas Day? in the 70s), and no big rush of holiday preparations and baking cookies and visiting relatives. I was kind of glad that it didn't feel like Christmas, because it kept me from feeling too sad. If I were at home and I had to work all day on Christmas and didn't get to be with my family, I'd be pretty upset. Here, I don't mind, because it didn't really feel much different from any other Thursday anyway.

The days leading up to Christmas were really crazy and busy and kind of stressful for me, but I survived with the help of an emergency infusion of American baked goods that arrived by surprise. THANK YOU AUNT KARYN; YOU ARE AWESOME. THE CHOCOLATE-RASPBERRY CHIP ONES ARE MY FAVORITE.

I did try a bit to get into the Christmas spirit. The closest I came was on Christmas Eve. I was working in my room when I heard Christmas music. It was surprisingly loud, and it sounded decidedly unprofessional. At first I figured it was somebody playing a tape of children singing Christmas songs or something (not too uncommon in my recent life). Then I tried to figure out where the sound was coming from, and I realized that it was from outside my window. I opened the window to find the source of the sound, and looking down into our courtyard, saw a circle of people wearing Santa hats and singing Christmas carols in Chinese. For the first time, it seemed a little bit to me like real Christmas. They weren't the best singers, but I stayed there at my window listening until they left.

That night, I went to an English-speaking church for the first time since I've been in Taiwan. It was a small church, and the setup was a little bit strange, but the message was good, and at the end we turned off all the lights and lit our candles together and sang Silent Night, just like we do every Christmas Eve. It was familiar enough to remind me that it was really Christmas, which made me a little sad.

On Christmas morning, I had breakfast and presents with Gered, which was nice. Then I went to work. We told the Christmas story in all my classes, and in my teacher classes even ventured to attempt to explain Hanukkah a little bit. There are extremely few Jewish people in Taiwan, so we had a lot of confusion there. One of the teachers brought me a Christmas present, and a number of students gave me cards or little gifts. Patty's 18-year-old daughter gave me a stuffed Care Bear (the pink one, with the rainbow on its stomach), to the great delight/envy of my girl students. Taiwanese people don't generally exchange Christmas presents, but I think a lot of them gave me things because they know that Christmas is important in America, and they want me to feel at home. It was very sweet. That evening, the Fulbright ETAs got together and had a Western-style Christmas dinner (ordered from a nearby hotel), with turkey and mashed potatoes and whatnot. (okay, there might have been dumplings as well) We did quite decently, for Taiwan.

Anyway, it's lame to be away from home for Christmas, but we made the best of it. Also, I got to talk to a lot of people at home recently through the magic of Skype. Hooray!

Craziness and other craziness

First of all...we had an earthquake this morning!!!! Okay, just a little one, but I have never been in an earthquake before so it was exciting. It was around 8 am and I was sitting at my desk in my room on the 3rd floor when things got a little shaky. I looked outside and people were still walking their dogs and chatting with the guards and carrying on, but there was definitely a little earthquake action. It was cool.

So this weekend was insanely busy...not even very weekend-like, because I was up before 7 both days and going nonstop. Delicious.

Saturday was my school's anniversary celebration, a truly giant event. It started before 8 and went all the way until 4, and all the students and teachers and parents and anybody related to the school was there. There were lots of snacks and apparently a flea market (I never found it), but the big deal was the athletic competition between classes. Each grade's classes competed against each other in a series of relay races. The kids are extremely competitive, and I got pretty worked up just watching my kids race. Watching the kids run is fabulous, because you can tell that they are running sooooo hard, but they are so little that a lot of them looked like they were perpetually just about to fall over. Since I was around for all the races, a lot of my students came up and talked to me before and after, which was great. They were so excited that they forgot to be scared to speak English! Some kids even brought their parents over to meet me, which was really nice. It was a physically draining day, but I felt pretty great.

After a full day of sporting and flinging "hello"s left and right, I jaunted over to Chris Castro's (director of AIT-Kaohsiung and owner of a real oven!) for American baking time. I got there a bit late for the baking part, but we had a scrumptious dinner of Western food followed by lumping around the living room and watching the Polar Express. I even got baked goods to take home, even though I didn't help make them. It was extra-nice.

So Saturday was a very full day, but Sunday was no better. We were supposed to meet at 7:40 am to go on a cultural trip to Pingdong sponsored by the Kaohsiung Educational Bureau. My host sister was there, and she brought along her 6-year-old niece, who named herself Aurora after Sleeping Beauty because Sleeping Beauty gets to wear a pink dress. She was super-shy and barely said two words to me, but she was all kinds of cute, and she drew me a bunch of pictures.

The cultural part of the trip was that we were going to a sort of Taiwanese aboriginal culture village. Not an actual aboriginal village, but a place where they have things from various different aboriginal groups that you can check out. We watched a performance of the different groups' traditional dances, which was neat but very long. Also a lot of the guys in the performance were wearing some kind of traditional thong-type garment, and nothing else. Okay, maybe a vest or something, but the booty was all right on out there. Slightly awkward. They taught us a traditional song and a dance, and gave us (itchy) temporary versions of the traditional Atayal facial tattoos. When you're already conspicuous, you might as well just run with it, right? Unfortunately all photos of this are in my host sister Grace's possession, but you'll see them whenever they come into my hands. Also we went to Meinong again and made pots, but at a different place than last time. By the time we had dinner (they served us intestines! yum) and got on the bus to go home, I was totally wiped out. And it was maybe 7:30 pm. And I still had plenty to get done that night. As much as it is good to do interesting things on the weekends, man, it sucks to not have any time to rest. Fortunately English Village is on break again, so my life is going to be more relaxed for a bit. Hooray!

Christmastime in Taiwan

Spending the Christmas season in Taiwan is a bit of a strange time. For one thing, it doesn't feel like Christmastime because the weather is all wrong. These days our weather has been in the 70s, which doesn't exactly spell Christmas to me. I keep forgetting that it is even December. Also, this is the first year in a while when Christmastime hasn't been heralded by a period of final exams. Having a Christmas break to look forward to certainly adds to the holiday anticipation. As for me, I will be working on Christmas, just like any other Thursday. Honestly, I don't mind too much...I think it will keep my mind off of missing Christmas at home, and I'm happy to spend Christmas with my kids.

Taiwanese people seem to all know about Christmas, but it's not the same kind of holiday here that it is in the States. I asked one of my classes today how many of their families celebrated Christmas at home, and only a few kids raised their hands. They knew about Santa and Christmas trees, and one or two kids even told me that Christmas is when Jesus was born. Some of them knew that Christmas involved presents, but most of them said that they didn't get Christmas presents themselves.

However, even if Taiwanese people don't generally celebrate Christmas the way most Americans do, there is one aspect of the Christmas season that Taiwan can definitely get behind. Because what is Christmas, really, if not an excuse to festoon everything with as much shiny, light-up stuff as we can get our hands on? Now that's what I'm talking 'bout. Our friendly neighborhood stationery store is both stocked with and decorated with formidable amounts of tinsel, and they have taken to blasting really unfortunate Christmas music as well (think techno version of The First Noel, and other equally painful things). My favorite Christmas decorations, however, are the ones that have been put up in the courtyard of our apartment building. Here is the view from our balcony:

Check out the left side of the picture. See that little guy? It's a light-up reindeer!

Two of them, actually. Also: THEY MOVE. Albeit veeeeeery slowly.

For those of you with a little extra time on your hands, here is a more complete video tour:

Special guest appearance by one of our security guards, who didn't realize that I was taking a video. Also please note the friendly light of 7-11 just outside our gate. My life revolves around that 7-11.

Voiceless Teaching, a Bus Acquaintance, and Leftover Turkey

I've been sick recently with a nasty cold, which puts a cramp in my usual teaching style because my throat has been too sore to deal with all of the (loud) talking that normal teaching demands. Fortunately, I have the fabulous Patty to back me up in class, and together we formed a scheme (about 30 seconds before our first class) to use my lack of voice as a teaching tool. When the students entered the classroom, they found Teacher Rebekah apparently asleep with her head down on the desk, which drew a lot of curiosity. As class started, Patty explained that I was resting because I was sick with a sore throat, so I couldn't talk to the students, but I could still respond to their English! She reminded them of our vocab words from the last class (get up, go to bed, go home, and go to school), and prompted them all to tell me, "get up," which was my magical clue (after having *slept* through the cacophony of the students' arrival to the classroom) to wake up sleepily. Although in the beginning Patty prompted the students to give me different commands, after a little while they were all raising their hands and yelling things out. Smart-aleck students had me running back and forth between "school" and "home" (drawn on the blackboard) over and over, or they would tell me to "go home and go to bed" and then promptly order me to go to school, resulting in some sleepwalking. To end the activity, I waited until someone told me to go home, and then I would leave the classroom and fall asleep out in the hall, upon which some puzzled student would be sent to find the missing teacher. Finding me asleep usually flummoxed them for a moment, after which they would remember to use their vocab and command me to "get up and go to school." We all had a ton of fun with this activity, so it really wasn't so bad that my throat was sore.

One of the unexpected side effects of doing the "sleeping teacher" act in the beginning of class was the way that the students reacted when they saw me asleep. A lot of times the students would arrive before Patty and just hang around speculating about their sleeping teacher in Chinese:
"Why is the teacher asleep?"
"Maybe she is tired."
"Maybe she doesn't feel well."
"I think that she must be tired because she doesn't get nap time. I heard that she teaches the English Angels class during nap time."
One student even came up and started massaging my shoulders, and another pressed a heating pad to my forehead! Also, in one class, after Patty told the students that I had a sore throat, I woke up to find a little collection of cough drops and candies contributed by various students sitting in front of me. Sigh...as much trouble as my students can be sometimes, I really do love them. They are so adorable.

Patty and I went to the doctor together after school today, where they poked things up my nose and sprayed what I think was anesthetic down my throat and told me that I have "the flu," which is Taiwan English for "a cold." (not actually the flu!) Now I have medicine and am hopefully on my way to a quick recovery, because Patty is busy coming down with whatever I've got. To my mother: Patty says do not worry about me, because she will take good care of me. Patty is the same age as my mom, so she tends to feel responsible for me the way she is for her own two daughters.

I had an interesting experience on the bus ride home on Monday. I overheard some high school girls talking about me ("you talk to her!" "no, you do it!" etc.) and debating whether or not I would be able to speak Chinese. I heard one of them say "what about Taiwanese? Foreigners usually can't speak Taiwanese," after which point one of them finally came up to me and said hello...in Taiwanese. Which fortunately sounds enough like the Mandarin for me to understand, so I said "hi" back. She kept looking at me, and it was kind of awkward, and then she started asking me questions. At first they were the normal questions, like "what country are you from" and "what are you doing in Taiwan" and such like. Once we had established the basics, though, she started asking me strange things, like who my American idol was. At first I thought she meant American Idol, and I was really confused, and then she suggested maybe Rihanna so I knew it wasn't the uppercase Idol, but I still didn't really have an answer. There was another awkward period where she got really close to my face and stared at my eyes (dear heavens, they are blue! alert the press!). Then she saw my Peking University t-shirt and we got to talking about mainland China. I asked her if she had ever been to China, and she said no, but then she started spewing all this stuff about mainland Chinese people. I didn't understand a lot of it, but I could tell that it wasn't exactly favorable. Finally she ended up telling me that they were heixin, which literally means "black-heart." I was a little bit taken aback. Admittedly, it is a lot less likely that people are trying to rip you off in Taiwan than it is on the mainland, but that doesn't mean that all Chinese people are bad people! I started to say this, but before I could give much of a good response, we were at my bus stop. Oh well. I have to wonder if many Taiwanese people hold these kind of views, because I haven't encountered it with anyone else. Kind of intense, coming from a 15-year-old kid. Weird times.

And to top off this post, I think it's time for a serving of leftover turkey...it keeps being delicious!
I am thankful for "my mother"

...if that's really who she is.

I am thankful for my grandparent

...but I can't tell you which one!

Alien turkey, by Leon:


Strangely patriotic turkey from my crazy Tina (the Obama lover):


And one of my personal favorites:

Happy to Rebekah! Incoherent but cute. Although the nails are kind of creepy, let's not lie.

Here's a little panorama of my classroom...you can click on it to see a big one. It is pretty much plastered with hand turkeys on all available surfaces:

I am a lazy bum

The other reason that I haven't posted in a while is that there haven't been too many new and crazy things happening. This past week there was no English Village, so I only actually worked 3 of the past 7 days. The rest of the time I mostly did nothing...I got sick this week, so I spent a lot of time sleeping and blowing my nose and sitting around in my pajamas watching Pushing Daisies off the internet. Gered brought me soup and orange juice the day I was feeling really gross. He's a sweetheart.

I don't feel too bad about being lazy, because a) I am sick, and all the sleep really helped, and b) the 3 days that I did work this week were tiring enough! I am supposed to be teaching the English Angels to sing Christmas carols, and it's halfway hilarious and halfway just plain awful.
I made them sing by themselves if they weren't paying attention, which was fun. Let's be honest, though, the Little Angels did not get selected for their singing abilities. After one class of Decking the Halls in like seven different keys at once, my ears were about to fall off. I don't know how I'm going to do it for three more weeks. Slash I don't know how I'm going to stand teaching that class for the rest of the year; they are so disrespectful.

But you know who I love? My teacher classes! They are the cutest bunch of ladies ever. On Thanksgiving, I arrived into my last period teacher class to find that they had gotten tea and cake for everybody. When I asked what the occasion was, they said it was because it was Thanksgiving and they were thankful for the opportunity to be in our English class. Then they asked me to tell them all about American Thanksgiving, which was nice because while I gave all my classes an introduction to Thanksgiving, nobody had actually asked me about it. Teacher class is the best because we just talk about whatever comes up. We start with activities in the book, but we always get sidetracked, which is fine because we are still learning things. Like the word "sidetracked," for example. We also talk about lexical semantics a lot, which makes me feel like my college education was actually useful, so that's fun.

Oh, it's been so long since I posted that I didn't even write about our Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving in Taiwan was pretty good...the head of AIT-Kaohsiung hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for us and our co-teachers and other foreigners who were in town, and it was a good time. There was turkey and ham and mashed potatoes and green bean casserole and pumpkin pie and all of the traditional Thanksgiving food. I love pumpkin pie so very much, but it's only ever around at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Why??? I would make my own pumpkin pie at other times, if I weren't in the Land of No Ovens.

Anyway, Thanksgiving was about as good as it gets for not being at home, and because of the time difference, I got to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family as well! Thanks to the marvels of the Internet and Skype, I got to be virtually present at Porter Thanksgiving a little bit, which meant talking to relatives as well as participating in the traditional Thanksgiving game of Charades! There is a little bit of a delay when communicating over Skype, and the video is a little fuzzy/slow sometimes, so I wasn't a super-helpful guesser, but I did get to act some things out while the crew back at home did the guessing. Hooray for trans-continental Charades!

So it seems that Taiwanese winter has arrived...when the weather first got cooler, my kids all came into school bundled up in layers and down jackets, telling me "teacher, today is dongtian!" ('winter') I told them no, it's not winter yet, it's fall, but then the other night a cab driver told us that Taiwan mostly just has summer and winter, so maybe this is winter? It's 77 out right now, which is really nice, and I know that I can't complain that much because it's freezing at home right now BUT it does get cooler at night, and we don't have heat in our apartment. Consequently, although the outside weather is a lot warmer here than at home, my room gets pretty far below room temperature. Also I am cold-blooded. My bed just has one thin blanket-sheet-thing, so I've been wearing two layers of pajamas when my room gets down into the 50s at night. Picture this: polka-dotted pants underneath, tucked into my socks so they don't scrunch up in the night and leave my calves cold, with striped capri-length pants over them. Add two sweatshirts, and you have Rebekah's super-fashionable cold-weather pajama ensemble. I should probably just get another blanket.

Yesterday afternoon Gered and I went on a trip with my school to Guanyin Mountain. We walked up the mountain on a trail, rested a couple times on the way, then walked back down and had a celebratory dinner. The mountain was really pretty and scenic, and the place where we had dinner was cute until you went inside and experienced the wealth of Christmas lights and booming karaoke, a hallmark of any good Taiwanese festivity. We had a pretty decent dinner, although I really do not understand why people voluntarily eat kugua (bitter melon). I took a few pieces in spite of the unappetizing name, and regretted it with every bite. The excellence of our dinner was augmented by the melodious tunes of school administrators singing into what was apparently an Echo Mic turned up to 8 zillion, plus of course the fabulous presence of Principal Dragon. Originally we had been at the same table as Dragon, but Patty stole us away to another table because the administrator's table was going to be drinking and she thought we might be uncomfortable. Nevertheless, Dragon made his way over to our table, and despite my protestations, topped off my half-full cup of tea with Taiwan Beer. Delicious. Then he had a super conversation with Gered ("handsome boy!" as Dragon likes to call him), informing him that I would be staying in Taiwan after this year. Oh really. Also we learned that apparently in Taiwan, if you are openly dating, it means that you are going to get married. Geez, no pressure. It's a good thing that I am used to awkward situations.

Fire Chickens!

Since Thanksgiving is coming up, we devoted part of our class time this week to special Thanksgiving activities. Also, since Fulbright wanted photos of us co-teaching, I happen to have photo documentation of these activities for your enjoyment (photos by Jeffrey, the YMPS academic dean)!

First there was some 'splainin to do, being as Taiwanese children don't know much about Thanksgiving:



Me: "And what do Americans like to eat on Thanksgiving?" (hint hint, look at the giant picture behind me)
Students: "Chicken!"
Me: "No, but close..."
Students: "Huoji!"
Me: "Yes! How do you say that in English?"
The funny thing about turkey in Chinese is that the Chinese word for turkey, huoji, literally means "fire-chicken." There was always some smart kid in my class who knew the word "turkey," but I kind of prefer the literal translation myself.

Then we made hand turkeys! I showed them a paper one that I had made first, and then I demonstrated my hand turkey technique up on the board. Despite the fact that I had JUST shown them an actual completed hand turkey that I made, they were totally amazed when the hand-thing I was making on the board turned out to be a turkey. One class even applauded!



Then it was time for the kids to make their own hand turkeys. I was quite surprised by how meticulous they were about it! I mean, it took me about 5 seconds to trace my hand satisfactorily, but the students were very careful, and would erase and redo it if they thought their hand didn't look good enough.

Peter and Melody beginning their hand turkeys:

Side note: the boy on the left, Peter, has always been kind of a space cadet during class, and never seemed to understand what was going on. Then two weeks ago, he started coming to class wearing glasses. I asked him about it yesterday, and it turned out he is kind of blind without them. What was he doing before, I'd like to know! Perhaps these things are related in some way?




A lot of the kids were taking their time so much that they didn't quite finish their turkeys in class, which is a shame, because then I could have shown you the alien turkey or the turkey with mushrooms for wings. One girl came to visit our classroom after school, and examining my example turkey more carefully, asked Patty if in fact she hadn't been supposed to make all of the fingers into heads!

Although some kids made really crazy things, a lot of them modeled their turkeys pretty closely after my example turkey. Each student had to write "I am thankful for ____" above their hand turkey, and some of them just copied mine verbatim, which was silly because mine said "I am thankful for my students." One girl was just confused about what "students" meant, and after talking to her a little bit I helped her change it to say "I am thankful for my classmates." My other student Goofy (yes, that's his name, although he spells it "Gofy") was just being silly, and when I pointed out that he didn't have students, he changed it to this:

Thanks, Goofy.

A lot of the turkeys turned out pretty special, for various reasons:

Sometimes you just forget some of those middle letters.


It's a little hard to see, but if you look at the middle of the turkey, you will notice that this particular turkey is actually celebrating "Manksgiving," a lesser-known, more testosterone-fueled November holiday.


I think this is actually a pretty cool turkey, despite the excellent spelling of Thanksgiving.


My student Michael asked Patty how to say "grandmother" in English so he could make this sweet little guy. Michael is very small and super adorable!


Lightning turkey!


Extra-colorful turkey!


Extra-perfect suckup turkey! Haha, just kidding, Amy.

Mmmm all this turkey is making me tired. I'll leave you with a shot of my beloved Patty:

All these turkey shenanigans can be so perplexing! Must be time for a nap.

Assorted Pictures

Some things that I wrote about before but didn't provide pictures of, plus some other random little things.

Baiyang Waterfall Trail in Taroko Gorge National Park:


Taking pictures in a photo booth with Maya and Taiwanese teenagers:




My fierce pirate Halloween costume! The best part was that the students kept asking me if my anchor tattoo was real. Actually I drew it myself with a sparkly blue gel pen, but close enough:

(it's an attractive face I'm making, I know)

Christmas started in early November at the coffee shop near my school:


My school courtyard on a nice day:


Giving a talk on American campus culture with super translator Eric! I am so official:


And just for fun...my student Sandy (center) came in one day wearing a striped shirt, striped pants, and striped socks, and I just had to take a picture:

And there's soooo much more cuteness where that came from...I love my students!

There's a lot of cuteness in my life

I've been making more of an effort recently to get up and get to school early so I have some buffer time to prepare before my classes start. One pleasant side effect of this was that I discovered that there's a school dance competition that takes place first period (not all year long, just recently). The day I happened upon it was the day that all of the 2nd grade classes were competing against each other. Each class had its own little dance, and all of the students had costumes that they apparently had made themselves out of household materials. Behold:

Garbage bag skirts decorated with stickers! Little white hats that are really just upside-down paper bowls! Giant plastic blue bow ties! Socks with faces drawn on them worn on the hands! To me, this class easily took the cake in the costume department.

This class was less coordinated in their dress...the girls in the first row have leis, the boys in the second row have cowboy hats with flowers on them, and the children in the back rows have large cardboard fish strapped to their foreheads. The first two rows also have garbage-bag loincloths (blue for boys and pink for girls, of course). Also note that some kids in the back row have brooms, which they danced with during the performance. You can't say they aren't resourceful!

Also in the performance vein, this past Tuesday my Little Angels class was scheduled to perform a song in English on the morning TV show that is broadcast to the whole school. We voted in class to sing "Boss of Me," the Malcom in the Middle theme song, and I made some posters for them to hold up during the instrumental break in the song. We held a quick extra practice session the day before the performance, and things were good. On the day of the performance, the kids were really nervous, and they couldn't get our music to work until the very very last minute before we went on! Despite their anxiety, the kids did a really great job, and the gal who taped the performance said she would get me a copy...we'll see if that really happens.

I had kind of forgotten the possibility that the kids might be nervous about performing, because at this point in my life, I've been in enough performances that I don't really get nervous about being in front of an audience. That's why I said yes when AIT (the American Institute in Taiwan) asked me to give a talk on American Campus Culture at the American Shelf, a special section of the Baoju Library. I didn't exactly know what I was supposed to do, but I've had pretty good luck with agreeing to do things where I don't exactly know what I'm doing (how do you think I ended up teaching English in Taiwan?) and then sort of figuring it out as I go along. They told me to send my talking points to the translator beforehand so he could prepare, which was good because it ensured that I actually prepared my talk before the last minute. The talk was on Wednesday, and it was an interesting time. I don't mind public speaking, but I've never had a translator before...it's kind of weird, because the audience doesn't react to what you're saying at the same time as you actually say it. Except the one guy with really good English who laughed riotously at anything that was vaguely funny. I loved that guy. Eric the translator was really sweet, too...he made everything I said sound so much better (and, you know, so much more Chinese). The best part was when I was talking about eating on campus and I mentioned the concept of the "freshman 15." For their reference, I said that 15 pounds was about 6 or 7 kg. When Eric translated, this turned into "6.8 kilograms." He was not kidding about preparing himself beforehand. A number of other times, I noticed that things from my notes that I had forgotten to actually say made their way into the Chinese translation. Eric, you are the man. At the end, we had a Q & A session, and they gave me oranges. It was a good time.

One of the reasons that I haven't posted much recently is that a lot of things haven't been that exciting...in school I spent the better part of the past 2 weeks doing English Village stuff, which was a little bit lame. First I had to teach my students a dialogue about a hotel, and the next week I had to go pretend to be the hotel receptionist and act out the dialogue with them. The only good part was the fact that they had to perform the dialogue in groups of 4, which gave me a little room to mess around with them. Example:

Me: "What kind of room would you like?"
4 students, in unison: "A double, please."
Me: "But you have four people! A double is only for two!"

A lot of students were boggled by this deviation from the dialogue, but some of them gave me some good, inventive answers. Many changed their request to 2 doubles, some told me "it's okay, we are so small" or "he will sleep on the floor," but my absolute favorite was the kid who told me he wanted "a fourple." Not quite, kid, but points for effort. And for cuteness!

On the subject of cuteness...as you may recall, earlier this semester I taught the English Angels to do Y.M.C.A. My dad had been digitizing some of our old home videos, and he found a video of me doing Y.M.C.A. at a wedding when I'm about 7 years old, so he sent it to me. I took it into school on Thursday and showed the Little Angels, and they couldn't believe that the small fuzzy blonde person was me. There was a lot of "Teacher, so cute!" and "Teacher, that is YOU???" Many students also wanted to know about the little boy running across the screen, and were amazed when I explained that it was my little brother, who is now thiiiiis tall, and has a beard! Experience small Rebekah and Luke for yourself:


In other news, today I managed to buy a pair of pants that, in spite of being Taiwanese, still manage to a) actually fit me and b) not have a single rhinestone on them!!! I know, I couldn't believe it either.

Taiwanese Wedding, featuring Principal Dragon!

A while ago, all of the Fulbrights got invited to the wedding of the son of the principal at San Min, the school where our main office is and where I work at English Village. I agreed to go, but I had kind of forgotten about it until this morning when Billy asked me if I was going to the wedding. I took a peek at my invitation and realized it was today! Ha. Good thing I didn't have anything else to do!

So this evening around dinnertime, six of us got mildly fancied up and went to Principal Lin's son's wedding. This is very different from going to a Western wedding. For one thing, wedding dress is less formal here. Suits and fancy dresses are not necessary. Also, usually if you attend a wedding in America, you are presumably a friend or relative of the bride or groom. The only encounter I had ever had with either of these parties before was the one time during orientation when we were leaving San Min and we ran into them taking some wedding pictures outside of the school. For another thing, in Taiwan the wedding pictures don't happen on the wedding day...the bride and groom spend lots of time before the wedding getting dressed up in all kinds of fancy outfits and taking lots and lots of pictures in different settings. Also, there is no gift registration to help you pick out some nice kitchen implements for the happy couple, because in Taiwan you just give them money in a nice red envelope. Not too complex, except you have to be careful about the amount you give to make sure that it is lucky. Even numbers are good, but you don't want a number including "4" because 4 in Chinese sounds like death. We gave $1200, which various Taiwanese people assured me is an appropriately lucky amount.

The event that we went today didn't include a ceremony, nor was there any dancing or anything. There were some speeches and a slideshow, but mainly there was eating. It took place in a giant hall full of tables, and you pretty much stay at your table the whole time. At some point, the bridal party comes around to all the tables and toasts everybody. They appeared to be using cranberry juice, which was probably wise given the number of tables.

The meal was 12ish courses, and featured a lot of things that I didn't know exactly what they were or how to eat them. I snagged a thing that looked kind of like a sweet potato chip, only to be informed by Shana as I bit into it that it was made of compressed fish roe. Let's be honest: it was gross. I was relieved when the desserty courses came, because they had far less questionable contents. Although there was the fruit soup that had weird white things in it (a kind of seaweed or fungi, I would guess) that supposedly would make me beautiful, as I was informed by the helpful man sitting next to me.

Dinner was a bit of an awkward time in general, especially because our table had six Americans and 2 Taiwanese couples who seemed fairly averse to talking to us. The Taiwanese couples didn't even really talk to each other. It was only the one guy who talked to us at all. So that was awkward, but the awkward highlight of the evening was when the principal of my school came over to our table.

To explain: I can't remember if I've said much about him before, but the principal of my school is a CRAZYPANTS. His English name is Dragon (he picked it himself!), and he is generally incoherent in English and not much better in Chinese. Even the other teachers at my school acknowledge that his Chinese isn't very clear. He came over to our table while one of the Taiwanese guys was gone, and *borrowed* his wine glass to toast all of us. Seeing our confusion at his original mixed-up toast, he clarified with "happy! nice!" and a thumbs-up. There were a couple of these toasts in a short period of time. Then he poured all of the wine left at our table into Dr. Phil's glass and made him drink. With our table out of wine, he disappeared momentarily and then reappeared with another bottle of wine, apparently snagged from a different table. More toasts all around. Did I mention that Dragon is looking pretty pink at this point? I ask him if the bride is a teacher at Yang Ming, because I thought I had heard someone say that. He said no, it's the groom who is a teacher at Yang Ming. Then he says that I can be the bride of Yang Ming. I'm a little confused by this. He clarifies, and it turns out that he means he thinks I will be the next person from Yang Ming to get married. Oooooookay. Then he goes on about my boyfriend, mispronouncing his name so thoroughly that I would never have known he was trying to say Gered if someone else didn't guess it. He reminds me that Gered is tall and slim, and pantomimes this. I'm doing the smile-and-nod thing here. It is basically a necessity in any conversation with my principal. He toasts me with a ganbei(lit. "dry cup"), which means I have to finish my glass of wine. Fortunately there isn't much in it. Then, he inexplicably asks me if I want to marry a Taiwanese man. Not the next question I would have expected. I tell him I wasn't planning on it. He asks me when I'm leaving Taiwan, and when I say June, he tells me that I should stay here, because I can get all the men. Super. With a lot more thumbs-up action, Dragon tells Dr. Phil that I am very good and that the students and the teachers all like me. "The boy teachers like you," he says to me, by way of clarification. He's still sitting in the other man's seat...why hasn't the other guy come back yet? Dragon has been at our table for a while at this point and everybody is feeling very awkward. To be honest, I am kind of enjoying myself, because it is a hilarious kind of awkward. There are some more toasts, and Dragon attempts to bond with Dr. Phil a little bit. Dr. Phil looks completely overwhelmed.

Several times during this extensive and sometimes painfully awkward conversation, it looks like Dragon is about to leave, but each time it turns out to be a false hope. Finally he comes over to me to put the final touches on what has been a long and hilarious conversation. He tells me once again how great I am, and how the other teachers all like me, and I assure him that I like them a lot as well. He tells me that the students all think I am the most beautiful, and does a little impression of them for my benefit. Another great part of this is that when he talks about me in Chinese, he gets my Chinese name wrong every time, calling me Bei li ka instead of Li bei ka. I feel that since he knows that my English name is Rebekah, it shouldn't be too hard to keep my Chinese name in order. Apparently this is untrue.

Finally, after a couple glasses of wine and an amazing amount of awkward, Dragon departed from our table, and the night was henceforth quite uneventful. The End.

Black Person Toothpaste

Observation 1: Taiwanese people like white skin. The whiter, the prettier; that is our philosophy here.
Observation 2: While they care a lot about their skin color, Taiwanese people don't seem to be nearly as invested in having straight, white teeth, as far as I can tell by looking at them.

True fact that, given these observations, strikes me as slightly unusual: The most ubiquitous brand of toothpaste around these parts is Heiren Yagao, which translates as "black person toothpaste." Literally. (Although the English brand name on the box is "Darlie." You can't fool me!)

Upon further inquiry, I learned that there is a stereotype among Taiwanese people that black people have very white teeth. I guess it's not that unreasonable, if you consider it relative to skin tone.

For your own examination, a box of Black Person Toothpaste:

How about that guy on the left? Does he or does he not remind you of the stereotypical vaudevillian blackface look? It's enough to make me feel a little bit weird.

For the record, other than the cultural preference for pale skin, I've never heard anything from a Taiwanese person to suggest that they actually harbor any kind of serious negative opinions about black people. Also, I have to confess that I myself own a tube of Black Person Toothpaste...I was in urgent need of toothpaste, and it was the only kind they had at 7-11 in the big tube. Plus it guarantees whiter teeth in 14 days! But still, Taiwan. Maybe we should class it up a little bit here and drop the racial stereotypes.

Obamarama!

So of course this week in my classes we had to have a little American Culture Time and talk about the American election, with occasionally hilarious results. Here is a typical dialogue from my Tuesday classes:

Me: Does anybody know what's happening in America today?
Students:..................(someone says something in Chinese about picking a new President)
Me: Riiiiight, a presidential election! Who knows who the President of Taiwan is?
S: Ma Ying-jeou!
Me: Okay, and who is the President of America?
S: OBAMA!!!!
Me: Ummmm who is the President of America RIGHT NOW?
S: ...............................
(finally someone yells "Bu shi!" which is an excellently silly Chineseification if I do say so myself)
Me: Right, George Bush. And who are the two men who want to be President?
S: OBAMA!! OBAMA OBAMA!!!
Me: Okay, right, Obama is one; who is the other one?
S: ..............................
(finally I get a little "Mai ken," which is apparently what they call McCain)
S: OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA!!!!!

The moral of the story is that Taiwanese elementary schoolers are totally in the tank for Obama. As far as I can tell, this is primarily because his name is easy and fun to say. Can't argue with that! In general, I was impressed by the amount that my kids knew about American politics. Take a class of average American 5th graders and see if any of them know who the candidates for President or Prime Minister or anything are in any other country. I know that Taiwan is little and America is big and important, but still. Good job, Taiwanese kids, is what I say. I asked them what they knew about the candidates and this is what they could tell me:
-McCain is old
-he has white hair
-Obama is black
-Obama is handsome (this comment surprised me because everybody in Asia knows white skin is prettier)
-Obama is "old," "young," or "so-so," depending on who you ask

In my smartie band class today, I tried to explain that at 47, Obama is quite young for a U.S. President, and one little kid piped up in protest, "but Teacher, I am ten!" I guess he has a point. Also it was really cute.

Probably my most Obama-riffic student is my girl Tina. Tina is tall and very friendly and wears all pink all the time. I have her for two classes a week, and every time she sees me she comes up and stands like 6 inches away and tells me, "hello, teacher!" followed by whatever sentence she has been practicing to say to me. Our last unit was on feelings, and on Tuesday Tina came up to me at the beginning of class and told me, "Teacher, I feel great and excited." Tina's English isn't that good, but out of all of my students she is one of the most motivated to speak English. This seems to spring from the fact that Tina is crazy about me. Tina is also crazy in general. She hadn't heard of Obama before Tuesday, but when she heard his name she just couldn't let go of it. A brief transcript of our conversation:
Tina: OBAMA! OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA!
Me: Yes, Tina, his name is Obama.
Tina: Obama is Obama and Obama. (her exact words)
Me: Right...hey Tina, what day is today? (our current unit is about days of the week)
Tina: OBAMA!
Me: Umm...well maybe tomorrow will be Obama day (because of course election night in America was on Wednesday in Taiwan).
Tina: OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA!!!!!
Me: Never mind.

Needless to say, Tina was sufficiently delighted to give me the answer when I asked her this morning who won the election (although a classmate had to translate the question for her).

As for me, it's been kind of interesting to experience a U.S. election from abroad. I didn't have class Wednesday morning, so I was able to keep track of the election results as they were coming in, but it was just me, waking up early on my morning off to drowsily watch CNN in my pajamas. It took the calling of Ohio for Obama to really wake me up, and by the time I was showered and dressed, California was coming in for real and it was all over, officially. It was so hard to believe that after the seemingly endless months of campaigning, the moment had finally come, and it was over, just like that. Very little pomp or ceremony around here...nobody was running out to celebrate in the streets. Nobody was even there to high five. So with my own little self, I spoke my thoughts to the television and did a little democracy dance around the living room. Later, I talked to Luke on Skype and we watched McCain's concession speech together from opposite sides of the world. It was cool.

Full disclosure: I voted for Obama. I think he's an intelligent and respectable guy, with generally good priorities, and the kind of leader that the country needs right now. He channeled a little FDR in his victory speech, and I think he's got more where that came from. But I have to say, McCain's concession speech was all kinds of classy. I was totally impressed. I think he'll be a lot better off just being John McCain than he was when he was trying to please all the different factions of the Republican Party. And that's about as much politics as this blog can handle...over and out!

My Legs Have Become Suddenly More Delicious

I'm starting to think that my legs must have become suddenly more delicious recently, because all of a sudden the number of bug bites I've been getting has increased exponentially. There was one time when I looked down and noticed that I had acquired seven new bug bites on my left shin since the last time I had checked. Presumably it is my most delicious region.

My life has been very busy in recent days, hence the lack of blogging. Last Saturday in particular was pretty crazy...in the morning I went with Maya and some Taiwanese high schoolers who she met another time to see an Indian movie about field hockey. It was very long and pretty awesome, enough to make me a little nostalgic about India despite the fact that my actual Indian experience was not so favorable most of the time. Also there was lots of girl power, and who can't get behind that? Anyway, after 2+ hours of movie, we went and got some lunch, and afterwards pondered what to do. The answer was, obviously, go take silly pictures in those silly Asian photo booths. After giving my face-making muscles a full workout, I grooved on over to the Kaohsiung Arena to attend an unspecified "athletic event" that the Kaohsiung Bureau of Education had given us tickets to. It turned out to be an opening ceremony for the Taiwan National Games, which seems to be a bit of a mini version of the World Games (which Kaohsiung is hosting in July), which are sort of a silly, more obscure version of the Olympics. The World Games have these silly little mascots (reminiscent of the Olympic Friendlies) that for some reason put in quite an appearance at the National Games ceremony. My guess is that Kaohsiung has invested a lot of money in the World Games mascots, so they wanted to get plenty of use out of them? Nobody in Taiwan really seems to be that interested (or even aware of) the National Games, so I'm sure nobody would notice if they just borrowed the World Games mascots a little bit, right?

So the ceremony featured, among other things: bleachers and bleachers of elementary schoolers who had been trained to wave pom poms and flags in different patterns (they did the wave a lot), a band that played some classical Chinese music and, inexplicably, a medley of American cartoon theme songs (Looney Tunes, the Simpsons, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, lots of other things I can't think of), cheerleaders, and a truly amazing dance performance by a huge horde of the World Games bubble-people mascots. Please appreciate (and note that the background music is "Hi Ho" from Snow White):



The dance move where they all fall down is by far my favorite part. This is why I love Asia.

Towards the end of the ceremony there were fewer dancing bubble-people and more processions of athletes and speeches in Chinese, so it got kind of lame. But afterwards things were fun again, because we went to Teresa's restaurant for dinner and salsa dancing! Teresa owns a (kind of) Spanish restaurant that we went to one other time...we were surprised to meet a native Spanish speaker in Kaohsiung, so it was only a little bit surprising when Gered started taking Spanish classes and she turned out to be the teacher. Apparently she also teaches flamenco. It seems that Teresa is a one-woman crusade to bring Spanish culture to Kaohsiung.

Anyway, we were taught salsa by a guy named Diego, who was very nice and seemed to know what he was doing, except he definitely had his own rhythm that was not at the same speed as the music, so trying to dance to the music and trying to follow Diego were kind of conflicting purposes. We had a good time learning some salsa moves, although later in the night the party sort of degenerated into whatever kind of dancing you felt like doing, which was fun too.

That was also the night that Gered lost his wallet at 1 am...he dropped it in the cab that we took home. Fortunately he had just taken his money out to pay the cab driver, but it still had important cards in it, so I asked the nice cashier man in 7-11 who to call, and he was like oh there is a number where they broadcast messages to the taxis; I can give it to you so you can call. Then he took a look at my face and was like aaaactually I will just call them for you, okay? Except then they didn't pick up, so he gave me the number to call the police, and I actually called them myself (phone conversations in Chinese are lots harder than face-to-face ones, so I felt pretty good about doing this successfully), and in a little bit a bunch of cops came to talk to us. First two cops came on motorcycles, then a car, then some more motorcycles. It was a big ol' party. At one point some other foreigners saw us talking to the cops and came to ask if we needed help. Sweet of them. In the end, we successfully reported the lost wallet, but it hasn't turned up in the week since, so I think it was a lost cause. Although today I saw the same cashier at 7-11 and he asked me about it very concernedly. So nice!

Tuesday was a big emotional rollercoaster at school. My first couple of classes were pretty good, but then I had English Angels after lunch, and they were just awful. Nobody was listening, very few kids seemed like they were taking our activity seriously, and everything was loud and disrespectful and generally derailed. I was trying to deal with it for a while, but towards the end of class it got to be too much. I gave an angry little speech about how they became English Angels voluntarily and if you don't want to participate properly then DON'T COME and then everybody had to put their head down on their desk and be quiet for the remainder of class. Which is what the kids who aren't in English Angels have to do during nap time, so I didn't feel too bad about it. I was still really angry when class was over, but when I went to teach my afternoon classes I made a big effort to not act angry, because I didn't want to take it out on them. I felt better pretty soon, but I was feeling a little apprehensive, because I had scheduled an extra-help class for the last period.

Since our midterms were last week, I had analyzed the midterm grades for all of my classes and broken them down by score. Out of my 310 kids, 19 failed their midterm, so those 19 were assigned to come in last period for extra help. Now, I had done an extra help thing the week before, and that worked really well, but these kids were the ones at the absolute bottom of the barrel, so I was concerned that they were going to be the ones who just didn't care or something. I also thought that they might feel humiliated or resentful at being sent to what was essentially a remedial English class. Thankfully I was wrong on both counts.

One of my boys showed up way early to our extra help session and just sort of wandered around the classroom. I asked Patty if he was embarrassed to be at extra help and she said no, he was really excited to come. This made me feel better, and when the other students arrived they seemed to feel the same way. Of course, they stared at me with total incomprehension when I said just about anything to them in English, but we can work on that. I was planning to try to squeeze in as much of the first two chapters' material as I could, but it turned out that first we needed to work on pronouncing our English names. A lot of students didn't understand the question, "what's your name?" and when I asked in Chinese they couldn't always remember it. Some of these students were ones that I had assigned names to earlier, but my names were kind of difficult for them. Students often get their English names from cram school, so the students without English names are usually the ones who don't go to cram school and consequently, the ones who are kind of behind.

Apologies to my cousins: I had to rename Natalie and Nathan. Natalie couldn't remember her name (too many syllables!), and Nathan couldn't pronounce his. I ended up renaming him Mason because that's how he pronounced Nathan, and Mason is a valid name, so why not? I would rather have the kids have names that they feel comfortable saying, because then they won't be as afraid to speak (I hope!). In any case, I think the kids kind of treasure having names that their teacher gave them personally. I wonder if they'll still remember their names on Monday. Even if they don't, I generally call my students by name if I can, so if they can't remember their name now they ought to after I call them by it a zillion times.

My little boy who cried during Jeopardy came to extra help! He's a shy little guy, but I have a lot of affection for him. I named him Josh.

On my way home on Tuesday, I thought about the wide range of abilities that I deal with at school. It's interesting to me that the most advanced students are the ones who are the biggest pain for me to work with, whereas I kind of love working with the kids who are incredibly behind. This surprises me a bit, because as a student I was always in the former group, so I might have expected to like those students better. This next week I'm starting another session of extra help, and I'm really excited about that, whereas in English Angels I have to start teaching them how to talk about the school. I am so enthused.

This past Friday was Halloween and Gered's birthday, and I had intended to spend my Sunday preparing for Halloween and scouting out where to get the intended birthday present (balcony plants!), except then I slept all afternoon instead, hahahahaha. As a result, my Wednesday was INSANE. Fortunately the press conference that had been scheduled for Wednesday morning was canceled, which totally saved my life. The morning was shopping at the flower market, which was actually lots of fun, but right afterwards I had to eat a quick lunch and jaunt off to our Wednesday workshop, after which I went to buy candy and various supplies for our Halloween celebrations at school. I spent a while busing around Kaohsiung in a futile search for face paint...the closest thing I managed was washable gel pens meant for coloring on skin. There was no orange and no black, and they were all sparkly, but it was better than nothing.

During this extended shopping adventure, I managed to have a kind of amazingly disjointed and carb-o-licious dinner. After having found the pens at Toys-R-Us, I was ravenous, but there was no real food in the area, and I was planning to go downtown anyway. It seemed sensible to grab a little snack in the Toys-R-Us area to tide me over, and then get dinner downtown. I ended up in a Mister Donut, where I ordered the only non-sweet thing that didn't involve sketchy unrefrigerated hot dogs: a corn donut. Fried donutty outside, a sort of creamed corn substance inside. It should not surprise you to know that this was invented by the Japanese. Downtown at Urban Spotlight, I ordered a sandwich that looked good in the promotional pictures, only to get it and find that most of its contents were noodles. Corn donut + noodle sandwich (on the whitest bread ever) = accidental overdose of refined carbohydrates. Oh well, life goes on.

I was up super late that night making posters and games and an eyepatch (another thing I failed to find on my quest), but it was nice because I talked to Mom and Luke on Skype while I was making stuff. The next morning I got a nice big dose of caffeine in my system, hailed a cab, and hauled my huge pile of Halloween stuff off to school for the big day.

As you may have guessed by the eyepatch reference, I was a pirate for Halloween. Not the most original costume of all time, but it didn't require many new materials and I am lazy slash cheap. I wore a striped shirt, tied a red scarf around my head, drew an anchor tattoo on my arm, and topped it off with my amazing homemade eyepatch that I made out of a circle of cardboard colored black. The eyepatch string was white elastic that I had colored black with a marker, and consequently it kept leaving black lines on my face throughout the course of the day. Also, wearing an eyepatch full time really messes with your vision, I found out. I accidentally smacked two different kids in the face because they were standing in my blind spot, and my distance perception was all kinds of confused. When I finally removed my eyepatch to draw tattoos for kids at the Little Angels Halloween party, it took a little bit for my vision to feel normal again. Whatever; it was an awesome costume. A lot of kids thought my tattoo was real, which I thought was pretty great considering I had drawn it myself with sparkly gel pen. Also I learned how to say "pirate" in Chinese: haidao! (Sorry there are no pictures of this; Patty took some so I have to get them from her)

Friday was another full day: English Village then meeting Gered for birthday lunch then hustling home to intercept the cleaning lady, a bit of down time, then out for birthday dinner, which was all you can eat hot pot (aka delicious gluttony) followed by eating cake with chopsticks because we ran out of the stupid little forks that come with cakes. It's been a generally gluttonous weekend, because on Saturday I went over to Apt. B to help out with their Halloween party (consisting of various children of co-teachers, host families, etc), which definitely involved cake AND ice cream AND a contest of eating donuts off a string. There was a major sugar crash that afternoon after the kids went home. Also, since Saturday was Katie's birthday, we went out to T.G.I. Friday's for lunch today, so I am once again fighting food coma, stuffed full of chicken and bacon and cheese and fries and ice cream and all foods good and American. Is it bad that food coma automatically reminds me of America? I think unhealthy food and gluttony are just a part of American culture. Think about Thanksgiving and tell me I am wrong. I am so psyched for Thanksgiving with AIT...they have an oven!!! We are going to make pies!!! THIS IS AMAZING.

Life at school

This week we have our midterm, so we reviewed by playing a game of Jeopardy where all the questions are things they were supposed to learn in the past two chapters (hahaha). It was kind of good because the kids are really competitive, so they tend to get pretty involved in any kind of activity that pits them against each other. What I didn't anticipate is the pressure that playing team Jeopardy entails...one player from each team comes up for each different question, but because the team as a whole loses points for a wrong answer, the rest of the team can be kind of hard on the kid who gets something wrong. I hadn't thought much of this, and in most classes this didn't turn out to be a huge deal, but in one class I had a little boy who couldn't take the pressure. He was sure that he wouldn't know the answer, so when his turn was about to come, he put his head down on the desk and just sobbed quietly. Of course the other kids, with the sensitivity of 11-year-olds, were all like "TEACHER HE'S CRYING" and crowded around him. I made them leave him alone, and tried to comfort him a little bit myself, but since he barely knows any English, there wasn't much I could say to him to help. I ended up dispatching Patty to take him outside and talk to him a little bit to make him feel better, while I got back up front and kept the game rolling to take the other students' attention away from the problem.

My heart just breaks in a situation like that, for one because it's my fault for giving them such a high-pressure game, but also because I have something like 280 fifth graders that I teach, and it's so hard to give them all the help they need. Many of my more privileged kids have parents that pay for them to go to buxiban ("cram school") after school, where they take supplemental classes to stay ahead of their classmates. However, for the kids who don't have this opportunity, school can be a constant struggle. When they're having trouble with material that their peers have already mastered outside of school, they experience a great loss of confidence, and sometimes start feeling like it's useless for them to even try to catch up. In every class I have some kids like this, but in a class of 36 kids, it's hard to notice and give individual attention to them on a daily basis. When we grade classwork and quizzes, though, it's impossible to ignore the fact that some of the students haven't even tried to answer a lot of the questions. Patty and I have been working on identifying the kids who need the most help, and trying to figure out a way to give it to them.

On Tuesday, I have an open slot last period, which I usually use to talk about lesson plans and random stuff with Patty. This Tuesday, we had a small group of students come in during that period to retake their lesson 2 quiz, which they had all bombed. As they were about to leave, I asked Patty if they had this period free or not. She informed me that they had a sort of flexible class for the last period, so I asked if I could keep them to do some review. When she proposed this to the kids, they all opted to stay and work with me. At first I was just trying to chat with them a little bit, but because they didn't really know what I was saying or how to talk to me, it ended up turning into a full-fledged vocabulary and grammar lesson on the words we were supposed to learn in the past chapter. I had to break out some of my Chinese in order to communicate with them effectively, but they took it in stride, and we actually started getting somewhere. Having only seven kids meant none of them could slip under my radar, and everybody had to talk. Producing their own sentences of spoken English seemed like a foreign concept to them, but by the end some of them were getting really into it. At the end of the period, I asked my quiet-as-a-mouse student Jason how he felt, and he told me, "I feel happy!" I was totally jazzed. I still have lots of students who need extra help, and even the students I got to work with for a bit still have a ways to go, but you have to take small victories where you can get them. I probably have something like 40 or 50 students who need a lot of help, and having that many kids in one session of extra-help would probably ruin its efficacy, so I need to find another solution.

It's been a good learning week for me too, so far...on Monday I went to bellydancing again and we tried doing this one dance all the way through and I felt like I had caught on pretty well. The teacher even complemented me on something, which was special because since I am the newbie in the class, I am usually the one who does things wrong and has to get corrected. On Tuesday the English Angels taught me how to say "photosynthesis" in Chinese, and my little swim team girls taught me how to say "submarine" (preceded by me trying to explain to them what the English word "submarine" meant, which is a lot easier to do when you are in a pool). Also, the swim coach Jessica decided that it would be fun to teach me how to do the butterfly. Fabulous!

East Coast Adventures!

Note: I hope you have a fair amount of time on your hands, because this might sort of be a post of gigantic proportions. Sorry.

English Village was still on break last Friday, so Gered and I took advantage of the 3-day weekend and jaunted off to Hualien! We left Friday morning at 7-something, and after a mere 6 hours on the train, we were there.

Where exactly is Hualien? I'm glad you asked.

The skinny red line from Kaohsiung to Hualien is the railroad (approximately; I drew it in myself but I think it's pretty good).

On the way to Hualien, I'm checking out my travel guide to see exactly what there is to do in Hualien. Here is a summary:
-there are these special dumplings you should eat
-it's next to the ocean, so I guess you could go check that out
-there is this special dessert that you should eat, mochi
-there are a couple of temples and museums...of course Taiwan is covered with temples but if you're in town you could go check out these ones if you wanted
-I hope you didn't want much in the way of nightlife or anything

Basically, Hualien is not a super-hopping town. Also it rains a lot. So our Game Plan upon arrival was: 1) check into hostel, 2) eat some special dumplings for lunch, 3) go down to the beach, 4) poke around a little bit, maybe see a temple and find some mochi? Beats me.

As you can see, it was a highly specific game plan. The hostel was nice, they had cute little dogs and I think we were the only people staying there. The special dumplings were pretty decent, and came in an oniony broth that tasted pretty much like the flavor packet from a package of ramen. We got to the beach okay, except it turned out that the beach was under construction, so we didn't actually go down to the water. The edge of the beach was comprised of giant cement things that looked like jacks, presumably a sort of breakwater. So maybe the construction machines down on the beach were putting in some more jacks. I didn't look very closely, plus there was a fence. It was a different sort of beach.

Anyway, we walked down the coast and chilled a little bit, when it started to rain. It was a nice little refreshing drizzle for a while, but then it turned into pouring buckets. Annnnd the rest of the afternoon and evening was on-and-off crazy rain. Welcome to Hualien! Also it got dark really early. Gered was ready to go to sleep by the time we got back to the hostel at night...at 7 pm. However, the hostel did not in fact have towels available (the internet lied to us about this!), so in order to shower we had to venture back out into the dark and stormy night on a quest for towels. Which then turned into a quest for mochi, after we had found towels and were feeling a bit hungry. If you have not had mochi, they are a kind of dessert-thing that I believe is of Japanese origin, with a chewy outer layer made of glutinous rice and some kind of filling. It is a dessert well-suited to the Taiwanese, who are pretty much suckers for anything glutinous. There are mochi shops everywhere you look in Hualien, EXCEPT for of course anywhere in the vicinity of our hostel, so it was kind of a longish mission to find mochi, but it was totally worth it.

On Saturday, we woke up early and got a bus up to Taroko Gorge National Park. I'm going to go ahead and say that Taroko is probably the most beautiful place I've ever been. The mountains are breathtaking, giant and green and gorgeous, with rushing rivers wrapped around their feet and occasional waterfalls tumbling down their sides. True Fact: there are taller mountains in Taiwan than there are anywhere in the entire eastern half of the U.S. Perhaps this is part of why I was so impressed. True But Lame Fact: my camera failed to work at all on this trip so I have no pictures of any of this. I will steal Gered's pictures whenever I get the chance.

From the entrance to Taroko, we hopped on a big old tour bus and hulked our way along some skinny little roads, winding around and sometimes underneath the mountains, until we ended up at a small town called Tianxiang in the middle of the park. Tianxiang seemed to consist mainly of a bus stop, a visitor center, a few crummy little restaurants, and 3 hotels: a big resort, a medium sized but still expensive hotel, and a cheap little hostel. Guess where we stayed.

Aside from having extremely firm (shall we say) beds, the hostel was actually kind of amazing and very idyllic. Perched up on a small hill, it was surrounded by plants and flowers, and there was even a rooftop garden as well. A hilarious little dog guarded the door, and a mama cat lounged around the patio while her kittens wrestled with each other. There are towering mountains on every side, and on the other side of the street the land drops off sharply into a gorge. For less than US$20 per person, you can have a room with a balcony that overlooks all of this. Taiwan is so excellent.

Having found a home base in Tianxiang, we launched off to hike the Baiyang Waterfall trail. Although the trail itself was very flat and easy to hike, it involved passing through a number of tunnels, some of them quite long and quite dark. At the entrance to the first tunnel, a sign reminded us to bring our flashlights. We had no flashlights. Consequently, I found myself walking fairly long distances in the dark, carefully treading ground that I was unable to see. Usually there was some glimmer of light in the distance or around a corner or even from another hiker's flashlight, but at times I found myself in complete pitch blackness, clutching the handrail for direction. The thought even crossed my mind: what if there is a giant pit in the middle of the trail up ahead of me? I would fall right into it! This was closely followed by the thought: Gered is a couple steps ahead of me, so if there were a pit, he would fall into it first and yell, so I am probably safe. Dear paranoid part of my brain: way to be rational! Gered later referred to this part of the hike as a Tunnel of Doom, which I appreciated, and you should too if you are a Kreher. Unfortunately, I neglected to bring my Tunnel of Doom kit with me to Taroko (or Taiwan for that matter...I believe it is at home under my bed), so I was woefully underprepared for a real live Tunnel of Doom.

Anyway, all of the doom tunnels were totally worth it, because there were some spectacular views along the actual sunlit portion of the trail. The trail was not named Baiyang Waterfall for nothing - several times I rounded a corner or came out of a tunnel and was met by the view of a waterfall or two or three. One particularly picturesque set of waterfalls had what can only be described as a Crazy Death Bridge in front of it. It was the kind of skinny wooden thing suspended by ropes that you always see in movies. In the movie, there will be some kind of crucial chase going on, and when our hero tries to cross the bridge, the rotting wood collapses under him and the ropes snap and how will he ever survive!?! but of course he does. In real life, the Crazy Death Bridge was not rotting and the ropes were made of metal and it seemed generally sturdy, but that does not negate the fact that it swayed and bounced when I walked on it, and there was a warning sign saying that the bridge had a 10-person limit. Also it was over a GIANT FRICKIN GORGE. Nevertheless, I managed to survive and make it back through the doom tunnels safely. Hooray!

I forget if this happened before or after we went on a hike, but we also had a kind of amazing experience at the visitor center in Tianxiang. First, I must explain that when we left on this trip, Gered still didn't know whether or not his Frisbee team was participating in a tournament in Taizhong on Sunday, so we weren't sure if we'd have to leave Saturday or Sunday. Hence, when we found out Friday night that they weren't going, we didn't have much of a specific game plan for the rest of the weekend. Since we were already in Tianxiang, we thought that we might possibly kind of just make a loop and go out through the west side of the park and down the west coast to Kaohsiung. Here is my amazing map again, in case you forgot what it looked like:

This would mean taking the yellow route home (the red is how we got there). The east-west portion of this route goes along the Central Cross-Island highway, straight through more of those spectacular mountains that run down the middle of Taiwan. It seemed like it would be a pretty cool scenic route to get home. We also thought we might just go out to Hehuanshan (one of the big peaks on the far western edge of the park) and then come back the way we came, if going all the way through didn't work. With these goals in mind, I peppered the nice lady at the visitor center with questions about how we could pull it off. She told us that there was a bus that went as far as Dayuling (about 2/3 of the way into the park), but after that there were no buses, and the only way to get any further was dabianche. This was a word that I had never heard before, but since che means "vehicle," I knew it had to be some form of transportation. I asked again a couple times about getting to Hehuanshan, but the answer was always the same: you can take the bus to Dayuling, but after that the only possible way is dabianche. We were at an impasse until another man entered the visitor center to ask the woman a question. He overheard our conversation a bit, and tried to help me out with a little English. Finally I asked him directly, "what does dabianche mean?" He informed me very matter-of-factly, "Dabianche means hitchhike!"

My eyebrows pretty much hit the ceiling on this one. This is the recommendation from an official park visitor center! Isn't it dangerous? I asked. Oh, just try to find a family with kids, she told me. It's pretty safe. Ooooookay.

Well, we pondered hitchhiking our way back into the realm of Available Public Transportation, but in the end we just didn't have enough buffer time to risk it. If you glance up at the map again, the black section of the route is the part where there is no way to travel besides hitchhiking (well, and actually having your own car), and over the rest of the yellow part between there and Taizhong (T'aichung on this map) we'd have to rely on the occasional public buses, which probably wouldn't be running anymore by the time we got there at night. In the end, we resigned ourselves to going back the way we came.

That evening, I had a kind of exciting experience, for Taiwan: I was cold, and not just from being in an overly-air-conditioned space! No, it was genuinely cool outside in Tianxiang. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt! It was crazy. We went for dinner at a little cafe in the other hotel, where it turned out that the fare consisted mainly of microwave personal pizzas. Mmm, deliciously mediocre! And of course it had peas and corn and random stuff on it, because we are in Asia here, let's not forget. Eating microwave pizza in a secluded village in the mountains of Taiwan: kind of surreal. After a pot of raspberry tea (because it was cold enough out to really want hot tea!! this was amazing), we retired to the hostel for a wild and crazy night of reading a little bit and falling asleep promptly at 9:30. Woooo!

Our bus back to Hualien left at 9 am, so we got up at 7ish and did some final poking around Tianxiang. There was some kind of pagoda up on the side of one the mountain at the edge of town, so we went up to investigate it. Apparently it was a temple to the God of Stairs, because getting up to the pagoda involved climbing approximately 547382534982795392 steps of stairs. I'm pretty sure that I filled my entire stair quota for all of October in that one morning. The pagoda was nice...very pagoda-like? I don't really know what to say about it. The temple also had a gift shop and a little stand where I got some sort of fried pancake and a couple slices of tofu for breakfast. We took the breakfast to go, because it was time to catch the bus back to Hualien!

In Hualien we grabbed a little lunch, bought some more mochi, and tried to find a bus that would take us down the east coast. The train line is further inland, but you can take a bus right down the coastal highway, which is really pretty. My travel guide informed us that there was some kind of restaurant by the normal bus stand where you could get bus tickets to go down the coast. The normal bus station didn't have any buses that would take us all the way to Taidong, where we wanted to go, and we asked at a restaurant around the corner that looked promising, but they only rented vehicles. It was really hot and sunny at this time, and I was feeling hot and a little bit grumpy. I wanted to just take the normal bus and transfer, but Gered was convinced that we could find the bus line mentioned by my travel guide, so we poked around the area a bit more, ending up at the visitor center. The helpful folks at the visitor center gave us free postcards of Hualien, and pointed us to a nearby row of mochi shops. It turns out that one of the shops, in addition to selling traditional local snacks, sells bus tickets down the east coast. Go figure.

So we grooved on down the east coast on a bus, taking in the sights. One of the characteristic features of Taiwan is unusual juxtapositions: ornate temples in the midst of weather-beaten concrete buildings, bus tickets in a mochi shop, and huge mountains right smack dab next to the sea. It's really amazing that Taiwan has such high peaks, considering that they have to get all the way up there from sea level over a pretty short distance. Driving down Taiwan's east coast, you can have the ocean on your left, and on your right, a big ol' mountain rising right out of the sea. It's definitely a must-see part of Taiwan.

The bus ride was pretty, albeit rather long. This was alleviated a bit by the presence of a really adorable small girl in the seat in front of me. First, I noticed the shiny black top of a small head peeking over the seat. A pair of eyes appeared, and I smiled at her. She immediately ducked back out of sight. This little peekaboo ritual was repeated a number of times, but each time she came up for a little bit longer, and each time she ducked back down, Gered and I would grin like fools at the cuteness. Once I even got a little answer to a question in Chinese! Then her mother moved the two of them to another seat on the bus, and I was a little bit sad.

It was already dark when we got into Taidong, and we still needed to catch a train back to Kaohsiung. At the train station, the ticket agent informed us that the next train was at 7:13, but there were no seats left. The next train after that didn't get into Kaohsiung until very late, so we opted to suck it up and just take the first train. Riding the train was another one of those Great Adventures in Staring for a little bit...when we were waiting to sit down, a little girl pointed at me and asked her mother loudly, "What kind of person is THAT??" Then we sat in some unoccupied seats for the first leg of the journey, across from a man who blatantly stared at me the whole time. Staring Man got off at the next station, but our seats' owner got on, and we were forced out. We ended up just sitting on the floor in the back of the car, tiredly typing up our weekly reports for Fulbright (due every Sunday night!) on Gered's little computer.

When we got into Kaohsiung, it was quite late, but the subway was still running, so we subwayed it to the stop near our apartments and walked the final stretch. It was around 11 pm when I finally arrived home...one looooong day of transportation, considering that we left Tianxiang at 9 am, but definitely worth the trip. Maybe sometime when there's a little more time I can do it again and dabianche my way home.