This was the last week of our orientation, when the important decisions get made! On Monday, we had another session with the local English teachers, and in the afternoon we had a "speed dating" activity in which the ETAs rotated around so we could each have 10 minutes talking to each LET one-on-one. It was extremely tiring (two straight hours of trying to cram all of your important questions and bonding time into 10 minutes, over and over), and at the end of the day, the ETAs and LETs both had to fill out preference forms indicating who we would like to work with the most and why. I had a really hard time filling out my form, because there were a lot of people I liked, but I didn't have lots of excellent, concrete reasons for why I would be a good fit at their school. I think the LETs were a lot better equipped to answer the question of who fits their schools' needs. Our program advisers spend the evening matchmaking, and on Tuesday morning they announced the pairings. Drumroll please...
So I'm going to be working with a fabulous lady named Patty at Yang Ming Primary School. Patty was worried that I wouldn't like her as much because she is old enough to be my mother, but I don't care, she's hilarious. In our speed dating session, I asked her about her strategies for classroom management, and she said that we would play good cop/bad cop. (I get to be the good cop) Patty is a character - she wears bright pink lipstick and is very funny and easy to talk to. I'm supposed to go into school with her sometime next week, where I will meet with the principal and get introduced to the whole school on their internal TV broadcast. Super. The principal at Yang Ming is a little bit crazy, judging from our visit there. Apparently he wanted a girl teacher because he wants to practice his English and he thought a guy would be too intimidating to talk to. Also, when we were visiting, he made some weird remark about how our Asian-Americans weren't really Americans, so I think he wanted a white person...it's going to be an interesting time with this fellow. Hopefully I can be a good influence, although it might be challenging to convincingly explain American diversity when I personally am so stereotypically American-looking. Exciting times. Also, besides my regular classes at Yang Ming, I'm going to be teaching conversational English classes for the teachers and for a group of advanced students apparently known as the "English Angels." Oh my. The excitement never ends!
Also this week, besides finding out our teaching placements, we went to National Sun Yat-Sen University to take a placement test for Chinese language classes, which we're going to have in the evenings. Our classes will just be us Fulbrighters and maybe some other foreigners who want to get in on the action, so we get to choose the time and location and everything. They put me in the advanced class (hahahahah) with people whose Chinese seems a lot better than mine, so I imagine I'll be working hard.
Today we went to the American Institute in Taiwan, a very special place that is certainly not an embassy or consulate of any kind, no sirree. We met some nice guys who gave us a little talk about what AIT does and told us that we can come over for Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl and whenever we need a little more Americanness in our lives. Also they told us to try not to get in trouble with the law, but if we do we can call them. A special warning was issued to the guys, because apparently in Taiwan if you correct somebody's manners or accidentally flirt with their girl in a club or something, they will call all their friends and beat you up later when you're not expecting it. Ooch. Also: Driving a scooter while intoxicated is a very very bad life decision! This message has been brought to you by the American Institute in Taiwan.
Ate a giant lunch today and had an intense attack of Food Coma. I should probably go find some kind of dinner, even though I don't feel like I need it...blargh
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
ChurchQuest 2008!
I still have yet to find a church here in Kaohsiung, but I have had some interesting adventures during my attempts. Last weekend I was strolling down our street, just kind of exploring the area a little bit, when I noticed a street sign that had a cross on it. When I read the text, it said "Water of Life Christian Church," and there was an arrow pointing down the little road that's next to our apartment. I wandered down the road, looking for the address on the sign, and ended up going down another little lane and around the corner into an alley where I finally found the church. As I stood outside reading the sign with all the meeting times, a man pulled up on his bicycle and asked me what I was looking for. I asked if it was his church, and we got into a little conversation. He even drew me 2 little maps to get to 2 churches in the area that he said might have English services. Then his wife came out, and we ended up talking for a really long time, and they were really cute and wanted to be friends. Their names are Joseph and Sarah, and they told me that I should feel free to come over and visit them. I asked what was a good time to come over, and they said usually during the daytime, and then they told me that I should come over Sunday evening at 6 and they would take me out to dinner and I could bring a friend if I wanted. So nice!
The next day, I went exploring with my two little hand-drawn maps. I did lots of walking, and even found a nice little fruit market, which I meant to go to on my way home but then I forgot. Anyway, I found both churches, but neither of them seemed to have English services. Oh well. That evening, I meandered over at 6ish and we went out to dinner. The restaurant was far away, so we took scooters! I rode with their daughter Claire, and she went slow for me because it was my first time on a scooter. (Don't worry, Mommy, I wore a helmet!) Claire is 24 and we are totally pals; she's really fun. They also have a son who's a year older than me, but he said like 2 words the entire time we were at dinner. Aww, he is shy. Dinner was really hilarious, because there was sooo much food and since I was a guest they were pressuring me to eat everything, and I could barely keep up. There was one food that was sort of ice-cream-cone-esque, only the cone was made of seaweed and full of rice and cucumber and topped with fish eggs, and they said it is a special Japanese delicacy, and they only ordered one of them because they said that they had all had it before, but I just HAD to try one. Talk about pressure! I ate some of everything in the end, but I had to pace myself. Sarah kept offering me more food and hassling me about looking skinny...shades of my own mother! It was a really fun time, and Claire drove me home afterwards, and I was a lot less scared that time. They invited me to come to their Bible study some time, and Joseph said that if I have trouble understanding the language, they can talk slow and translate for me a little. My religious vocabulary in Chinese is very small. I realized when we prayed before dinner that it was the first time I had ever heard anyone pray in Chinese! I understood a pretty good amount of it, actually. Considering the lack of English-speaking churches in my area, I might have to start going to church in Chinese. That would be an intense vocabulary adventure. I really want a Chinese-English Bible...I wonder where I can find one.
The next day, I went exploring with my two little hand-drawn maps. I did lots of walking, and even found a nice little fruit market, which I meant to go to on my way home but then I forgot. Anyway, I found both churches, but neither of them seemed to have English services. Oh well. That evening, I meandered over at 6ish and we went out to dinner. The restaurant was far away, so we took scooters! I rode with their daughter Claire, and she went slow for me because it was my first time on a scooter. (Don't worry, Mommy, I wore a helmet!) Claire is 24 and we are totally pals; she's really fun. They also have a son who's a year older than me, but he said like 2 words the entire time we were at dinner. Aww, he is shy. Dinner was really hilarious, because there was sooo much food and since I was a guest they were pressuring me to eat everything, and I could barely keep up. There was one food that was sort of ice-cream-cone-esque, only the cone was made of seaweed and full of rice and cucumber and topped with fish eggs, and they said it is a special Japanese delicacy, and they only ordered one of them because they said that they had all had it before, but I just HAD to try one. Talk about pressure! I ate some of everything in the end, but I had to pace myself. Sarah kept offering me more food and hassling me about looking skinny...shades of my own mother! It was a really fun time, and Claire drove me home afterwards, and I was a lot less scared that time. They invited me to come to their Bible study some time, and Joseph said that if I have trouble understanding the language, they can talk slow and translate for me a little. My religious vocabulary in Chinese is very small. I realized when we prayed before dinner that it was the first time I had ever heard anyone pray in Chinese! I understood a pretty good amount of it, actually. Considering the lack of English-speaking churches in my area, I might have to start going to church in Chinese. That would be an intense vocabulary adventure. I really want a Chinese-English Bible...I wonder where I can find one.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Making the best of it
These past couple days have been pretty full of silliness. From Tues-Thurs we spent our mornings visiting the elementary schools we're going to be teaching at, and in the afternoons we went to Lingzhou Primary School to present their English Village to local teachers. Visiting the elementary schools was kind of interesting, although I think I'll make my decision based mainly on the teacher and not the school. On Tuesday I had bread and coffee in the morning, which proved to be a mistake: every school we went to plied us with more beverages, and one school even gave our group a gigantamongous basket of dragon-eye fruit. The last school gave us bubble tea, which I usually love, but at that point it was all I could do to drink a little of it. So much hospitality! Soooo much hydration! Ay. After that I learned not to consume anything in the morning before school visits. On Thursday we even managed to get fed by somebody else for every single meal, since Fulbright buys our lunch at school and the head of Taiwan Fulbright took us out for dinner that night.
Anyway, the elementary schools here are rather different from at home. The hallways are all open to the outside, and the environment is very green...one school had mango trees, another had a butterfly garden, etc. All of the schools seemed pretty nice, although it was pretty funny to see how each school tried to sell themselves to us. On each tour, the teachers and administrators would tout their schools facilities, or long history, or the competitions that its students had won. In many cases, they came right out and said, "You should come to our school!" This amused and perplexed me, because there is no need for the schools to sell themselves...every one of the schools we visited is getting an ETA! I suppose the teachers still want us to pick their school first, but it's a little silly nonetheless.
So the school visits were okay (a little bit redundant after a while), but trying to do the English Village thing in the afternoon...well, it got better as the week went on. Here is the story: Apparently, some administrative person went to Korea, saw that the students there had good English, and noted that in Korea they had "English Villages" staffed by foreigners where children went to practice their English. The Kaohsiung educational bureau, wanting to improve their students' English, decided that they should have English Villages too. Schools spent a lot of money building fancy sets, but who was to staff them? Well, it just so happens that this year there is a posse of English speakers coming to work for the Kaohsiung educational system for the brand-new Kaohsiung Fulbright ETA program. That's approximately how we got roped into this whole thing. We are supposed to work in different English Villages around the city, taking shifts so there will be one of us there at any given time. Students from Kaohsiung City schools will take turns paying visits to the English Villages to practice with us native English speakers. It sounds like a good concept, but the logistics of the whole thing wayyyy had not been worked out well. On Tuesday, the first group of local teachers came to see us demonstrate the English Village. Working with scripts that had been written by some random person and edited into some semblance of natural English by us, we had 40 minutes to show each group of teachers the dialogue for each set. Bad dialogue + way too much time = either lots of criticism from the teachers, mind-numbing boredom, or both. Argh. To make matters worse, we spent quite a while in an auditorium of teachers listening to the Minister of Education talk in Chinese. At one point, realizing that some of us could understand Mandarin, he switched into Taiwanese to make a crack about the Asian-American Fulbrights, and how they could just get some local college students if the English Village needed more staff. Same thing, right? It was very insulting, and really illustrated the kind of misconceptions about Americans that we're all going to be laboring against this year. In a society as homogeneous as Taiwan, it is hard to understand that America is an immigrant nation, and that those of us with Asian faces are no less American (and no less of a native English speaker) as those of us with white skin and blonde hair. Taiwanese people are generally very nice, so I don't hold this misunderstanding against them, but we as Americans have the task of educating our students and our acquaintances here to understand otherwise. It's a big job.
So anyway, Tuesday was pretty rough, but we fixed things up for Wednesday and Thursday. We revised our dialogues, shortened the sessions to 20 minutes, and on Thursday, our coordinator Alex even came to introduce us and give a little speech about hard we worked to get here (general message: respect us pleeease, we are not just 12 random Americans). It was a lot better, and the teachers got a lot easier to work with those days. Granted, it still is not thrilling to spend an entire afternoon acting a 4-line dialogue as a waitress in the Lingzhou Hotel restaurant, but we got through it. On Friday, we were back to doing teachery stuff with the LETs that we're going to be working with, so that was good, although we were all pretty beat by the end.
I was supposed to go to Hong Kong this weekend to see my friends Jacqui and Richard who I know from Beijing, but unfortunately there was a typhoon in Hong Kong, so my flight got canceled, as did Richard's flight from Taipei. All of the flights the next day were full, so no weekend in Hong Kong for me. :( Sometime soon Amanda will go with me to the airline office so I can attempt to get a refund...cross your fingers! After that, I guess we will just have to schedule a trip another time. Oh well. On the bright side, since I'm not leaving town this weekend, I can go with everyone else to a dance party that's tonight! Yayyyy dance party! Also I will not miss out on the Sunday evening gathering where all of the Kaohsiung Fulbrights get together to watch Battlestar Galactica. Hahahahah we are so cool.
Anyway, the elementary schools here are rather different from at home. The hallways are all open to the outside, and the environment is very green...one school had mango trees, another had a butterfly garden, etc. All of the schools seemed pretty nice, although it was pretty funny to see how each school tried to sell themselves to us. On each tour, the teachers and administrators would tout their schools facilities, or long history, or the competitions that its students had won. In many cases, they came right out and said, "You should come to our school!" This amused and perplexed me, because there is no need for the schools to sell themselves...every one of the schools we visited is getting an ETA! I suppose the teachers still want us to pick their school first, but it's a little silly nonetheless.
So the school visits were okay (a little bit redundant after a while), but trying to do the English Village thing in the afternoon...well, it got better as the week went on. Here is the story: Apparently, some administrative person went to Korea, saw that the students there had good English, and noted that in Korea they had "English Villages" staffed by foreigners where children went to practice their English. The Kaohsiung educational bureau, wanting to improve their students' English, decided that they should have English Villages too. Schools spent a lot of money building fancy sets, but who was to staff them? Well, it just so happens that this year there is a posse of English speakers coming to work for the Kaohsiung educational system for the brand-new Kaohsiung Fulbright ETA program. That's approximately how we got roped into this whole thing. We are supposed to work in different English Villages around the city, taking shifts so there will be one of us there at any given time. Students from Kaohsiung City schools will take turns paying visits to the English Villages to practice with us native English speakers. It sounds like a good concept, but the logistics of the whole thing wayyyy had not been worked out well. On Tuesday, the first group of local teachers came to see us demonstrate the English Village. Working with scripts that had been written by some random person and edited into some semblance of natural English by us, we had 40 minutes to show each group of teachers the dialogue for each set. Bad dialogue + way too much time = either lots of criticism from the teachers, mind-numbing boredom, or both. Argh. To make matters worse, we spent quite a while in an auditorium of teachers listening to the Minister of Education talk in Chinese. At one point, realizing that some of us could understand Mandarin, he switched into Taiwanese to make a crack about the Asian-American Fulbrights, and how they could just get some local college students if the English Village needed more staff. Same thing, right? It was very insulting, and really illustrated the kind of misconceptions about Americans that we're all going to be laboring against this year. In a society as homogeneous as Taiwan, it is hard to understand that America is an immigrant nation, and that those of us with Asian faces are no less American (and no less of a native English speaker) as those of us with white skin and blonde hair. Taiwanese people are generally very nice, so I don't hold this misunderstanding against them, but we as Americans have the task of educating our students and our acquaintances here to understand otherwise. It's a big job.
So anyway, Tuesday was pretty rough, but we fixed things up for Wednesday and Thursday. We revised our dialogues, shortened the sessions to 20 minutes, and on Thursday, our coordinator Alex even came to introduce us and give a little speech about hard we worked to get here (general message: respect us pleeease, we are not just 12 random Americans). It was a lot better, and the teachers got a lot easier to work with those days. Granted, it still is not thrilling to spend an entire afternoon acting a 4-line dialogue as a waitress in the Lingzhou Hotel restaurant, but we got through it. On Friday, we were back to doing teachery stuff with the LETs that we're going to be working with, so that was good, although we were all pretty beat by the end.
I was supposed to go to Hong Kong this weekend to see my friends Jacqui and Richard who I know from Beijing, but unfortunately there was a typhoon in Hong Kong, so my flight got canceled, as did Richard's flight from Taipei. All of the flights the next day were full, so no weekend in Hong Kong for me. :( Sometime soon Amanda will go with me to the airline office so I can attempt to get a refund...cross your fingers! After that, I guess we will just have to schedule a trip another time. Oh well. On the bright side, since I'm not leaving town this weekend, I can go with everyone else to a dance party that's tonight! Yayyyy dance party! Also I will not miss out on the Sunday evening gathering where all of the Kaohsiung Fulbrights get together to watch Battlestar Galactica. Hahahahah we are so cool.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Where Does the Time Go?
Looking at the date of my last post, I'm honestly not too sure what exactly I could have done in all the time between now and then. It feels like I've been in Taiwan for such a long time already! Last week we just had class Monday-Friday...I remember that we talked about different kinds of language skills, and all of us had to write a 4-page platform statement about our views on education, which we presented in one magnificently long and not very exciting day. It turns out that a lot of our views on education are extremely similar, so a lot of it was hearing the same thing stated 12 times. Sweet. I will boil it down for you: Education is super!
Um yeah so the week was kind of tiring. There was some kind of plan to do a big trip on Saturday to see Lotus Lake and Confucius Temple and a number of things that I do not doubt are highly scenic, but it was supposed to be like 34584738957298 degrees on Saturday. No way that I am going to voluntarily gallivant around at any kind of anything in the midday in that weather, no matter how scenic. Instead we went out more towards the evening, which was probably a better plan. I was supposed to meet everybody at the bus stop to take the bus down to the Love River, but it turned out that I got there just as the correct bus was driving past with the rest of everybody on it. Super. No worries though; I just went to the bus stop and waited for the next one. At the bus stop, there was a giant posse of teenage boys waiting around. When they saw me come up to the bus stop all by myself, looking very non-Taiwanese, a sort of murmur ran through the bunch. A couple of them yelled "hello" to me, but when I said hello back they didn't have anything further to say. They went around the group trying to find someone with better English (I presume), and a couple of kids got shoved towards me, only to wimp out on the English speaking. Some of them were trying, but they couldn't find the words. I asked, in Chinese, "How is your English?", and somebody yelled "Bu hao!" Eventually, one boy shouted the only other English word he could come up with: "fish!" This set off a small chain of other animal words ("pig!" "monkey!"), but they ran out quickly. Their bus came soon after, and I was left waiting for my bus, puzzled by our strange interaction. I can see how perhaps they need a little help in the English teaching department around here.
I took the next bus to the river and set off to find the other Fulbrighters. Unfortunately, the person giving me directions on the phone was confused about where I had gotten off the bus, and I was given a number of confusing/contradicting directions before I managed to find everybody. It was still blazing hot at 5 pm when we got tickets to take a little boat tour of the Love River (the Love Boat, if you will). I felt like the Love River should have its own cheesy little theme song, but I have yet to come up with one that is exactly right. After an interesting dinner at a sort of quasi-Spanish restaurant, we strolled around the river and enjoyed the romantic scenery, which consists primarily of neon lights. The tour in the afternoon was a little bit amusing because, let's face it, the area surrounding the Love River just isn't that lovely. There were a lot of ugly buildings. It's really a lot nicer at night, when the bridges and the trees and who knows what else lights up. Right now the Kaohsiung city government is really psyched about the fact that they're hosting the 2009 World Games (summary: sports that are too obscure to be in the Olympics. Awesome!), so the bridges were covered in light-up images of the World Games mascots, who look a little bit like small Teletubby-elves, and are certainly not unlike the Olympic mascots themselves, especially in attempted cuteness level. There was also a really incredible amount of couples around, although I guess that shouldn't be surprising for the Love River on a Saturday night. We walked around a bit, hung out some at a bar that was inexplicably full of small children, and then walked home (a long way!) by way of a busy night market that was full of things covered in hilarious English that I was too tired to think about buying. My favorite was a little yellow bag that said "Bee! Bee!" on the front (with pictures of bees), and on the back had a random little paragraph about complaining. Very silly, very cute! Perhaps at a later date I will brush off my barguing skillz and go back for some nonsensical purchases. All in all, it was a pretty good evening.
Ah, the neon lights...so romantic!
On Sunday I was really dizzy and lightheaded for no apparent reason...I made certain that I wasn't dehydrated, but I still felt so weird that I just had to sleep until it went away. Consequently, I achieved nothing that day outside of eating 2 meals and watching a number of television programs. Oh well. The dizziness actually happened to me again today when we were meeting with the local English teachers that we're going to work with. We were in a hot, crowded room, and I felt like I was about to cough for like half an hour straight, but I didn't want to interrupt the presentations. I tried to keep from coughing, but it just made me feel like I was going to cry. Eventually I got up to leave the room, and realized how loopy and lightheaded I was. Then I drank a lot of cold water and put my hands on my head and rested a bit, until finally we moved into a different room that was air conditioned, and then I felt a lot better.
Meeting the local English teachers (LETs, for our purposes) is one of the things that I had been anticipating for a while. Everybody was very worried about dressing appropriately, because we didn't want the teachers to get the wrong impressions about us. I really think we didn't need to have worried so much, because the LETs for the most part seemed very open, and some of them were dressed fairly casually or a little bit wacky themselves. I really liked everybody I met, although there were a lot of different personalities. Some of them were very quiet, I think in part because they were not confident enough in their own English to use it comfortably with us. That might present some difficulty in a co-teaching situation, but hopefully working with an English teaching assistant will help the teachers' confidence in speaking English as much as the students'. I'm very interested to work with the teachers more and get to know them. Not everybody had as positive an impression today as I did, however - some of the ETAs expressed concerns that the LETs don't seem to want them if they are of Chinese ethnic descent (frustrating, because we are all definitely American and equally good English speakers) or if they don't know any Chinese (it's English class! speak English!), so that's kind of lame. I really hope our other sessions with the LETs can sort of work out the kinks.
Um yeah so the week was kind of tiring. There was some kind of plan to do a big trip on Saturday to see Lotus Lake and Confucius Temple and a number of things that I do not doubt are highly scenic, but it was supposed to be like 34584738957298 degrees on Saturday. No way that I am going to voluntarily gallivant around at any kind of anything in the midday in that weather, no matter how scenic. Instead we went out more towards the evening, which was probably a better plan. I was supposed to meet everybody at the bus stop to take the bus down to the Love River, but it turned out that I got there just as the correct bus was driving past with the rest of everybody on it. Super. No worries though; I just went to the bus stop and waited for the next one. At the bus stop, there was a giant posse of teenage boys waiting around. When they saw me come up to the bus stop all by myself, looking very non-Taiwanese, a sort of murmur ran through the bunch. A couple of them yelled "hello" to me, but when I said hello back they didn't have anything further to say. They went around the group trying to find someone with better English (I presume), and a couple of kids got shoved towards me, only to wimp out on the English speaking. Some of them were trying, but they couldn't find the words. I asked, in Chinese, "How is your English?", and somebody yelled "Bu hao!" Eventually, one boy shouted the only other English word he could come up with: "fish!" This set off a small chain of other animal words ("pig!" "monkey!"), but they ran out quickly. Their bus came soon after, and I was left waiting for my bus, puzzled by our strange interaction. I can see how perhaps they need a little help in the English teaching department around here.
I took the next bus to the river and set off to find the other Fulbrighters. Unfortunately, the person giving me directions on the phone was confused about where I had gotten off the bus, and I was given a number of confusing/contradicting directions before I managed to find everybody. It was still blazing hot at 5 pm when we got tickets to take a little boat tour of the Love River (the Love Boat, if you will). I felt like the Love River should have its own cheesy little theme song, but I have yet to come up with one that is exactly right. After an interesting dinner at a sort of quasi-Spanish restaurant, we strolled around the river and enjoyed the romantic scenery, which consists primarily of neon lights. The tour in the afternoon was a little bit amusing because, let's face it, the area surrounding the Love River just isn't that lovely. There were a lot of ugly buildings. It's really a lot nicer at night, when the bridges and the trees and who knows what else lights up. Right now the Kaohsiung city government is really psyched about the fact that they're hosting the 2009 World Games (summary: sports that are too obscure to be in the Olympics. Awesome!), so the bridges were covered in light-up images of the World Games mascots, who look a little bit like small Teletubby-elves, and are certainly not unlike the Olympic mascots themselves, especially in attempted cuteness level. There was also a really incredible amount of couples around, although I guess that shouldn't be surprising for the Love River on a Saturday night. We walked around a bit, hung out some at a bar that was inexplicably full of small children, and then walked home (a long way!) by way of a busy night market that was full of things covered in hilarious English that I was too tired to think about buying. My favorite was a little yellow bag that said "Bee! Bee!" on the front (with pictures of bees), and on the back had a random little paragraph about complaining. Very silly, very cute! Perhaps at a later date I will brush off my barguing skillz and go back for some nonsensical purchases. All in all, it was a pretty good evening.
Ah, the neon lights...so romantic!
On Sunday I was really dizzy and lightheaded for no apparent reason...I made certain that I wasn't dehydrated, but I still felt so weird that I just had to sleep until it went away. Consequently, I achieved nothing that day outside of eating 2 meals and watching a number of television programs. Oh well. The dizziness actually happened to me again today when we were meeting with the local English teachers that we're going to work with. We were in a hot, crowded room, and I felt like I was about to cough for like half an hour straight, but I didn't want to interrupt the presentations. I tried to keep from coughing, but it just made me feel like I was going to cry. Eventually I got up to leave the room, and realized how loopy and lightheaded I was. Then I drank a lot of cold water and put my hands on my head and rested a bit, until finally we moved into a different room that was air conditioned, and then I felt a lot better.
Meeting the local English teachers (LETs, for our purposes) is one of the things that I had been anticipating for a while. Everybody was very worried about dressing appropriately, because we didn't want the teachers to get the wrong impressions about us. I really think we didn't need to have worried so much, because the LETs for the most part seemed very open, and some of them were dressed fairly casually or a little bit wacky themselves. I really liked everybody I met, although there were a lot of different personalities. Some of them were very quiet, I think in part because they were not confident enough in their own English to use it comfortably with us. That might present some difficulty in a co-teaching situation, but hopefully working with an English teaching assistant will help the teachers' confidence in speaking English as much as the students'. I'm very interested to work with the teachers more and get to know them. Not everybody had as positive an impression today as I did, however - some of the ETAs expressed concerns that the LETs don't seem to want them if they are of Chinese ethnic descent (frustrating, because we are all definitely American and equally good English speakers) or if they don't know any Chinese (it's English class! speak English!), so that's kind of lame. I really hope our other sessions with the LETs can sort of work out the kinks.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Welcome to Taiwan!
First impression: Taiwan is full of silly things.
The food at a hot pot restaurant we went to. The colorful panda turned out to be made of some kind of fish
I have been in Taiwan for over a week now and finally have internet access! Needless to say, a lot of things can happen in a week, but I will do my best to sum it up for you. I flew out of Newark late at night on July 30th, stopped in Alaska in the middle of the night, and when we landed in Taipei it was August 1st, so if anything exciting happened on the 31st of July, I missed it. Anyway, there were 6 other Fulbright girls flying out of Newark with me, so we got to hang out in the airport, which was fun. It was a little bit awkward in the beginning because you would spot someone at the gate and think, “there is another young white person (most of the people on the flight were Taiwanese) who is traveling alone and looks like they might be a Fulbright scholar!”, except you would feel weird about just going up to ask them about it. It turned out to be a highly accurate profiling system, though, because I think everybody’s guesses turned out to be correct.
After flying into Taipei, the 4 girls who were going to the Yilan program (in northern Taiwan, closer to Taipei than us) had to go, leaving me, Vicky, and Dani to wander the airport in search of our gate to go to Kaohsiung. Let me tell you, the Taipei airport is hilarious, and it’s even better when it’s 5 in the morning and you’re very loopy. We did a fair amount of wandering before we found our way to the right place, but it was okay because we discovered amazing things in the process. For instance, we spotted this section of the airport with giant pink ice-cream-swirl pillars and huge pictures of Hello Kitty everywhere. I assumed it was a children’s play area, but on closer examination, it was just another gate, so anyone taking the flight to Hong Kong got to wait in the intense pinkness of Hello Kitty World. Even the chairs at the gate were all pink and had Hello Kitty’s face on them. It was aMAZing. Our gate wasn’t nearly so silly, but we did encounter another area on the way there that was an imitation of the Alishan Forest Railway in the mountains of Taiwan, complete with stand-up wooden aboriginal people with the faces cut out so you can pose as aboriginals, which of course we did. (My apologies for the lack of pictures, I will have to get them from one of the other girls later because I didn’t take my own)
Finally we arrived at our gate, where we eventually accumulated 8 Fulbright scholars going to Kaohsiung. The flight was short, but we did have some adventures getting out of the airport. Billy had lost his luggage, and a couple of us got randomly selected to have our luggage inspected at customs. Apparently my luggage was extra suspicious, because I ended up having to open my big bag for them. The guard rifled around through my stuff and fished out several cans of shaving cream, which he proceeded to question me about in Chinese. I told him what it was for, and the guards had a little discussion about it, following which the one guard came back, opened one of the cans, and decided to see what exactly it was by spraying it into the air. I guess he didn’t understand that it’s actually a gel and not a spray, because instead of spraying out into the air, the can just dispensed a big blob of shaving gel, which plopped onto the floor. Words cannot convey how funny this was at the time. I kept my composure until I was away from the guards, and then I cracked up. Traveling for a long time makes you a little bit crazy.
I can’t even think of what we did the first day...not only does it seem like ages ago, but I was really tired at the time and it was a lot of new things at once. I’m fairly sure we took a trip to San Min Elementary, the school that is our home base. We drew slips of paper to see who would be in what apartments, and they took us to our apartments to drop off our luggage and rest a bit. Each apartment has 4 people in it, and the other three in my apartment are Billy, Shiela, and Kate. We all have our own rooms, and we have three bathrooms (Shiela and I share), and there is a common living room and kitchen. It’s a pretty nice apartment (plus there is a convenient 7-11 right outside our gate!). It’s interesting how neatly the apartment drawings turned out. There are 12 of us, 9 girls and 3 guys, and each apartment has one boy. Each apartment also has one person who can speak Chinese well, as well as one person who has never studied Chinese before. It’s kind of amazing how it worked out.
We actually stayed in a hotel for the first night, because we didn’t have bedding or anything in the apartments, but the second day we made a giant trip to Carrefour and Ikea and bought 8 zillion pounds of household items. I guess my memory of our apartment furnishings was quite fuzzy (I had barely spent any time in my room at this point), because I bought a desk and desk chair at Ikea only to come home and find that my room already had a chair. Whoops. But it’s okay, because I like the one I bought a lot better (it’s turquoise!). Getting 12 people’s worth of household furnishings home from Ikea was pretty ridiculous. We bought a really, really large amount of stuff, some of it quite large (a couple people had to get new beds), and it wasn’t even all in bags (they charge for them and we didn’t want to pay), so we basically had to do a lot of assembly-line type lifting to transport everything. We brought it out to the bus in giant Ikea carts, and then a person on the ground would pass it to someone on the stairs who would pass it to someone in the back of the bus who would pack it into a seat, etc. We had to go through the whole process again getting all the stuff off the bus, and then taking it in loads up the elevator to the apartment. It was quite exhausting. After a full day of intense shopping, I spent all evening unpacking and putting together uncooperative furniture until my hands were red and sore from too much screwdriving. Fortunately, we weren’t required to meet for Fulbrighty group activities until rather late the next day. Fulbright is very nice to us :) There have been several nights since I’ve gotten here that I’ve been so tired that I fall asleep somewhere in the evening, fully clothed with all the lights on, and when I wake up it is 1 in the morning and I have to get up and get ready to go to bed for real. I’ve told my roommates that they should poke me into consciousness if they catch me doing it anymore.
The view off of our apartment balcony
On Sunday we took a ferry to Cijin, which is an island right off the coast of Kaohsiung. We climbed a hill to see the lighthouse (which was closed), and on the way found these random tunnels in the hillside, so we went inside to check them out. It seems that they were old military hideouts? It was pretty adventuresome. Also in Cijin we went to the beach and ate local street food (fish balls, anyone?) and watched this little local music festival or something that was going on near the beach. It was a pretty super day – I would definitely go back.
The rest of this past week has basically been spent getting us set up with various things that we need to live in Taiwan (residency cards, bank accounts), learning about daily life and culture in Taiwan, and starting some teacher training. One day we went out to lunch with a bunch of important people from the Kaohsiung Education Bureau (or something like that) and ate a bunch of amazing food...they just kept bringing out the dishes even after we were all completely stuffed full, and it was all really good. We eat a lot a lot of seafood, which takes a little getting used to, but it’s pretty tasty. Anyway, the best part of the lunch was that we were in a private room because we were a large party, and towards the end of the meal Katie asked one of the important officials why there was a TV and microphones in the room. Before she knew it, they had brought out a book of songs for karaoke and were like, “okay, pick a song to sing!” Hahahaha. And that’s how we ended up having a little karaoke time with important educational officials, featuring American renditions of “Yesterday,” “My Girl,” and the slowest, most hilarious “My Way” ever. It was fabulous. I think the takeaway lesson is to be careful what you ask, because they might make you sing. Also this one time we went to the beach and it was really windy and I got sand in my teeth, but it was okay because there were awesome cutouts where you could pose as tourists. And then they took us to the Dream Mall, which is the largest mall in Taiwan, but I was kind of still all shopped out from the big day of shopping, so I just bought ice cream and wandered through stores looking at silly clothes.
Posing as tourists at the beach
When we are not on field trippy-things, we are usually at San Min, doing various orientation things. There is a professor here with us who’s also here on a Fulbright, and he’s running our teacher training. He’s never taught teachers before, so it’s a learning experience on both ends. We started working with him for real on Friday, when we spent the day talking about lesson plans and how to make them. We made little lesson plans of our own in groups based on a little sample dialogue from a textbook and then we presented them to the group. It was pretty fun, and I think I’m a lot more comfortable with the idea of making lesson plans now, which is good. For the next three weeks we’re going to be doing teacher training all the time during the week. We meet the local English teachers that we’re working with at the beginning of the third week, and then we have a couple of sessions to meet with them before we find out who’s going to be working with whom. School starts September 1st!
Okay, so that obviously doesn’t cover everything, but there was too much for me to think about at once. If you have questions, post them in the comments and I will answer!
P.S. - It turns out I'll be teaching elementary school!
The food at a hot pot restaurant we went to. The colorful panda turned out to be made of some kind of fish
I have been in Taiwan for over a week now and finally have internet access! Needless to say, a lot of things can happen in a week, but I will do my best to sum it up for you. I flew out of Newark late at night on July 30th, stopped in Alaska in the middle of the night, and when we landed in Taipei it was August 1st, so if anything exciting happened on the 31st of July, I missed it. Anyway, there were 6 other Fulbright girls flying out of Newark with me, so we got to hang out in the airport, which was fun. It was a little bit awkward in the beginning because you would spot someone at the gate and think, “there is another young white person (most of the people on the flight were Taiwanese) who is traveling alone and looks like they might be a Fulbright scholar!”, except you would feel weird about just going up to ask them about it. It turned out to be a highly accurate profiling system, though, because I think everybody’s guesses turned out to be correct.
After flying into Taipei, the 4 girls who were going to the Yilan program (in northern Taiwan, closer to Taipei than us) had to go, leaving me, Vicky, and Dani to wander the airport in search of our gate to go to Kaohsiung. Let me tell you, the Taipei airport is hilarious, and it’s even better when it’s 5 in the morning and you’re very loopy. We did a fair amount of wandering before we found our way to the right place, but it was okay because we discovered amazing things in the process. For instance, we spotted this section of the airport with giant pink ice-cream-swirl pillars and huge pictures of Hello Kitty everywhere. I assumed it was a children’s play area, but on closer examination, it was just another gate, so anyone taking the flight to Hong Kong got to wait in the intense pinkness of Hello Kitty World. Even the chairs at the gate were all pink and had Hello Kitty’s face on them. It was aMAZing. Our gate wasn’t nearly so silly, but we did encounter another area on the way there that was an imitation of the Alishan Forest Railway in the mountains of Taiwan, complete with stand-up wooden aboriginal people with the faces cut out so you can pose as aboriginals, which of course we did. (My apologies for the lack of pictures, I will have to get them from one of the other girls later because I didn’t take my own)
Finally we arrived at our gate, where we eventually accumulated 8 Fulbright scholars going to Kaohsiung. The flight was short, but we did have some adventures getting out of the airport. Billy had lost his luggage, and a couple of us got randomly selected to have our luggage inspected at customs. Apparently my luggage was extra suspicious, because I ended up having to open my big bag for them. The guard rifled around through my stuff and fished out several cans of shaving cream, which he proceeded to question me about in Chinese. I told him what it was for, and the guards had a little discussion about it, following which the one guard came back, opened one of the cans, and decided to see what exactly it was by spraying it into the air. I guess he didn’t understand that it’s actually a gel and not a spray, because instead of spraying out into the air, the can just dispensed a big blob of shaving gel, which plopped onto the floor. Words cannot convey how funny this was at the time. I kept my composure until I was away from the guards, and then I cracked up. Traveling for a long time makes you a little bit crazy.
I can’t even think of what we did the first day...not only does it seem like ages ago, but I was really tired at the time and it was a lot of new things at once. I’m fairly sure we took a trip to San Min Elementary, the school that is our home base. We drew slips of paper to see who would be in what apartments, and they took us to our apartments to drop off our luggage and rest a bit. Each apartment has 4 people in it, and the other three in my apartment are Billy, Shiela, and Kate. We all have our own rooms, and we have three bathrooms (Shiela and I share), and there is a common living room and kitchen. It’s a pretty nice apartment (plus there is a convenient 7-11 right outside our gate!). It’s interesting how neatly the apartment drawings turned out. There are 12 of us, 9 girls and 3 guys, and each apartment has one boy. Each apartment also has one person who can speak Chinese well, as well as one person who has never studied Chinese before. It’s kind of amazing how it worked out.
We actually stayed in a hotel for the first night, because we didn’t have bedding or anything in the apartments, but the second day we made a giant trip to Carrefour and Ikea and bought 8 zillion pounds of household items. I guess my memory of our apartment furnishings was quite fuzzy (I had barely spent any time in my room at this point), because I bought a desk and desk chair at Ikea only to come home and find that my room already had a chair. Whoops. But it’s okay, because I like the one I bought a lot better (it’s turquoise!). Getting 12 people’s worth of household furnishings home from Ikea was pretty ridiculous. We bought a really, really large amount of stuff, some of it quite large (a couple people had to get new beds), and it wasn’t even all in bags (they charge for them and we didn’t want to pay), so we basically had to do a lot of assembly-line type lifting to transport everything. We brought it out to the bus in giant Ikea carts, and then a person on the ground would pass it to someone on the stairs who would pass it to someone in the back of the bus who would pack it into a seat, etc. We had to go through the whole process again getting all the stuff off the bus, and then taking it in loads up the elevator to the apartment. It was quite exhausting. After a full day of intense shopping, I spent all evening unpacking and putting together uncooperative furniture until my hands were red and sore from too much screwdriving. Fortunately, we weren’t required to meet for Fulbrighty group activities until rather late the next day. Fulbright is very nice to us :) There have been several nights since I’ve gotten here that I’ve been so tired that I fall asleep somewhere in the evening, fully clothed with all the lights on, and when I wake up it is 1 in the morning and I have to get up and get ready to go to bed for real. I’ve told my roommates that they should poke me into consciousness if they catch me doing it anymore.
The view off of our apartment balcony
On Sunday we took a ferry to Cijin, which is an island right off the coast of Kaohsiung. We climbed a hill to see the lighthouse (which was closed), and on the way found these random tunnels in the hillside, so we went inside to check them out. It seems that they were old military hideouts? It was pretty adventuresome. Also in Cijin we went to the beach and ate local street food (fish balls, anyone?) and watched this little local music festival or something that was going on near the beach. It was a pretty super day – I would definitely go back.
The rest of this past week has basically been spent getting us set up with various things that we need to live in Taiwan (residency cards, bank accounts), learning about daily life and culture in Taiwan, and starting some teacher training. One day we went out to lunch with a bunch of important people from the Kaohsiung Education Bureau (or something like that) and ate a bunch of amazing food...they just kept bringing out the dishes even after we were all completely stuffed full, and it was all really good. We eat a lot a lot of seafood, which takes a little getting used to, but it’s pretty tasty. Anyway, the best part of the lunch was that we were in a private room because we were a large party, and towards the end of the meal Katie asked one of the important officials why there was a TV and microphones in the room. Before she knew it, they had brought out a book of songs for karaoke and were like, “okay, pick a song to sing!” Hahahaha. And that’s how we ended up having a little karaoke time with important educational officials, featuring American renditions of “Yesterday,” “My Girl,” and the slowest, most hilarious “My Way” ever. It was fabulous. I think the takeaway lesson is to be careful what you ask, because they might make you sing. Also this one time we went to the beach and it was really windy and I got sand in my teeth, but it was okay because there were awesome cutouts where you could pose as tourists. And then they took us to the Dream Mall, which is the largest mall in Taiwan, but I was kind of still all shopped out from the big day of shopping, so I just bought ice cream and wandered through stores looking at silly clothes.
Posing as tourists at the beach
When we are not on field trippy-things, we are usually at San Min, doing various orientation things. There is a professor here with us who’s also here on a Fulbright, and he’s running our teacher training. He’s never taught teachers before, so it’s a learning experience on both ends. We started working with him for real on Friday, when we spent the day talking about lesson plans and how to make them. We made little lesson plans of our own in groups based on a little sample dialogue from a textbook and then we presented them to the group. It was pretty fun, and I think I’m a lot more comfortable with the idea of making lesson plans now, which is good. For the next three weeks we’re going to be doing teacher training all the time during the week. We meet the local English teachers that we’re working with at the beginning of the third week, and then we have a couple of sessions to meet with them before we find out who’s going to be working with whom. School starts September 1st!
Okay, so that obviously doesn’t cover everything, but there was too much for me to think about at once. If you have questions, post them in the comments and I will answer!
P.S. - It turns out I'll be teaching elementary school!
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