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.