More Typhoonage

Several times in the past couple weeks, we've been warned that a typhoon is coming. And several times in the past couple weeks, the anticipated typhoon has missed Kaohsiung and all we get is a little rain. So when they started telling us earlier this week that a big typhoon was coming around the weekend, it was hard to take it seriously, even though on the satellite pictures Typhoon Jangmi was headed straight for Kaohsiung. Sure enough, the typhoon changed course a bit, and now northeastern Taiwan is going to get pummeled once more. However, this one is so big that we're still getting some pretty intense winds and rain here in Kaohsiung...I think tomorrow might be supposed to be the worst of the typhoon, but there is definitely some crazy wind going on out there right now. It sounds like a giant vacuum cleaner. Anyway, we are all safely inside, and we have candles and ramen and bottled water, just in case, so please put your minds at ease. Maybe they will cancel school tomorrow!

Oh man, so this week was funny because I started having to teach real classes for the English Angels. The first unit in our syllabus is "Songs and Dances," which was silly to begin with, because I felt like there was some base assumption that as an American, I obviously know how to sing and dance and generally act like a trained monkey. Conveniently for everybody, this isn't such an incorrect assumption. They told me to pick some songs to teach the kids, so I basically just went through my iTunes and picked out songs that seemed kid-friendly. The kids are 3rd-6th grade and advanced English learners, so I needed something that wasn't too childish, but also wasn't too hard for non-native English speakers to sing. I played my top 6 picks for the kids in class, and then everybody voted on which ones they liked best. The top vote-getter was "Y.M.C.A.," followed closely by "Boss of Me" (the Malcom in the Middle theme song, for those who are unaware). On Thursday we learned the dance for Y.M.C.A. and I told the children that they are now prepared to attend American weddings. It was excellent. The other two runner-ups were "Yellow Submarine" and "I Just Can't Wait to Be King," so we'll see how many we have time to learn.

So this past Tuesday I was hanging around talking to Patty after school, and someone said my name outside the door of our classroom, and when I looked it was Gered's host sister Isabella! She doesn't go to my school, but she was there for swimming lessons, and her mom came and met Patty, and now I think the two of them will be plotting things together. Patty is also in cahoots with my host sister to plan trips out of Kaohsiung for us. Also she potentially has some kind of matchmaking scheme going on...I'm not allowed to tell, but it does not involve me, although heaven knows Patty loves to scheme and gossip about me. She's also teaching me to ride a motorcycle. The general moral of the story is that Patty makes my life more hilarious on a regular basis, and I love her to pieces. The other moral of the story (the one I was getting to in the first place) is that I went down to the Yang Ming swimming pool to see Isabella's swimming lessons, and I ended up talking to the swim coach, who invited me to come swim with them and then gave me an official Yang Ming school swim cap. It is neon green, and the first swimming cap I have ever owned. So I suppose I'll be going swimming after school on Tuesday...I even went out this weekend and bought a nice, ultra-modest one-piece bathing suit that I can feel okay wearing in the presence of students. This was kind of tricky to do, given the general makeup of bathing suits in Taiwan. A handy diagram:

As you can see, it is especially difficult to buy a modest, inexpensive bathing suit that isn't hideous. Actually, this diagram is slightly misleading, because most of the bathing suits were quite modest, it's just that most of the cheap ones were really ugly, and a lot of the expensive ones were too. I ended up getting a plain navy blue suit that says "Macarena" on the front in white. Not so bad, but not nearly as interesting as I prefer to dress.

It looks like bathing suit weather outside right now...just the 10-minute walk home from church this morning drenched my legs AND turned my umbrella inside out. Whooee!

Yellow Man

On Wednesday, I was waiting at the bus stop, watching down the road for the bus, when I happened to glance at a man parked on his scooter by the side of the road. He was wiggling something at me, and for a moment I didn't process what, and then I realized that he had his shorts open, and was wiggling THAT thing at me! Aughhhghhghhhhdhgjkalbdfjhkadsfhjfbjasd. I was totally disgusted, but I still had to catch the bus, which meant that I still had to look in that direction to see if the bus was coming so I could flag it down. It was an exercise in selective vision, where I just kind of had to block the man out of my view. This went on for an agonizing 5 or 10 minutes until the bus finally came, to my great relief. As soon as I stepped foot on the bus, it occurred to me that I know a couple of good humiliating things to yell at people if they are behaving inappropriately, and I really should have yelled some things to publicly disgrace the guy. So without further ado: Rebekah's Short Guide to Yelling at Perverts in Chinese!

1) Ni lao segui! = 'You old pervert!' Start the shaming by getting everyone's attention with this one. I've translated the word segui as pervert, but if you want to be totally literal it says color-ghost. I'm not sure about the 'color' part (although in Chinese culture they do associate the color yellow with things that are inappropriate or pornographic, kind of like "blue movies" in English, so maybe that has to do with it), but in Chinese 'ghost' also means 'devil,' so it seems like a pretty good thing to yell at someone bad.

2) Ni bu yao lian! = 'You have no shame!' (lit. 'you don't want face') In Chinese culture, it's very important not to lose face, and to maintain one's dignity. Therefore, to intentionally exhibit face-losing behaviors like exposing oneself in public is almost unthinkable...only a really shameless person doesn't care if they lose face.

3) Bu yao peng wo! = 'Don't touch me!' Hopefully it doesn't come to that, but it's a good expression to know.

4) Zou kai! = 'Go away!' 'Nuff said.

Birthday and weekend and anything else I can remember

This past Thursday was my birthday, so there were all kinds of festivities throughout the day. For one, Patty told all of my classes that it was my birthday, and then made them sing Happy Birthday to me in English, Chinese, and Taiwanese. Consequently, I probably received as many Happy Birthday songs on Thursday as I have the past 10 or 11 birthdays combined. Fabulous! My school's director got me a cake, which we had before lunch. It was surprisingly realistically cake-like, which is rare in Asia. Then I had lunch and went to the introductory class of English Angels. The class was short because it was the first session, and afterwards the director busied himself demonstrating to me all of the facilities I could use to teach them. In addition to a computer and a projector and a big screen, our classroom has a karaoke machine. Naturally. I think the director really loves his own voice, because of course he just HAD to demonstrate the karaoke machine, and then he wanted me to sing a song too. Now, something I had at lunch must have disagreed with me, because at this point I was really nauseous and feverish and dizzy and generally feeling awful. I sang a little bit, and then tried to explain to the director that I felt sick and I really just wanted to rest and not sing or talk or anything. He decided that I was just sad because it was my birthday and I missed my hometown, and I had to do a lot of explaining to make him understand.

Patty covered for me in the afternoon while I sat on the sidelines, and it didn't take long for me to feel better. I made the students guess how old I was, and got answers ranging from 18 to 30. Hmm. Then we talked about how in America, you don't get to be 1 until a whole year after you are born. In Taiwan, you are 1 when you are born, then you become 2 when Chinese New Year passes, and when your next birthday comes, you turn 3. At least, I think that's how it goes. It is definitely different.

In the evening, my host sister Grace threw me a little birthday party. It was the first time I met her, and she's really nice. She even went to the restaurant beforehand to put up some decorations. After dinner, we had pseudo-cake, which was really muffins arranged in a circle, one with a candle in it. We asked Grace what the muffins were, and she said, "It's a traditional Taiwanese dessert...prawn muffins." Now, you think it sounds weird, but here in Kaohsiung everything has seafood in it, so you have to be ready for things like prawn muffins. Poor Maya is allergic to shellfish, and she has to be really careful because they are always sneaking into things. Anyway, Maya put her muffin aside and made a mental note not to eat it so she wouldn't die, when a dubious Gered asked Grace again exactly what kind of muffins they were. "Prawn muffins," she said. "P-L-U-M."

Oh. Well, they were very delicious, and I was certainly glad that they contained plums and not prawns. After dinner we went across the street to Birthday Park, where you are apparently supposed to go on your birthday, but it had just rained and it was dark so we only went and looked around for a minute. It was all right, though, because my birthday was pretty fabulous overall. I am the big 2-2...twice as old as my students. Sweet.

On Friday I think I slept all day...don't remember. But Saturday I went with Gered and his host family to pick up their nephew from his military base and bring him home for the weekend, which was fun. His family has a 9-year-old daughter named Isabella, who is incredibly hilarious, and we are totally pals now. Isabella and Andy (the nephew) spent the whole car ride home (~1 hr) teasing each other, which was very entertaining for me, as the three of us were together in the back seat. My favorite excerpt (translated and paraphrased for your convenience), on the topic of Isabella's rather round face:
Andy: You little fatty. You look like a puffer fish.
Isabella: I am not a puffer fish! You are a puffer fish. I am the moon.

During the course of the day, Isabella also: played Frisbee, played badminton, tried to do chin-ups on the bars at the base, played cards, made a cow puppet, played mancala, played Chinese checkers, played regular checkers, played Mamma Mia and sang, disappeared for a minute and came back with her face painted and a "tattoo" drawn down her arm, and danced with me on the light-up sidewalk at Urban Spotlight*, among other things. It is a busy life, being 9 years old.

*the hip downtown hangout in Kaohsiung...lots of food and drink places, live music, and everything is covered in multicolored lights

So Saturday was a really full day...then on Sunday I woke up feeling really sick and slept all day. It's okay though, because today I felt better, plus I went to the doctor and he gave me like 57382945783429 kinds of medicine to take at all different times of day, so surely I will be better in no time. He also told me not to talk too much, to which I say hahahahahahaha. I am a teacher. Wish me luck with that one.

Also, there is a new typhoon here, potentially one with a silly name. Basically, it is rainy out, and delightfully humid. Yes!

Chao hao!

I learned from my laogong that people in Taiwan don't say ting hao ('quite good'), instead they say chao hao (something like 'super')! I like it.

Sorry for not posting this earlier, but I should mention that Kaohsiung was barely affected by the typhoon, so no need to be worried about me. The city is on the west side of the island, and typhoons all come from the east side, off the Pacific Ocean. Also, there are some really tall mountains in the center of Taiwan that shield western Taiwan from the force of the typhoon. At any rate, northeastern Taiwan got hit pretty badly, but down here all we had were a couple of really windy days and a bit of rain. It was actually pretty nice. After the typhoon left, the air was really gross - humid and heavy with pollution - and I wished the typhoon would come back. The pollution here can get pretty bad...it's just palpable in the air sometimes, and you can feel it settling on your skin. Ew.

So! At the beginning of this week, I spent a number of hours interviewing 3rd-6th graders at school for spots in the Little Angels, the school's elite group of English students. It is apparent to me that the whole concept of Little Angels is less to provide enrichment for advanced English students and more to give the school something to show off. Whatever.

Anyway, the auditions went like this: each student gives a speech in English to two of the local English teachers, who then ask some follow-up questions. The student then moves into the next room, where they have to face...dun dun dun...a NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER! ONE-ON-ONE! This was me. Naturally, most of the students were very nervous, so I threw them a couple of softball questions and tried to work up from there. I started with things that I knew they had practiced, like "what's your name?" and "how are you?" The answer to the latter question is, invariably, a robotic "I-am-fine-thank-you," sometimes with a little "and you?" tacked on the end. I think at some point I will do a lesson for my class in which I explain that there are other things to be besides fine, like "fabulous!" Once I got into more open-ended questions, the interviews got more interesting. When I asked, "what do you like to do?" one student cheerfully announced, "I like to hit my brother." This turned into a common follow-up question - after asking the students about their siblings, I would ask how they got along.

The funniest, though, was the one little girl who I could barely get to talk to me. I got her to tell me her name, but she stared at me blankly with every other question. I asked her what she liked to do, and when she didn't respond, I gave some prompts..."do you like to swim? read books? play baseball?" Finally, I got a very soft "bicycle." I responded with lots of enthusiasm and encouragement, but my further questions got more blank stares. Do you have brothers or sisters? Mumble. Do you have a brother? Head shake. Do you have a sister? Mumble. How old is your sister? Stare. Do you play with your sister, or do you fight? Long stare, finally followed by one whispered, barely audible word......

"Bicycle." Aaaaaaand the interview was over. Heard all I needed to hear.

A Tycoon is Coming to Taiwan!

Lots of rain, strong winds...you know, a tycoon. Stock up on water and ramen! Tape the windows! Don't go outside!

Also, tonight we got host families! My host is an English teacher named Grace, but she had class tonight so her parents came to the host family dinner to meet me instead. They spoke like no English, so it was an interesting time. My Chinese is pretty decent, especially for talking about the things you usually talk about when you are introducing yourself to somebody, but the dad kept using words I didn't know, and I think he got kind of frustrated that I didn't understand. They were really nice, though, and the mom said I could call her Xu Mama (Xu is their last name) and she would teach me how to speak Taiwanese and cook Chinese food. If the weather permits, we'll probably do something together for Moon Festival, which is this Sunday.

Me with Xu Mama and Xu Baba:


For those of you who do not know what Moon Festival entails, here is the lowdown: Moon Festival, aka Mid-Autumn Festival, is a holiday sort of similar to Thanksgiving, in that it's a time for families to get together. Traditionally, on Moon Festival, you barbecue meat and eat moon cakes and pomelos. After you eat your pomelo (it's a sort of grapefruitish thing), you are supposed to take the rind and wear it on your head. I am not kidding. The other crazy thing about Moon Festival is the moon cakes, which often come in really fancy boxes with lots of compartments that people usually save for jewelry boxes. There are various flavors of moon cakes, but a common variety has a whole egg yolk in the center. Also many of them are bean-flavored, as Asian desserts tend to be. My impression of moon cakes is that they are sort of like fruitcakes at Christmas...it's traditional to give them to people, but they aren't necessarily that good. I'm not huge on the egg yolk, but I had a moon cake yesterday that tasted vaguely like raisins, and it was pretty decent. Unfortunately, we foreigners as a group don't seem to like moon cake that much, but in the past few days people have given us soooo much moon cake! I suppose it might be nice to have around if the typhoon is particularly fierce and keeps us from leaving our apartment to obtain non-ramen food.

School Starts (for real)

This won't be too long a post because it is late and I am exhausted, but today was my first day of teaching and it was crazy. Folks, I have a real job. It is difficult for me to think about. It's the start of a new school year, and I'm on the other side of the desk than usual.

When I had talked to Patty earlier about preparing activities for the first day, she told me not
to worry about it, and that I could just introduce myself. Well, I did introduce myself, but I also discovered after that that I was going to be teaching the rest of the lesson for that day as well. Hahahahah. While I did this, Patty was doing some kind of work at her desk. Fabulous. The first two classes were not the most effective English classes of all time, but by the third one I changed the activity a little bit, and it worked a lot better. It was still tricky, because there's a handful of kids who had a lot of trouble keeping up, so I'll have to think of good ways to help them catch up without embarrassing them.

In general, the students are really cute and funny and I like them a lot. There was one girl with pretty green glasses who I kept coincidentally making eye contact with, and every time it happened she would give me this enigmatic little smile. After class, the students left, but a few minutes later she came back with two hot dogs and gave one to me. A lot of the other ETAs have been receiving lots of welcome presents from their schools, and I haven't really (I think because my school is so giant - 3000 students! - that I am less of a big deal), but it warmed my heart to get a hot dog from a 5th grader. She was so cute. On the other side of things, I have a couple of very naughty boys in my classes who make things rather interesting. Patty asked me to make English names for the kids who don't have them, and I told her I'd think some up tonight, but there was one boy who I didn't even have to think about. As soon as she told me that he needed an English name, I promptly decided (based on my immediate impression of his behavior/personality) to name him Kevin. Kreher relatives should understand.

A Call for Input: If you have any good names in mind that are nice and not too hard to pronounce, feel free to leave them in the comments. Maybe if you are very good I will name a Taiwanese child after you. One of my students wrote that her English name is "Cow," so probably most anything that you think up will be better than that.

Oh, I forgot! After my last class, one boy came up and asked me where I was from. Impressed that he was brave enough to practice his English with me, I replied, "America." "What state?" he asked. I told him New Jersey, and he replied that he was from Pennsylvania, and had just moved back to Taiwan. It turns out that he had spent the past 3 years living in Carlisle, PA - shout out to the Gilmores! - and his English is probably better than his Chinese. During this exchange, a whole posse of kids crowded around and gaped at their classmate having a conversation in English with the teacher. When it was over, the other boys dragged him off in a fit of giggles. It was pretty amusing.

Hooray for Taipei!

All of the Kaohsiung Fulbright crew went up to Taipei this past weekend for a little Fulbright conference. We took the high speed rail to get there, which was pretty cool. Before we left, I had put my duvet cover in the wash (I wanted to be able to hang it out to dry at a time when I wouldn't need to sleep under it), but the wash cycle took longer than I thought, so I left the apartment a lot later than everyone else. Moreover, I just barely missed the bus to the metro, so I waited around for the next bus, took the bus to the subway station, and then took the subway up to the high speed rail station. It was an economical choice, but a major time crunch. When I was about to get off the subway, I got a call saying "everybody else is on the train and it's leaving in like 3 minutes; where are you?" Hahaha. I eschewed the escalators and hustled my butt up the stairs to the ticket machine while Maya gave me tips over the phone for maximum efficiency. In a moment of great triumph, I managed to buy my ticket and get down on the platform and onto the train in the very nick of time! It was super. Also super: when we got there that night, I got to go hang out with my friend Richard a.k.a. my laogong (Chinese for husband...don't worry, it's only for pretend), who lives in Taipei these days.

We went out to this giant night market and ate intense amounts of delicious Taiwanese snacks, followed by wandering around the rest of the night market in an effort to fight off food coma. The highlight of this part was probably when we passed a restaurant called, I kid you not, Modern Toilet:


The classy display in the front window (don't worry, it's stuffed):

All of the food is served in containers shaped like various kinds of toilets. Very classy. Apparently it's actually really popular...silly Taiwan.

Laogong and I also visited the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, which is really pretty at night:


While we Fulbright ETAs arrived in August, most of the other grantees had just arrived, so a lot of the first day of the conference involved going over orientation-type information that we had already heard. We gave a little Powerpoint presentation introducing ourselves and the work we're doing in Kaohsiung, and also got to see a presentation from the Yilan ETAs. It was nice to finally meet the other group of Taiwan ETAs, and it made me wish that we weren't so inconveniently located with respect to each other, because they are pretty excellent. In fact, it was a generally excellent group of people. On Friday night, Fulbright threw a big old party with all of the Fulbright fellows and staff and representatives from the American Institute in Taiwan and some other prestigious-type people, and we dressed up fancy and schmoozed and people gave each other business cards. It was wild. There was an open bar.

On Saturday we got to hear all of the different projects that the non-ETA Fulbrights came here to work on, which took a really long time and I got kind of sleepy, but I promise that it wasn't because the presentations were boring. People are doing crazy things. There was one hilarious and adorable little man who explained to us in a highly entertaining fashion how if you take metal and stretch it into long thin hairs and make a sheet of glass filled with them, it refracts things at a totally new and crazy angle! This apparently has potential application in cloaking devices. That night we all went out to the Skyline Restaurant, which is at the top of the second tallest building in Taipei. The view was pretty sweet, and the food was delicious and delightfully buffet-style.

On Sunday, I got up bright and early and went on an adventure with Gered to see Taipei 101, the world's tallest building. On the way, we went to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial again. It is pretty in the daytime as well:

Fun fact: Chiang Kai-shek Square was renamed "Freedom Square" after the DPP (opposition party to the Kuomintang) came into power!

After that, we were at a bus stop squinting thoughtfully at the bus maps and trying to determine which one might go to Taipei 101 when a nice little man came up, started talking to us in English, and ended up riding with us on the bus for a while and giving up helpful tips. Taiwanese people are so nice. :)

Taipei 101 is 101 floors tall. Go figure. For an idea of how tall that is, comparatively: it is really really tall. We took a crazy high-speed elevator that goes up 89 floors in 37 seconds. I thought it would be like going on the Dominator at Dorney Park, but it turned out to be really smooth, plus the elevator had light-up constellations on the ceiling. Awesome.

Probably the most amusing part about Taipei 101 was their gift shop, which was centered around these cartoon characters called "Damper Babies." When I first saw the name, the thought that popped into my head was, "Who would want a damper baby? Babies are generally best when dry." It turns out that they are based off of the giant damper in Taipei 101, a huge giant ball suspended in the center of the building that helps to dampen the effects of the wind on the motion of the building. How does this work? I would suspect that there is definitely some physics involved.

Anyway, the Damper Babies have spherical heads (overall, they looks like lightbulbs), and they are plastered all over the majority of the merchandise in the gift shop. Definitely one of the sillier tie-in products that I have experienced. I wonder if people really buy them. Since this is Taiwan, I'm going to guess yes. Unrelated fun fact about Taipei 101: you can mail a postcard from the top! I sent one to Grandma, in honor of all of the time she spent telling me which places I should definitely visit in Taipei (answer: the Chiang Kai-shek memorial/museum, if my memory serves me correctly). Also it's one of the few addresses I know from memory. Sorry other relatives; I still love you!

Stop...picture time!

Taipei 101 in all its majesty:


A view from the top:

(the mountains in the picture are named after the animals that some exploring guy apparently mistook them for in the night...it's lion, tiger, elephant, and something else. I don't frequently mistake mountains for tigers, but I guess I am not everybody.)

The infamous damper...can it live up to the hype??


After Taipei 101, Gered went back to Kaohsiung and I went off on an adventure by myself. I ended up going to the Palace Museum, where they keep all the awesome little chunks of history and culture that the Kuomintang swiped from the mainland when they left. Probably a good plan, because it has stayed nice and safe in Taiwan. My favorite part was all of the gorgeous ceramic pieces that they had from different ages of Chinese history.

Brief adventure: On the train back from the museum, I made friends with a lady who was traveling with her 7-year-old son. They just returned to Taiwan from Singapore, so her English was pretty good, except that her son's English name was "Fashion." She thought it was pretty cool and unique. I definitely agree on the latter point.

So after the museum, I got back to the hotel, picked up the bag I left there, hopped back on the subway to the high speed rail station, and hightailed it back to Kaohsiung, where I took more subway and another bus and walked back to my apartment, where I was very very very tired. Good weekend. :)

Since when is it September?

I went into school on Monday and talked with the dean of academic affairs about random stuff, so now I'm at least moderately informed about what my life will be like for the next 10 months. I'm actually only teaching on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, but Monday and Friday I also have to work in the English Village. I managed to save Wednesday, despite the dean trying to convince me that I should come in on Wednesdays to tutor him in English. I'm not technically obligated to tutor him or anything, but they were so nice to me that I didn't really know how to refuse. At least I got it switched to a day when I have to go to the school anyway, so I will have a sweet day of freedom every other Wednesday (when we don't have Fulbright meetings). Delicious!

Besides my random tutoring session, I'm also supposed to be teaching 4 classes independently that I'm supposed to be designing myself - 2 for teachers, 2 for students. Two of them are actually during my lunch hour, which the dean felt really bad about, but I don't care that much because we have almost 2 hours for lunch, and I'll only be teaching for half of it. I was a little bit worried about what I was going to teach in those classes, but then I talked to Patty and she was like ehhh we'll figure it out as you go along and now I feel better about it. I might have devoted a whole lot of time today to making beautiful posters for my classroom. Hooray!

This morning was also the first run-through of the English Village...we spent a lot of time on Tuesday putting together all of the games and materials that we needed, and today we had a class come through and try some of them out, supervised by a teacher. The teacher's job was to report back to the Bureau of Education, who apparently was feeling fairly skeptical of the way that we wanted to run the English Village. Fortunately, it turned out pretty well, perhaps because we had 3 ETAs running a section instead of the 1 that we'll have when we do it for real. We still have to make a lot of revisions, but for now I'm just glad that it's OVER.

Tomorrow afternoon we are all going to Taipei! There will be a conference for all of the Fulbrights in Taiwan - not just us English teachers, but also the people with research grants and whatnot. They sent us the schedule, and it looks packed full of activities that we already did during our own orientation. I feel like this might be poor planning, and we're all going to have to sit through a zillion presentations about things that we're already really familiar with. At least it should be fun to be in Taipei and meet the other Fulbrights!

Going to Church in Chinese!

On Friday, Patty helped me hunt down a Chinese-English Bible, so I figured I was armed to go to a Chinese-speaking church this Sunday. The church I attended turned out to be a Baptist church, and a very large one, but I think I was the only foreigner there, nonetheless. The service started with worship, and I was relieved to find that it was all fairly easy for me to understand. The prayers and the songs were fairly repetitive by nature, so what I didn't catch the first time around, I felt pretty good about the third or fourth. I don't really know many church words in Chinese, but I do know the word for "create" (chuangzao), and it was allll over the place in the prayers, so I was pretty on top of that situation. The song lyrics were projected up on a big screen in the front, so that wasn't too bad either. The words usually go fairly slow when you're singing (esp. church music), so there is plenty of time to read the lyrics for those of us who aren't fast readers in Chinese. It was a little bit of an adventure in traditional characters. Interestingly, a lot of the worship music is of English-language origin, translated into Chinese. We even sang a song that I knew from PCC (the one that goes "from the mountains to the valleys/hear our praises rise to you"), translated into Chinese, which was a lot of fun for me.

So the worship part was pretty neat, and generally easy for me to understand. The sermon was kind of another story. I got out my new Chinese-English Bible to look at the reading, but they said the reference in Chinese, so I didn't know where to turn. Fortunately a nice girl in front of me turned around and whispered "Genesis 12!" While most of the books of the Bible are translated phonetically, it turns out that Genesis is translated literally as chuangshiji, lit. 'record of the world's creation.' Probably wouldn't have been able to find that one by myself. Anyway, the sermon was full of words I didn't know, so I concentrated really hard and just tried to get the gist of things. The pastor talked with his hands a lot, which helped. There were a couple of words that I heard over and over that I didn't know, so I wrote them down and asked Patty what they meant ("prayer" and "praise," as it turns out). After the service, I chatted a little bit with the nice gal in front of me, and she invited me out to lunch with her friends. Her name was Helen, and it turned out that she had lived in California for 11 years, so her English was very good. I had a nice time chatting with some other church ladies at lunch, and now I've been invited to like 4 different small groups, total. I doubt that my Chinese language skills would be up to participating in a Bible study, but maybe I will give it a try sometime. Everybody promises that they will speak slow and translate a little to help me understand.

I won't be in town next weekend (Fulbright conference in Taipei!), but I think I'll try to keep going to Chinese-language church and working to improve my comprehension. Even though the language is different, what struck me was how much of my experience on Sunday transcended language. Even when I didn't understand all the words, the spirit of worship was as palpable and as powerful as in any English-speaking church, and the disjointed pieces of the sermon that I managed to catch still resonated with me. I would recommend it to anyone.