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!