My Legs Have Become Suddenly More Delicious

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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