Adventures!

In case you were wondering, they celebrate the regular old new year here too, in addition to Chinese new year. I hear that they set off some sweet fireworks from Taipei 101 (the world's tallest building! for now), so I'm going up to Taipei this afternoon for that. After that, the adventure begins. It's a long weekend, so Gered and I wanted to go somewhere a little more inaccessible that we wouldn't be able to get to on a normal weekend, but we haven't nailed down a place yet. We're going to try to go to the Matsu Islands, but if that doesn't work out then maybe we'll poke around some mountains in central Taiwan or something else. There is a lot of potential adventure (potenture?) here.

CUTENESS:
Some of the Little Angels were actually angelic for once and made me a fancy paper bouquet. The bouquet was decorated with koalas and a note saying "thankful your teach! Happy New Year!" on it. Witness:

We wish you a lot of peace in the new year. Peace is abundant in Taiwan (especially when cameras are present), so I am happy to share.

It's April 27th, if you were wondering

On the bus today I saw a poster for a day to encourage people not to hit their children. The English name: International SpankOut Day.

I'd like to know who was in charge of translating that one...

聖誕節...

...a.k.a. shengdan jie a.k.a. Christmas a.k.a. a strange time to be abroad. Christmas didn't seem like Christmas this year, because there was no Christmas break to look forward to, and no snow, and not even any cold weather (Christmas Day? in the 70s), and no big rush of holiday preparations and baking cookies and visiting relatives. I was kind of glad that it didn't feel like Christmas, because it kept me from feeling too sad. If I were at home and I had to work all day on Christmas and didn't get to be with my family, I'd be pretty upset. Here, I don't mind, because it didn't really feel much different from any other Thursday anyway.

The days leading up to Christmas were really crazy and busy and kind of stressful for me, but I survived with the help of an emergency infusion of American baked goods that arrived by surprise. THANK YOU AUNT KARYN; YOU ARE AWESOME. THE CHOCOLATE-RASPBERRY CHIP ONES ARE MY FAVORITE.

I did try a bit to get into the Christmas spirit. The closest I came was on Christmas Eve. I was working in my room when I heard Christmas music. It was surprisingly loud, and it sounded decidedly unprofessional. At first I figured it was somebody playing a tape of children singing Christmas songs or something (not too uncommon in my recent life). Then I tried to figure out where the sound was coming from, and I realized that it was from outside my window. I opened the window to find the source of the sound, and looking down into our courtyard, saw a circle of people wearing Santa hats and singing Christmas carols in Chinese. For the first time, it seemed a little bit to me like real Christmas. They weren't the best singers, but I stayed there at my window listening until they left.

That night, I went to an English-speaking church for the first time since I've been in Taiwan. It was a small church, and the setup was a little bit strange, but the message was good, and at the end we turned off all the lights and lit our candles together and sang Silent Night, just like we do every Christmas Eve. It was familiar enough to remind me that it was really Christmas, which made me a little sad.

On Christmas morning, I had breakfast and presents with Gered, which was nice. Then I went to work. We told the Christmas story in all my classes, and in my teacher classes even ventured to attempt to explain Hanukkah a little bit. There are extremely few Jewish people in Taiwan, so we had a lot of confusion there. One of the teachers brought me a Christmas present, and a number of students gave me cards or little gifts. Patty's 18-year-old daughter gave me a stuffed Care Bear (the pink one, with the rainbow on its stomach), to the great delight/envy of my girl students. Taiwanese people don't generally exchange Christmas presents, but I think a lot of them gave me things because they know that Christmas is important in America, and they want me to feel at home. It was very sweet. That evening, the Fulbright ETAs got together and had a Western-style Christmas dinner (ordered from a nearby hotel), with turkey and mashed potatoes and whatnot. (okay, there might have been dumplings as well) We did quite decently, for Taiwan.

Anyway, it's lame to be away from home for Christmas, but we made the best of it. Also, I got to talk to a lot of people at home recently through the magic of Skype. Hooray!

Craziness and other craziness

First of all...we had an earthquake this morning!!!! Okay, just a little one, but I have never been in an earthquake before so it was exciting. It was around 8 am and I was sitting at my desk in my room on the 3rd floor when things got a little shaky. I looked outside and people were still walking their dogs and chatting with the guards and carrying on, but there was definitely a little earthquake action. It was cool.

So this weekend was insanely busy...not even very weekend-like, because I was up before 7 both days and going nonstop. Delicious.

Saturday was my school's anniversary celebration, a truly giant event. It started before 8 and went all the way until 4, and all the students and teachers and parents and anybody related to the school was there. There were lots of snacks and apparently a flea market (I never found it), but the big deal was the athletic competition between classes. Each grade's classes competed against each other in a series of relay races. The kids are extremely competitive, and I got pretty worked up just watching my kids race. Watching the kids run is fabulous, because you can tell that they are running sooooo hard, but they are so little that a lot of them looked like they were perpetually just about to fall over. Since I was around for all the races, a lot of my students came up and talked to me before and after, which was great. They were so excited that they forgot to be scared to speak English! Some kids even brought their parents over to meet me, which was really nice. It was a physically draining day, but I felt pretty great.

After a full day of sporting and flinging "hello"s left and right, I jaunted over to Chris Castro's (director of AIT-Kaohsiung and owner of a real oven!) for American baking time. I got there a bit late for the baking part, but we had a scrumptious dinner of Western food followed by lumping around the living room and watching the Polar Express. I even got baked goods to take home, even though I didn't help make them. It was extra-nice.

So Saturday was a very full day, but Sunday was no better. We were supposed to meet at 7:40 am to go on a cultural trip to Pingdong sponsored by the Kaohsiung Educational Bureau. My host sister was there, and she brought along her 6-year-old niece, who named herself Aurora after Sleeping Beauty because Sleeping Beauty gets to wear a pink dress. She was super-shy and barely said two words to me, but she was all kinds of cute, and she drew me a bunch of pictures.

The cultural part of the trip was that we were going to a sort of Taiwanese aboriginal culture village. Not an actual aboriginal village, but a place where they have things from various different aboriginal groups that you can check out. We watched a performance of the different groups' traditional dances, which was neat but very long. Also a lot of the guys in the performance were wearing some kind of traditional thong-type garment, and nothing else. Okay, maybe a vest or something, but the booty was all right on out there. Slightly awkward. They taught us a traditional song and a dance, and gave us (itchy) temporary versions of the traditional Atayal facial tattoos. When you're already conspicuous, you might as well just run with it, right? Unfortunately all photos of this are in my host sister Grace's possession, but you'll see them whenever they come into my hands. Also we went to Meinong again and made pots, but at a different place than last time. By the time we had dinner (they served us intestines! yum) and got on the bus to go home, I was totally wiped out. And it was maybe 7:30 pm. And I still had plenty to get done that night. As much as it is good to do interesting things on the weekends, man, it sucks to not have any time to rest. Fortunately English Village is on break again, so my life is going to be more relaxed for a bit. Hooray!

Christmastime in Taiwan

Spending the Christmas season in Taiwan is a bit of a strange time. For one thing, it doesn't feel like Christmastime because the weather is all wrong. These days our weather has been in the 70s, which doesn't exactly spell Christmas to me. I keep forgetting that it is even December. Also, this is the first year in a while when Christmastime hasn't been heralded by a period of final exams. Having a Christmas break to look forward to certainly adds to the holiday anticipation. As for me, I will be working on Christmas, just like any other Thursday. Honestly, I don't mind too much...I think it will keep my mind off of missing Christmas at home, and I'm happy to spend Christmas with my kids.

Taiwanese people seem to all know about Christmas, but it's not the same kind of holiday here that it is in the States. I asked one of my classes today how many of their families celebrated Christmas at home, and only a few kids raised their hands. They knew about Santa and Christmas trees, and one or two kids even told me that Christmas is when Jesus was born. Some of them knew that Christmas involved presents, but most of them said that they didn't get Christmas presents themselves.

However, even if Taiwanese people don't generally celebrate Christmas the way most Americans do, there is one aspect of the Christmas season that Taiwan can definitely get behind. Because what is Christmas, really, if not an excuse to festoon everything with as much shiny, light-up stuff as we can get our hands on? Now that's what I'm talking 'bout. Our friendly neighborhood stationery store is both stocked with and decorated with formidable amounts of tinsel, and they have taken to blasting really unfortunate Christmas music as well (think techno version of The First Noel, and other equally painful things). My favorite Christmas decorations, however, are the ones that have been put up in the courtyard of our apartment building. Here is the view from our balcony:

Check out the left side of the picture. See that little guy? It's a light-up reindeer!

Two of them, actually. Also: THEY MOVE. Albeit veeeeeery slowly.

For those of you with a little extra time on your hands, here is a more complete video tour:

Special guest appearance by one of our security guards, who didn't realize that I was taking a video. Also please note the friendly light of 7-11 just outside our gate. My life revolves around that 7-11.

Voiceless Teaching, a Bus Acquaintance, and Leftover Turkey

I've been sick recently with a nasty cold, which puts a cramp in my usual teaching style because my throat has been too sore to deal with all of the (loud) talking that normal teaching demands. Fortunately, I have the fabulous Patty to back me up in class, and together we formed a scheme (about 30 seconds before our first class) to use my lack of voice as a teaching tool. When the students entered the classroom, they found Teacher Rebekah apparently asleep with her head down on the desk, which drew a lot of curiosity. As class started, Patty explained that I was resting because I was sick with a sore throat, so I couldn't talk to the students, but I could still respond to their English! She reminded them of our vocab words from the last class (get up, go to bed, go home, and go to school), and prompted them all to tell me, "get up," which was my magical clue (after having *slept* through the cacophony of the students' arrival to the classroom) to wake up sleepily. Although in the beginning Patty prompted the students to give me different commands, after a little while they were all raising their hands and yelling things out. Smart-aleck students had me running back and forth between "school" and "home" (drawn on the blackboard) over and over, or they would tell me to "go home and go to bed" and then promptly order me to go to school, resulting in some sleepwalking. To end the activity, I waited until someone told me to go home, and then I would leave the classroom and fall asleep out in the hall, upon which some puzzled student would be sent to find the missing teacher. Finding me asleep usually flummoxed them for a moment, after which they would remember to use their vocab and command me to "get up and go to school." We all had a ton of fun with this activity, so it really wasn't so bad that my throat was sore.

One of the unexpected side effects of doing the "sleeping teacher" act in the beginning of class was the way that the students reacted when they saw me asleep. A lot of times the students would arrive before Patty and just hang around speculating about their sleeping teacher in Chinese:
"Why is the teacher asleep?"
"Maybe she is tired."
"Maybe she doesn't feel well."
"I think that she must be tired because she doesn't get nap time. I heard that she teaches the English Angels class during nap time."
One student even came up and started massaging my shoulders, and another pressed a heating pad to my forehead! Also, in one class, after Patty told the students that I had a sore throat, I woke up to find a little collection of cough drops and candies contributed by various students sitting in front of me. Sigh...as much trouble as my students can be sometimes, I really do love them. They are so adorable.

Patty and I went to the doctor together after school today, where they poked things up my nose and sprayed what I think was anesthetic down my throat and told me that I have "the flu," which is Taiwan English for "a cold." (not actually the flu!) Now I have medicine and am hopefully on my way to a quick recovery, because Patty is busy coming down with whatever I've got. To my mother: Patty says do not worry about me, because she will take good care of me. Patty is the same age as my mom, so she tends to feel responsible for me the way she is for her own two daughters.

I had an interesting experience on the bus ride home on Monday. I overheard some high school girls talking about me ("you talk to her!" "no, you do it!" etc.) and debating whether or not I would be able to speak Chinese. I heard one of them say "what about Taiwanese? Foreigners usually can't speak Taiwanese," after which point one of them finally came up to me and said hello...in Taiwanese. Which fortunately sounds enough like the Mandarin for me to understand, so I said "hi" back. She kept looking at me, and it was kind of awkward, and then she started asking me questions. At first they were the normal questions, like "what country are you from" and "what are you doing in Taiwan" and such like. Once we had established the basics, though, she started asking me strange things, like who my American idol was. At first I thought she meant American Idol, and I was really confused, and then she suggested maybe Rihanna so I knew it wasn't the uppercase Idol, but I still didn't really have an answer. There was another awkward period where she got really close to my face and stared at my eyes (dear heavens, they are blue! alert the press!). Then she saw my Peking University t-shirt and we got to talking about mainland China. I asked her if she had ever been to China, and she said no, but then she started spewing all this stuff about mainland Chinese people. I didn't understand a lot of it, but I could tell that it wasn't exactly favorable. Finally she ended up telling me that they were heixin, which literally means "black-heart." I was a little bit taken aback. Admittedly, it is a lot less likely that people are trying to rip you off in Taiwan than it is on the mainland, but that doesn't mean that all Chinese people are bad people! I started to say this, but before I could give much of a good response, we were at my bus stop. Oh well. I have to wonder if many Taiwanese people hold these kind of views, because I haven't encountered it with anyone else. Kind of intense, coming from a 15-year-old kid. Weird times.

And to top off this post, I think it's time for a serving of leftover turkey...it keeps being delicious!
I am thankful for "my mother"

...if that's really who she is.

I am thankful for my grandparent

...but I can't tell you which one!

Alien turkey, by Leon:


Strangely patriotic turkey from my crazy Tina (the Obama lover):


And one of my personal favorites:

Happy to Rebekah! Incoherent but cute. Although the nails are kind of creepy, let's not lie.

Here's a little panorama of my classroom...you can click on it to see a big one. It is pretty much plastered with hand turkeys on all available surfaces:

I am a lazy bum

The other reason that I haven't posted in a while is that there haven't been too many new and crazy things happening. This past week there was no English Village, so I only actually worked 3 of the past 7 days. The rest of the time I mostly did nothing...I got sick this week, so I spent a lot of time sleeping and blowing my nose and sitting around in my pajamas watching Pushing Daisies off the internet. Gered brought me soup and orange juice the day I was feeling really gross. He's a sweetheart.

I don't feel too bad about being lazy, because a) I am sick, and all the sleep really helped, and b) the 3 days that I did work this week were tiring enough! I am supposed to be teaching the English Angels to sing Christmas carols, and it's halfway hilarious and halfway just plain awful.
I made them sing by themselves if they weren't paying attention, which was fun. Let's be honest, though, the Little Angels did not get selected for their singing abilities. After one class of Decking the Halls in like seven different keys at once, my ears were about to fall off. I don't know how I'm going to do it for three more weeks. Slash I don't know how I'm going to stand teaching that class for the rest of the year; they are so disrespectful.

But you know who I love? My teacher classes! They are the cutest bunch of ladies ever. On Thanksgiving, I arrived into my last period teacher class to find that they had gotten tea and cake for everybody. When I asked what the occasion was, they said it was because it was Thanksgiving and they were thankful for the opportunity to be in our English class. Then they asked me to tell them all about American Thanksgiving, which was nice because while I gave all my classes an introduction to Thanksgiving, nobody had actually asked me about it. Teacher class is the best because we just talk about whatever comes up. We start with activities in the book, but we always get sidetracked, which is fine because we are still learning things. Like the word "sidetracked," for example. We also talk about lexical semantics a lot, which makes me feel like my college education was actually useful, so that's fun.

Oh, it's been so long since I posted that I didn't even write about our Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving in Taiwan was pretty good...the head of AIT-Kaohsiung hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for us and our co-teachers and other foreigners who were in town, and it was a good time. There was turkey and ham and mashed potatoes and green bean casserole and pumpkin pie and all of the traditional Thanksgiving food. I love pumpkin pie so very much, but it's only ever around at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Why??? I would make my own pumpkin pie at other times, if I weren't in the Land of No Ovens.

Anyway, Thanksgiving was about as good as it gets for not being at home, and because of the time difference, I got to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family as well! Thanks to the marvels of the Internet and Skype, I got to be virtually present at Porter Thanksgiving a little bit, which meant talking to relatives as well as participating in the traditional Thanksgiving game of Charades! There is a little bit of a delay when communicating over Skype, and the video is a little fuzzy/slow sometimes, so I wasn't a super-helpful guesser, but I did get to act some things out while the crew back at home did the guessing. Hooray for trans-continental Charades!

So it seems that Taiwanese winter has arrived...when the weather first got cooler, my kids all came into school bundled up in layers and down jackets, telling me "teacher, today is dongtian!" ('winter') I told them no, it's not winter yet, it's fall, but then the other night a cab driver told us that Taiwan mostly just has summer and winter, so maybe this is winter? It's 77 out right now, which is really nice, and I know that I can't complain that much because it's freezing at home right now BUT it does get cooler at night, and we don't have heat in our apartment. Consequently, although the outside weather is a lot warmer here than at home, my room gets pretty far below room temperature. Also I am cold-blooded. My bed just has one thin blanket-sheet-thing, so I've been wearing two layers of pajamas when my room gets down into the 50s at night. Picture this: polka-dotted pants underneath, tucked into my socks so they don't scrunch up in the night and leave my calves cold, with striped capri-length pants over them. Add two sweatshirts, and you have Rebekah's super-fashionable cold-weather pajama ensemble. I should probably just get another blanket.

Yesterday afternoon Gered and I went on a trip with my school to Guanyin Mountain. We walked up the mountain on a trail, rested a couple times on the way, then walked back down and had a celebratory dinner. The mountain was really pretty and scenic, and the place where we had dinner was cute until you went inside and experienced the wealth of Christmas lights and booming karaoke, a hallmark of any good Taiwanese festivity. We had a pretty decent dinner, although I really do not understand why people voluntarily eat kugua (bitter melon). I took a few pieces in spite of the unappetizing name, and regretted it with every bite. The excellence of our dinner was augmented by the melodious tunes of school administrators singing into what was apparently an Echo Mic turned up to 8 zillion, plus of course the fabulous presence of Principal Dragon. Originally we had been at the same table as Dragon, but Patty stole us away to another table because the administrator's table was going to be drinking and she thought we might be uncomfortable. Nevertheless, Dragon made his way over to our table, and despite my protestations, topped off my half-full cup of tea with Taiwan Beer. Delicious. Then he had a super conversation with Gered ("handsome boy!" as Dragon likes to call him), informing him that I would be staying in Taiwan after this year. Oh really. Also we learned that apparently in Taiwan, if you are openly dating, it means that you are going to get married. Geez, no pressure. It's a good thing that I am used to awkward situations.