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!