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.