Dragon Boat Festival

If you had neglected to mark it on your calendar, let me remind you that this Thursday is Dragon Boat Festival! On Dragon Boat Festival, people have dragon boat races and eat zongzi, a kind of triangular dumpling made of sticky rice and wrapped in bamboo leaves. In class this week, we had the students try to tell the story of the holiday's origin in English. I will let two of my star students from class 5-3 explain Dragon Boat Festival for you:

"Today is Dragon Boat Festival. A long time ago, Chu Yuan is a poet, because he has big stone jump into the river and commit suicide. Why is he commit suicide? He commit suicide because king don't like him Chu Yuan was so sad, he go to river, hug big stone, jump into the river, he gave dream to people, say "the fish is eating my body, help me," the people make rice dumplings and row a dragon boat, throw rice dumpling give fish eat but fish don't eat Chu Yuan body, people is so happy." by Stephanie

"A long time ago, have a man, his name is Chu Yuan and he is a poet. He tells emperor a advice, but emperor doesn't listen, Chu Yuan is very sad, he want to commit suicide and he holds a big stone jump into the river, but no body find Chu Yuan's body, So they row a boat and throw rice dumplings into the river, hope the fish don't eat Chu Yuan's body. They in memory of Chu Yuan, they decide a day as Dragon Boat Festival." by Bob

(Note: these stories are largely a product of the 8 bajillion vocab words we put up on the board; there wasn't anyone in any of my classes who already knew the words "poet" or "commit suicide")

Dragon Boat Festival has consumed a lot of my life recently, since a fair amount of my time has been devoted to practicing and competing in the Kaohsiung City dragon boat races on the Love River. Our team, Hamburger Breakfast, was a motley crew of Fulbrighters and Taiwanese friends (mostly recruited by Gered, notably including his host mother). The team name is an allusion to the common misconception in Taiwan that, besides being white and blonde and blue-eyed, all Americans also eat hamburgers all the time, including for breakfast.

Hamburger Breakfast was an underdog from the start; our initial time in practice was over 7 minutes, and you have to get under 6 just to escape disqualification. We thought that since we were competing in the foreign division, our competition wouldn't be very serious, but when we arrived at the first actual race on Monday evening, we noted that the other teams were all composed of large men and appeared to have obtained corporate sponsorships. Our team had no corporate sponsors, but we did have shirts with big yellow hamburger sunrises on them! We rowed frantically in the first race, and managed to lose by just a nose (a non-humiliating loss is its own kind of victory), coming in at 4:39. We came back on Tuesday with a new strategy and rowed in top form, our most excellently in-sync race yet. We managed to lose again, but we improved our time by 21 seconds! And most importantly, we looked good.

In practice:


Race day!


The actual race is at night, when it's cool, which means that we get to have an excellent light-up boat! Also on race night we discovered that the Love River is FULL OF JELLYFISH! So it was extra exciting.

East Coast Adventures, Round 2!

My apologies, I realize that this installment is long overdue! However, when things get busy and you only have a little time left to spend with the people around you, that has to take priority over writing the blog. Without further ado, I present to you: what we did several weeks ago!

Gered wanted to take a big trip with all of the Kaohsiung ETAs to go whitewater rafting on the East Coast of Taiwan, so we had all set aside a weekend for it a while before. On Friday morning, we trained our way down around the southern tip of Taiwan and up the East Rift Valley to Rueisuei. Rueisuei is primarily known for its hot springs, and we got in on the action by staying at a hot springs hotel. What I hadn't expected was that, due to mineral content in the water, the hot springs were ORANGE. And when you get out of them, so are your feet and knees and bathing suit and anything else that was touching the ground! But it's okay, because they are good for your health.


You can't see the orangeness of the water in the picture, but trust me.

Besides improving your health through exposure to orange water, there is really not that much to do in Rueisuei. In situations like these, we Fulbright scholars simply entertain ourselves by engaging in intellectual discourse.

...OR seeing how many people we can fit into the cabinet in our hotel room!

for some reason our two largest members were the first to attempt this


it worked better with the girls

After a busy night of such hijinks, we needed a good night's rest...especially because in the morning we got up to go whitewater rafting! Outfitted in faded life jackets and hilarious orange helmets, we eagerly plunged forward into what promised to be a thrilling and slightly dangerous adventure. However, it seemed that the elaborate warnings of danger on the river were more geared to the sensibilities of the Taiwanese (a surprising number of whom cannot swim), and in reality the rapids were fairly tame. The wettest parts of the whole trip were the water fights with neighboring rafts. But hey, at least we looked intrepid! Never mind that in the beginning we were so slow that a motorboat came and pushed us!



Despite multiple generous applications of sunscreen, I still managed to get a tan while rafting...but only on my knees! Take a look at how we are sitting on the raft and you may understand why.

After rafting, it was time to hop back on the train and go off to Taitung! Taitung is one of the major cities on the east coast of Taiwan. However, the east coast is so sparsely populated that "major city" pretty much means "sleepy little town." We arrived on a Saturday evening, and there was NObody about. The big night market wasn't even open. It was another very chill evening for the Fulbright folk.

The next morning, we decided to take advantage of our location in Taitung to hop on over to Green Island, a place most notorious for housing tons of prisoners during Taiwan's White Terror, when thousands of suspected Communists and political dissidents were arrested by the Kuomintang. Today, Green Island is also famous for its marine life and unique rock formations. We took a ferry over, intending to take a glass-bottom boat to see fish, but the boat times were either too early or too late for us to make it. Plan B was to rent cars and drive around the island to see the sights. This was a little bit tricky, since the first van we rented got about as far as the gas station, and then failed to start up again. The second van looked beat up, but at least it started without trouble. We got a little ways around the island, and then got out to take some pictures of giant rocks off the coast. Everybody piled out of the van and hurried off, leaving me and Kate behind in the parking area. I was trying to close the sliding door, but all of my efforts resulted in failure. I pulled and pushed from all different angles. "You're just going to pull and pull until the door falls off," Kate told me. Her words were prescient. About to give up, I gave the door one final big tug, and the top of the door came right off its hinges!



After we finished laughing, I got the door back on, but we never managed to close it. For the rest of the time, we just drove around the island with the side door open, taking turns sitting in the "danger seat." If nothing else, this was very convenient for taking unobstructed pictures of things we passed by!

We had an idea that we would visit an old prison while on Green Island (I'm pretty sure they aren't in use anymore), so when we came across a prison, we drove right in. The guards gave us a weird look, but let us in anyway. We drove around the side to look for parking, and found only a dead end. Going back the way we came, we asked the guards if there was a place to park. "This place isn't open to visitors," they told us. Whoops! I wonder why they let us in in the first place?

Well, we didn't get to take our glass bottom boat and we didn't get to visit any prisons (at least not on the inside!), but we did get our fill of scenic views of Green Island's coastline!

The big one on the right is known as "Sleeping Beauty"...the one on the left is supposed to be shaped like a dog or something, I forget

After our whirlwind tour around the island, we returned our extra-special rental cars (the car rental guy managed to close the door somehow...I suspect magic), got to-go frozen desserts, and hopped back on the ferry to Taitung, where we went straight to the train station and got our tired little selves back to Kaohsiung. Home again, home again, jiggety jig!

Funny Moments in Teaching

I have these two 6th grade boys who frequently come to my classroom during their break time. Johnny is skinny and polite and likes to come tell me funny little bits of English ("Teacher! Sports drink!") and borrow my microphone to make little announcements or sing. He also hangs around the gate after school and says goodbye to me when I leave. Jack is more of a troublemaker. I figure that they both like me because of the amount of time they spend visiting my classroom, but one day last week Jack was hassling Johnny and going "say it! say it!" and Johnny turned around and abruptly went "I love you!" It took all of my willpower not to burst into laughter, but it was really funny and adorable.

Also last week, one of the teachers in my teachers class asked me if I could come sing a song with her class. She teaches the 5th grade band class, who are my students, and I had seen the music for I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing in their notebooks, so I figured maybe she wanted me to help them with the pronunciation. On Monday I went to their rehearsal, and it turned out to be all of the band classes together! I asked if I should explain what the words in the song meant, and the teacher told me no. Well, should I just read it first? Nooo, sing it! I tried to turn the music stand towards the kids, but she turned it the other way and said that I had to face the audience.

It turns out that I wasn't just singing a song with the class, I had been conscripted to sing a song in their performance while they played their instruments! The performance is tomorrow afternoon, she told me, and you'll be singing with Jeforly. Surprise! Anyway, I have come to be fairly relaxed about this sort of thing, so today Jeforly and I sang a song for a whole bunch of students and it was pretty fun. I am already on TV at school, so I guess a singing career is just the next step on my road to Yang Ming stardom.

Kinmen: A Post of Gigantic Proportions!

This past weekend Gered and I took an adventure up to Kinmen! If you are not familiar with Kinmen, it is an island (two islands, really) that is right off the coast of mainland China, but that happens to belong to Taiwan. Because of this position, Kinmen has seen a ton of military action over the years, and was only opened to visitation in recent years. Due to this isolation as well as the insular nature of the place, they've preserved a lot of traditional culture that isn't so evident in the rest of Taiwan.

In booking our homestay in Kinmen, I had to make many phone calls to the same, slightly confusing lady who ran the place. When I told her there were two people coming, she immediately asked, "you and your boyfriend? Is he handsome?" Later, I put Patty on the phone to talk to her about some of the reservation details, and in the midst of the conversation I caught Patty responding, "yes, she's very cute! Really, very cute!" Patty failed in her attempt to get me a discount, but the lady said she would give us some presents when we got there. Obviously we were in for a special time, accomodation-wise.

We flew into Kinmen's little one-room airport Friday morning, rented a scooter, and grooved on off to our homestay. The place where we stayed, Shuietou Yaoyue, is a 300-year old traditional Fujian courtyard house that has been renovated to have modern bathrooms and whatnot. Check it out:

Everyone in Kinmen kept apologizing for their hot weather, but it was actually gorgeous - sunny and in the 70s all weekend

The whole posse: 5 guests, one Taiwanese grandma, and one granddaughter

Kinmen was all about juxtaposition: sleepy little villages with giant tanks lying around, colorful temples with camouflage bomb shelters built in, and of course, the shiny green basketball court in the middle of our neighborhood of 300-year-old buildings.

Driving past this never failed to make me smile.

We got taken out for an extra-beefy lunch on Friday: beef noodles (made with kaoliang!), cold sliced beef, beef dumplings, and some other kind of beef.


I kind of knew that we were getting ourselves into something by the phone conversations, but it turned out when we got to our homestay that we had essentially rented ourselves a Taiwanese grandmother for the weekend. Oy vey. Zhang Mama was super cute, but very intense! The first thing she did once we got back after lunch was to bring us a small bottle of kaoliang (Kinmen's specialty, a liquor distilled from sorghum) and some beef jerky (beef things are also a specialty of Kinmen, which is full of cows), and to hassle us until we tried them. As if I weren't already fully beefed.

One of the funny things about Kinmen was how much trouble we had getting used to the scale of the maps. We wanted to go to a place on the exact other side of the island, but it was already mid-afternoon, and everyone assured us that it was too far to attempt. Knowing that the Taiwanese concept of "far" differs significantly from the American one, we went for it anyway. It took like half an hour to get there, even with a lot of getting lost. A lot of roads weren't labeled, and what looked like a big road on the map often turned out to be, like, a path through someone's field in real life, so navigation was a little bit confusing. On the bright side, because Kinmen isn't very big, we accidentally ran into a lot of its tourist attractions on the way across the island.

As a big battleground between the PRC and ROC, Kinmen is full of military monuments and such:

Note the giant ROC sun on the ceiling


Anti-landing devices on the beach. Don't try to land a boat on the north shore of Kinmen, because you will get poked like crazy.


There is a pillbox out on the northeastern point where you can spy on the mainland, so naturally this was the first thing we went to do


Taken through the binoculars: A boat off the coast of Xiamen, China. If you look closely, you can make out people playing on the beach. Creepy...


Besides poking devices, many beaches in Kinmen are still full of mines...Danger Mines! I was under the impression that pretty much all mines are danger mines, but I suppose they felt the need to specify. (note: the Chinese on the sign reads "ground thunder!" Don't you think that's a good way to say mine?)

We followed up a military-flavored afternoon with a peaceful evening watching the sunset by Cih Lake. But there were still tanks there, because there are tanks in a lot of random places in Kinmen.

We noticed later that the sign said "No Climbing." Whoops.


It's kind of pretty


Sunset over Xiamen, the city across the water on the China side

In the evening we got some dinner and poked around downtown Jincheng, the biggest town in Kinmen. I hadn't planned to do anything but go to bed early in the evening, but Zhang Mama would not let us get out of socialization, so we sat in the courtyard with the other guests and let people try to feed us more. Zhang Mama had cooked up a giant plate of little clams that one of the other guests, Afa, had dug up at the beach that day. He had gotten a seriously impressive number of clams, prompting comment from Zhang Mama: "You are so great! How is it that you haven't found a wife yet?" In addition to clams, we had kaoliang made with Chinese medicine (ew), shrimp chips with squid ink, and a random little fruit called pipa. Blehhhh, so full, and early bedtime was a total failure.

On Saturday I awoke bright and way too early to a pounding on the door. It was Zhang Mama, calling "Good morning! Come out and get your breakfast! Aren't you hungry?" Ignoring the pounding only made it intensify. Ha ha ha. I wasn't really hungry but I dragged myself out to breakfast to avoid further hassling. Then it was back to sleep until a more civilized time, like 11 a.m.

Saturday for lunch we went to a restaurant where we ordered something that we weren't sure exactly what it was off the menu (we knew it was a kind of bird). It turned out to be ostrich. It also turned out that I don't particularly care for ostrich, but whatever.

We meant to take the ferry to Little Kinmen that day, but you can only take scooters on the ferry at certain times, and by the time we got going it was kind of too late. Instead, we went up to Beishan Village and wandered around checking out old houses. Because of its strategic location, a lot of businesspeople have lived in Kinmen throughout the years, and some Kinmen residents who made their fortunes abroad came back and built houses in a hybrid Western-Chinese style of architecture. A lot of these houses are empty now. Slash full of bullet holes:


A little secret garden inside an abandoned house


After some wandering, we made our way on to a nature-preserve-type area, where somebody had abandoned their pedal boat. I can't imagine why, because we had a lot of fun with it:


The Chinese characters for Kinmen look like this: 金門。Telephone booths in Kinmen look like this:

Can you spot the resemblance? Cute, no?

As far as I could tell, pretty much all restaurants in Kinmen were located in the one main town, but it turned out that there was also a little one down the road in our neighborhood. They were so excited to have us that they gave us complimentary mulberry juice (I was informed that it is "good for women." Don't know why, but Gered also enjoyed it) and some kind of cold fried fish. We weren't that hungry, but they were so nice that we had to eat it anyway.

Some kind of veggie, pumpkin noodles, random fish item, mulberry juice!

We accidentally saw more of the tourist attractions in my book on the way to dinner. Also we followed the signs to a place called "Half Moon Lake," which turned out to be a stagnant semicircular pool surrounded by an appliance graveyard. Classy.

Sunday was our last day in Kinmen, so we made the effort and roused ourselves early enough to catch the scooter ferry to Little Kinmen. The most famous thing to see on Little Kinmen is the giant tunnels that were drilled out during the war as a place for ships to hide.

I am even whiter than usual in this picture

There is a military theme all over Little Kinmen too:

Zhang Mama gave us a little booklet about things to do in Little Kinmen, but it a) was all in Chinese and b) had a really terrible and inaccurate map so we were kind of confused a lot of the time. What else is new. The one item that both of us agreed that we definitely wanted to find was the so-called "wind chicken."

An introduction to wind chickens, from the Little Kinmen tourist information booklet (translated inexpertly by me):

"In the past, Lieyu (Little Kinmen) and Kinmen had both been damaged by strong winds, so in Lieyu every village erected a wind chicken on top of the village gate. The public chicken was made of clay, and because of its white paint it was called "white chicken" or "wind chicken" by the villagers. The wind chicken could hold back the wind, hurt insects, and protect household peace. This mighty spirit guards the land of Lieyu in a magnificent manner."

Obviously, we would be missing out if we left Kinmen without having seen a wind chicken. There was one on the map in the booklet, but we couldn't find it, and when we asked someone if there was a wind chicken in the vicinity, he treated me like I was crazy. "A white chicken," I clarified. He told me there was one on the other side of the island, just as Gered spotted the local wind chicken that was right behind us! I was not terribly impressed:

That's it?? Come on!

Disappointed with the first wind chicken, we went off looking for the one on the other side of the island. It was located at a temple that everyone knew about, so we had a pretty easy time getting directions to the second wind chicken. It was a big improvement:

Now THAT is that I call a wind chicken!

This lovely piece of statuary was right outside the temple with the wind chicken:

With our chickens fully photographed, we felt pretty good about returning to big Kinmen on the next ferry.

That afternoon, we scooted off to the other side of Kinmen to look for an elusive bird called the blue-tailed bee-eater, if my memory serves me correctly. The one hitch in the plan was when the road we were taking over the mountains ended in a security checkpoint. Although the road continued through, the guard told us that we couldn't take a scooter in. Boo. While we were pondering what to do, a voice from behind called, "hey, foreigners!" and lo and behold, it was Paige of the Fulbright crew in Yilan, who had managed to come to the same security checkpoint on the same mountain road on the same faraway island on the same weekend as us. What are the odds?

We took an alternate route, but returned after a while without having spotted any bee-eaters, sadly. The one last thing on our list was to go to Maestro Wu's, a shop run by a guy who uses metal from all the shells that have been dropped on Kinmen over the years to make really awesome knives. Kinmen was shelled by the Allies during World War II (when Taiwan was a Japanese possession) as well as by the Communists during the Chinese civil war, so there is plenty of raw material.

I bought a cleaver for my mommy! It is pretty neato.

After knife-buying, we headed home to pack up so we could leave. We wanted to have a decent margin of time to return the scooter and get to the airport, but Zhang Mama felt that we were leaving far too early. "You're just trying to get rid of me! Let me take you out for some coffee. Come on, let's go."

As Zhang Mama marched us down the road with my arm firmly in her clutches, she spouted a stream of unanswerable questions my way: "When are you getting married? Soon, right? When will you come back to Kinmen? On your honeymoon? I bet next time when you come, you'll be bringing a little baby, right? Next time, bring the baby!" At the coffee shop, she bought us two cups of coffee and then disappeared. "I'll leave you two alone together." Like we hadn't spent any time together this weekend.

Finally, Zhang Mama deemed it an acceptable time to leave, and we scootered off, trailing behind our speed demon of a Taiwanese grandmother. What a weekend!

Dog Style

Living in Taiwan, I've come to be fairly unfazed when I come across dogs wearing clothing.



Even the stray dogs on the street wear clothing during the winter, usually old t-shirts or something that people put on them. However, if you are a really overachieving dog owner, you won't stop at dog clothing. There is only one way to make sure your pooch looks truly glorious:

LION DOG!

This is a moderately popular dog shaving style, right up there with only shaving the top of the dog so it looks like it's wearing pants. Oh, Taiwan.