Terrific Times in Taiwan

I Have a Dream

2009-10-23T00:54:00.004+08:00

Perhaps the rigors of ICLP have reduced the number of ridiculous adventures in my life, but there is one thing that has increased dramatically in number: naps. After a full morning of class followed by lunch, it is rather difficult to be mentally functional enough to do homework efficiently. For this reason, if you enter the ICLP lounge in the mid-afternoon, you are likely to find yourself facing this sort of situation:

(I'm on the left in the middle)

It's true, ICLP students are not only diligent scholars of the Chinese language, but also apparently champion nappers. Are the "couches" in the ICLP lounge comfortable? Ha! Not in the least, but we cannot be deterred. The unfortunate side effect of afternoon naps is that one has to stay up later to finish homework, necessitating a nap the next day as well. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a vicious cycle...just a sleepy and slightly inconvenient one. Also it opens one up to the possibility of unconscious photo-ops:

Will falling asleep with my textbooks improve my Chinese? It might be possible. This afternoon I apparently took a pretty solid nap at ICLP, because I had a very vivid dream. In the first part of the dream, I dreamt that I had a purple pool noodle that I set down on the sidewalk, and when I turned my back it disappeared and was replaced by weird old soggy pool noodles. But that part is not important. The rest of my dream not only featured several of my classmates, but also in the second part of the dream Sharon and I were walking together, and she used a specific grammatical pattern/vocab word combination that we learned in the last chapter ("感到不安“, which means "to feel uneasy"）. When I awoke I felt slightly silly for having so much ICLP on the brain, but also totally proud of myself for dreaming not only in Chinese, but in textbook sentence patterns! My teacher is going to be so impressed.

My Thrilling New Life

2009-10-14T23:18:00.003+08:00

What's new these days: ICLP is eating my life. I try to make room for story-generating adventures, but an unfortunately large of my adventuring time is now occupied. From Sunday evening until Friday afternoon I live in a Chinese haze, fueled more by coffee than sleep. Napping on the hard wicker "couches" in ICLP is a common occurrence, and not just for me. This says something about how tired we are, because those things are the least comfortable napping locations possible. Fan Laoshi, our head teacher, assures me that this is intentional.

But I do occasionally do things that are not either learning or procrastination! This past Saturday I went to Ximending (a night market) with some lovely ICLP ladies and we took crazy Japanese photo booth pictures and got them made into stickers!

I also am making progress in my quest to develop a more ridiculous wardrobe while living in Taiwan. Taiwan has such an abundance of silly clothes, and I need to wear them before I have to have a real job or anything, so it is an urgent mission! My best night market purchase this time around was a pair of black leggings with shiny silver nonsense words (like "theer" and "sbnug"!) written all over them.

Where will I wear these, and with what? I still have yet to figure it out.

During the week, the one other thing I do besides schoolwork is choir! I tried out for the TaiDa chorus a couple weeks back, and so far it has been pretty awesome. Everybody seems to be a sightreading ninja, which is neato. It's interesting on the language front as well, because I don't really know musical terms in Chinese. For instance, the word for "measure" sounds an awful lot like the word for "miss" (as in young woman), and at first when the teacher kept saying it I thought it was because she wanted to address the girls. "Now let's look at Miss 87!" she would say. Needless to say, I am figuring things out from context. Fun fact: although we mostly speak Chinese, everybody always refers to the voice parts in English: Bass, Tenor, Alto, and "Soap." Another fun fact: we are performing, among other things, a medley of Japanese cartoon theme songs. SO CUTE. I can't wait until we start learning dance moves!

There are 4 other foreign students in the choir, and last week one of the student leaders called us all to meet with him, informing us that we technically couldn't be in the performance because they sell tickets and we don't have work visas. He told the Asian-Americans that they could probably perform anyway without anyone noticing. Then he told me that maybe they could dye my hair black and pretend that I was half-Taiwanese. Mahaha...somehow I don't think that would be very plausible, no matter how black my hair was. However, the director of ICLP assured me that this visa rule couldn't possibly apply to me, so I probably won't get deported for singing in the concert. Here's hoping!

I'll leave you with the only other picture that I have taken so far, from a train bathroom on the High Speed Rail:

There are shavers in the can!!

(apologies to anyone who doesn't get the Uncle Brett reference)

Things Finally Get Started

2009-10-05T23:47:00.003+08:00

I thought I'd have a lot of free time before my program started, but as is often the way with free time, it managed to get filled up with who-knows-what. Right after moving into my apartment, I went down to Kaohsiung for a couple days to fetch the stuff that I left down there and visit old friends and students. I met some of the sweet new Kaohsiung ETAs, and even went to Yang Ming to introduce their new ETA and see my old coworkers and students. You wouldn't believe how much they can grow in just a month or two! (the students, not the coworkers) I had such a great time seeing old friends and new that I was rather sad to board the train back to Taipei at the end of it.

Back in Taipei, I spent a couple days helping out at Fulbright Orientation for this year's scholars and going out with some excellent new Fulbrighters at night. You can definitely say one thing about Fulbrighters: they are never boring. After that orientation was over, I devoted a lot of time to just getting my life in order: doing laundry, finding nearby grocery stores, and other such exciting activities. And hanging out with Vicky's Taiwanese friend Eggbert, who magically knows all foreign students in Taipei! (his name alone merits a mention, I feel)

ICLP (International Chinese Language Program, if you were wondering) didn't even quasi-begin until the 17th, when I had my placement test. I had spent the night before trying to brush up on traditional characters, only to discover that the test had no writing component, plus they let me take it in simplified Chinese. I ran into a funny kind of situation the next day: it was my birthday, but I didn't really know anyone in the program too well yet. I ended up having a Very Fulbright Birthday, the highlight of which was when, having no candles to put on my cake, people held up 23 wiggling fingers for me to "blow out." Yay! Then we went to the night market and had delicious frozen desserts and I bought a $3 dress that has purple trees and large green and orange cats on it. Only in Taiwan!

Side note: Can you believe that I am 23? Five years ago I could have never imagined being that old, haha, but actually in the grand scheme of things it isn't very old at all. It's merely the oldest I've ever been.

The next week we had ICLP orientation...there were a lot of lectures on various things that I didn't pay a lot of attention to because the room where we had it was FREEZING. Air-conditioning is a delightful invention, but seriously: too much of a good thing. The other main thing I did that week was try to get on a morning-class-friendly sleep schedule, but let's not lie: this effort was a total failure. Also, I tried out (successfully) for the NTU Chorus! They are super-good, plus there is dancing, and I couldn't be happier about it. Especially since they let me switch from my original assignment to the soprano section. Yikes.

The one thing that they impressed upon us during ICLP orientation was how we were going to need to spend a bajillion hours a day studying and doing homework, plus I placed into a decently advanced level, so I was a little bit afraid of what the work would be like when class started. However, at this point I've been doing it for a week, and although it's been a little bit crazy and some nights are more sleepless than others, it seems to be manageable. Also, I am learning new stuff at a slightly ridiculous rate, which is awesome. I keep hearing people using vocab words in my actual life, which is really exciting. For example, we learned the word for mission or task, and that night I had an icebreaker activity for choir where we broke up into teams and went around playing games at different stations, and at every single station, they'd say, "all right, your task here is to...(whatever)" I was so psyched about that word. Then we played a bunch of fast-paced chanting games in Chinese to learn people's names, and I was really afraid but I totally held my own! Looks like I'll be working real hard this year, but at least I am learning all kinds of stuff. English is forbidden inside the ICLP building (well, the 2 floors of it that comprise ICLP), and everybody had to create their own punishment for if they get caught speaking it. Fun!

I Live in Taipei Now: Finding an Apartment

2009-10-05T23:16:00.003+08:00

Yes, I've been in Taipei for about a month so far. Here is the rundown of what has happened:

I arrived in Taipei August 27th and hit the ground running. Got into the airport at 6 am, was out by 7, at the hostel by 8, and out on the street to begin my apartment search by 9. Fortunately, during the week I was able to use the Fulbright office as a base of operations. They let me print out apartment listings and helped me interpret a lot of the Chinese, which was awesome. I spent mornings looking up new listings and making phone calls, then in the afternoon I'd go around to look at the places. Although the listings all seemed promising, it became apparent after looking at a few places that most of the reasonably-priced apartments were disgusting/tiny/in a basement/had windows that looked out onto walls, and anything nice was going to be a lot more expensive. Blah. After 3 days of searching, I finally made a decision, but when I called the place, it was already rented out. Frustrated and delirious with jet-lag, I made the rash decision to just call another place that I thought I remembered to be decent and tell them that I'd take it. They told me to come over right then to sign the lease.

When I arrived, the landlady wasn't there yet, so I had to wait outside for half an hour. When she finally got there and we went in, the room really wasn't as nice as I had remembered, and from half an hour of observing the outside of the building, I had realized that the window in the room didn't actually face the outdoors, just the hallway. Moreover, the landlady's two young sons had come down to the room and were jumping on the bed, hiding the keys to the drawers, and apparently breaking the blinds. It was a slightly stressful environment, and I just wanted to get the lease-signing over with and go home to sleep. I signed the lease in a hurry and handed over the first month's rent plus a deposit equivalent to 2 months' rent.

As soon as I got in the cab to go home, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake, and started to freak out. When I got to the hostel, I called the landlady and got her sister-in-law (I think) on the phone. On the verge of breakdown, I choked out that I realized that I couldn't live there, but I had already signed the lease and put down the deposit, and what was I going to do???? Don't cry, don't cry, she told me, just come back over and we'll fix it. I hopped back in another cab and headed back. The landlady met me at the door and asked why I was back. Apparently the sister-in-law hadn't told her anything (the two ladies seemed to be in the middle of some kind of disagreement), so I had to pour my sob story out all over again. The landlady was less inclined to be sympathetic. She offered me the rent money back, but not the deposit. My sister didn't know we had already signed the lease, she said. But she did! I told her on the phone! I replied. The landlady didn't look totally convinced. How old are you, she asked. I replied sheepishly, twenty-two...

Looking much less than pleased about the situation, the landlady finally took pity on me and let me have my deposit money back. Shaken, I headed back to the hostel, too exhausted to even think about where I would look the next day.

The next morning, I talked to my parents on Skype, and they talked me down a little bit and promised to put in a prayer request for me at church. My booking at the hostel had run out, so I moved to a different hostel and made a fresh start on my apartment search, printing out a bajillion new listings at 7-11 (Fulbright is closed on weekends). I checked my computer one last time before embarking on my new search, and noticed one more listing that looked promising. I scribbled it down and started making calls. When I called the agent for that listing, he told me he was there right then and how soon could I be there? Startled but intrigued, I headed over immediately.

When I walked into the apartment, I was immediately impressed by how much nicer it was than pretty much everything I had looked at so far. It was clean and spacious, with wood floors and big windows and a couple of balconies, the location was a short walk from my program at NTU, and the price was cheaper than anywhere else I had seen. Then I walked into a bedroom and found a piano! I exclaimed my surprise to the agent, who told me not to worry about the things that the landlords had left behind, they could be taken away. Actually, I play the piano, I told him. He told me he could ask the landlords, maybe they would leave it for me. It was beyond what I had dreamed. I left the apartment singing and practically skipping with glee, and although I looked at a couple more places that afternoon, none of them could compare. I called the agent back the next morning and went right over to sign the lease. The landlords turned out to be a sweet older couple who had to move out because they couldn't handle the stairs every day. We had a pleasant chat, and they told me I could keep the piano there if I liked. Score! One lease and a couple hundred bucks later, I had a home!

Next step: Making multiple trips to Ikea in my quest for beautiful curtains. It took me a couple tries to do the measuring correctly, but now I have the WORLD'S BEST CURTAINS, which, among other things, have mountain goats on them. LOVE. And I have a piano, and a room with my own balcony! Life is good.

Malaysia, in a hurry

2009-10-05T21:54:00.006+08:00

But first, a stop at the National Museum in Phnom Penh to see the treasures of Angkor that were stolen by looters and then given back to Cambodia by the Thailand! Special times.

Our second arrival in Malaysia was a special one: due to a delayed flight out of Phnom Penh, we were forced to make a harrowing (slash asthma-inducing...bleh) sprint through the Kuala Lumpur terminal to catch our flight to Kuala Besut. But we made it!

Traveling in style, the Asian way! Unfortunately the in-flight meal was VERY strongly seasoned, and the face mask essentially gives you your own personal breath-smelling chamber. Awesome. But it's better than getting H1N1!

We had made our hotel reservation in Kuala Besut on a pay phone in KL, and I had barely managed to give the guy my first name and flight time when the money ran out. Magically, they still managed to successfully retrieve us, and we spent a night in a hostel whose 2 main qualities were: 1) kittens running around everywhere and 2) chicken sheets!

In the morning, took a taxi to the jetty with another random guest from our hostel, a girl who had been traveling for months and had stopped wearing shoes completely. Interesting. A short boat ride later, we were at the beach on Pulau Perhentian Kecil, the idyll marred only by the fact that we were carrying large backpacks and had nowhere to stay. A little wandering around netted us a rather suspicious-looking tin-roofed hut for the eminently affordable price of $10/night. There was only electricity at night, and the shared toilets had no seats, plus there were lizards in the stalls. We looked elsewhere, but all the nice places were full. Oh well!

It looks nice outside

Our sketchy hut

Next plan of action: do nothing all day. And by "nothing" I mean "assiduously reapply sunscreen every 15 minutes and hide out under umbrellas." I had a realization upon our arrival that my skin was pretty much the exact same color as the sand, that is to say: insanely white. But unlike sand, skin is burnable!

Day 2: Snorkeling! Soooo many awesome fish, and I jumped off the top of a lighthouse into the water! (probably about equivalent to jumping off my 4th-floor balcony, and definitely the farthest I've ever fallen) Unfortunately, we didn't discover until afterwards that you could buy underwater cameras. Sorry. Night: go out, make friends with a couple of British guys who ask us to explain the American fraternity system to them. The more we try to explain, the less they believe us. Fun times.

Day 3: Despite choppy weather, rent a kayak to try to do some independent snorkeling. Get around the first point before deciding to give it up. After a strenuous row back, run into problems getting the kayak out of the water. Breaking waves near the shore fill the kayak with water and sand, making it too heavy to get out, but the force of the waves coming in to shore makes it difficult to get it back out in the water either. Vicky goes to get help from the man who rented it to us, but he is nowhere to be found. After much struggling, finally manage to get kayak back in the water and turn it upside down to get all the sand and water out. Ditch kayak and decide to go snorkeling on our own beach. Evening: go back to the place where we've been having breakfast every day (and trying unsuccessfully to move into) to pay back the 50 cents we were short at breakfast. They invite us to have dinner with the staff. Discover that Malaysian island dinner consists mainly of whole fish of various sizes and is meant to be eaten with one's hands. Being as Vicky is vegetarian, I tackle the whole-fish-eating by myself. I was suspicious, but it was delicious! Stay and watch a movie with the staff. We are totally BFF.

Day 4: Early boat back to the mainland, share a taxi to the airport with some other random foreigners.

Goodbye, hut

At airport, the only place open for breakfast is KFC. Here are their only vegetarian offerings:

Fries and ice cream: the breakfast of (vegetarian) champions.

Fun fact: Malaysia has more candy stores per capita than any other country!*

*Okay, I made up this statistic, but there is NO WAY it is not true, because you can't throw a rock in Malaysia without hitting a candy store. THEY ARE EVERYWHERE. The airport alone had like 3 of them. My feeling is that they should change the national slogan to "Malaysia: Land of Candy!"

Flight to KL is actually shorter than the bus ride from the KL airport into town. Take monorail to hostel. Don't know why Kuala Lumpur has a monorail in addition to the subway lines. Just for fun, I guess. Make friends with some Swedes, walk to Little India for Indian food. Apparently Little India is mostly full of textile stores and not restaurants...what?? Go to Indian restaurant by hostel instead.

2 Fun Facts About Sweden That I Learned In Malaysia:

1) traditional Swedish high-school-graduation-day breakfast: strawberries and champagne

2) Ikea is actually pronounced "ee-KEE-ah" (the middle eeee is drawn out)

See what you can learn by traveling???

We were too lazy to go to the Petronas Towers (Taipei 101 is taller, anyway), but we did get to see this guy:

BTW, our KL Hostel (Bedz KL, in case you ever make a visit) was a totally sweet hostel, featuring the most NICEST CLEANEST MOST CIVILIZEDEST SHOWERS that we have experienced in this whole trip. GLORIOUS. Leave at an insanely early hour the next morning for airport.

Airport breakfast: seriously, who taught these people how to butter toast?

Spend most of flight back to Taipei watching movie previews, because on Air Asia in-flight movies themselves are not free. Saddest part: not getting to fly on the Raiders Plane!

This is an unusual feature for a plane

Annnnd that's all! Sorry for being a slowpoke. And for this slightly mixed-up post.

Genocide Day

2009-09-13T01:50:00.006+08:00

Catching a tuk-tuk early in the morning, we ride a few kilometers outside Phnom Penh to Choeung Ek, finally arriving at a tall white monument surrounded by rippling green grass. An Asian tour group poses perkily for a group picture in front of the monument, which as we approach it, reveals itself to be filled with shelves and shelves of human skulls. Nine thousand of them. The field around it ripples because it is pitted with mass graves. These are the killing fields.

It's quiet here, and a few other somber tourists meander through the fields. Matter-of-fact signs posted here and there tell of the horrors that happened here. "Mass Grave of 450." (unbelievably small) "Mass Grave of over 100 women and children, majority naked." "Killing Tree against which executioners beat children." We are told that the executioners sprinkled DDT over the mass graves, partly to cover the smell, and partly to kill any potential survivors. To save bullets, victims were beaten to death with shovels, or sometimes suffocated with plastic bags. How practical.

Wandering around the perimeter of the field, local children sing to us (specifically, Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls") and ask us for money, but I am not in the proper state of mind to be charmed. Our tuk-tuk driver tries to rip us off on the fare to the next place. I am used to people trying to shake me down for money while traveling in Asia, but it seems disrespectful to do it right here and right now. He wants us to pay extra to go to a different destination afterwards instead of back to our hotel, except the other destination is actually a much shorter drive than going back to the hotel. We refuse to pay on principle, returning stubbornly to our hotel and getting a different driver to take us to the next location: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, also known as S-21.

Before it became a museum, S-21 was a prison used by the Khmer Rouge. More horrifying is the fact that before that, it was a middle school. Asian schools are built quite differently than what we are used to, so to the Western eye, this place doesn't look very school-like. If I had come here a year earlier, this fact probably wouldn't have registered much. However, to a pair of Taiwanese elementary school teachers, the original purpose of this building is painfully clear. Walking through rooms of cramped cells, I notice the marks where a blackboard used to hang, and automatically picture rows of desks where now there are iron beds and shackles. Even the playground equipment has been transformed into tools for interrogation and torture. What was once a home for education was transformed into a place where the anti-intellectual Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured people for offenses like wearing glasses and speaking another language. The absolute completeness of this perversion amazes me.

Walking through the complex, we come upon a series of rooms filled entirely with faces. The Khmer Rouge were chillingly methodical about producing photo documentation of each prisoner that passed through here. Each picture is a portrait of certain death: of the thousands of people who passed through this prison, only 4 ever survived. In the walls and walls of pictures, all kinds of people are represented. There are wrinkled old men, young boys grinning defiantly into the camera, mothers holding babies. I find an entire wall filled with the faces of children, and my eyes begin to blur. Vicky articulated it best later on: when there are so many faces, sooner or later some of them are bound to start looking like people you know. Standing in front of that wall of children, I couldn't help but see in them the faces of my children in Kaohsiung, playing in the halls of a school just like this one.

Leaving the museum, my sadness was mixed with a sense of anger and indignation. The atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge were so extensive; how is it that nobody had ever told me about them before? I suppose members of older generations know more because they lived through it, but before going to Cambodia, all I knew were the names Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and that there had been some kind of genocide. I didn't know when, or why, or to what extent. I only knew the names because I had seen them somewhere or heard them offhand (Eddie Izzard does a little bit about Pol Pot); in years of history class we never really touched upon these things. I know we learned about that time period, because I've definitely studied the Vietnam War, which was at the same time. I feel so ignorant about Cambodia; was I just not paying attention? How come nobody ever brought up the fact that while we were trying to beat back communism in Vietnam, the Cambodians were busy slaughtering a third of their country's population right next door, in the name of communism no less? The genocide in Cambodia took 1.7 million lives, leaving the population decimated (and a whopping 70% female) and the countryside dotted with countless land mines, as well as around 20,000 mass graves. Children were brainwashed to become killers. People were executed indiscriminately, for all kinds of seemingly minor offenses. The question plagues me: how did it get so far? We learned about the Holocaust multiple times in school, and the motto "Never Again." Well, genocide happened again, and again, and still happens. How is this getting swept under the rug?

We were told that even in Cambodia, people aren't really being educated about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. At the museum, we ran into a group of Cambodian high schoolers, part of a new program to educate Cambodian youth about the atrocities of their nation's recent history. Aside from that, however, most visitors to these places are foreigners, and most of what the locals know about the Khmer Rouge era comes from stories they've heard. In contrast, however, Cambodia is completely plastered with references to its less recent past: bus companies, hostels, and the country's most popular beer all bear the name Angkor. I can understand why Cambodians are so quick to embrace their Angkorian heritage. It's not like the recent past has given them too much to be proud of.

Getting Back to Phnom Penh

2009-09-13T01:32:00.002+08:00

The night before we left Siem Reap, we had tried to get bus tickets to leave in the morning, but they were already closed by the time we got around to it. This just meant waking up extra early the next morning to see if we could snag some tickets in the short window between the ticket place opening and the bus departing (it was an early bus). Being extra fancy, this time we took the $9 bus! The only noticeable differences between the $5 and the $9 buses were that the $9 bus was full of Westerners, and had a hilarious on-board bathroom. It was down in the baggage compartment, and the room was only about 4 feet high and just big enough to squat in. Besides the tight fit, there was nothing to hold onto, so you just had to brace your legs against the wall and hope that the bus didn't do any abrupt braking! Good times.

In Phnom Penh, we got a hotel in a little nicer part of town than last time, and went off to see the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take pictures in these places, so you will just have to trust me when I say that they are pretty sweet, and in some places very very ornate. The Silver Pagoda is not silver on the outside, but the inside has a silver floor! Of course it is covered thoroughly with rugs so tourists don't step on it directly, which is a shame, because it would be a pretty amazing sight otherwise. Later in the day, we moseyed over to the Independence Monument, a striking structure that stands in front of a long grassy park. We spent hours there just hanging out and people-watching. At night, there were fireworks by the monument, and a horde of excited young people rode past on motorcycles cheering and celebrating. The reason for the celebration, which we actually learned from Chaa before leaving Siem Reap, is that UNESCO had ruled a temple on the border with Thailand to be a Cambodian possession. Booyah, Thailand!

(Another unrelated but interesting fact that we learned from Chaa: the guy at our hostel had told us that Angkor Wat is owned and operated by a Vietnamese company, and Cambodia only gets a smallish percentage of the profits. Chaa confirmed this when we asked him, but said that people don't mind, because the Cambodian government is so corrupt that giving them more of the profits wouldn't make much of a difference anyway. Ooch.)

Cambodia Continued

2009-09-06T22:47:00.011+08:00

After one very full day of many many temples, I was a little bit worried that I would get templed out. Fortunately, my worries were unfounded, because the Angkor temples turned out to be fabulously diverse! No temple sunrises for us on Day 2, but we did get up at a sufficiently bright and early 6 am to get on our way. This day took us farther afield, heading towards the far-off but reputed-to-be-impressive Banteay Srei. We took a brief and rather sleepy stop at another temple called Pre Rup on the way:

And then we were at Banteay Srei! Banteay Srei is built entirely out of stunning red rock, which was a sharp contrast from the gray temples of the day before. Its intricate carvings seemed to be quite well preserved, and there were few tourists. We like.

Awesome carvings!

Monkey guards!

Peekaboo

This picture is dedicated to Shana "Preserve Cultural Relics" Fung:

We escaped just as a giant group of Chinese tourists in matching hats arrived...

After seeing Banteay Srei, we stopped at the land mine museum, a small establishment run by a man named Aki Ra. Aki Ra was conscripted as a child soldier for the Khmer Rouge, where he planted numerous land mines. Later in life, he became a one-man force to rid Cambodia of land mines. Using the most decidedly unfancy of equipment, he singlehandedly removed thousands of land mines in the Cambodian countryside, created the land mine museum, and took in a number of children who had been victims of land mine accidents. Pretty much, this guy is the man. Unfortunately, he has his work cut out for him: although highly populated areas are now quite safe, many areas of rural Cambodia still haven't been cleared of land mines.

Moving on from the museum, we hopped back in the tuk-tuk and took off, only to be stopped shortly thereafter by a flat tire. It didn't take long to fix though, and I am pretty sure the fix cost our tuk-tuk driver 25 or 50 cents total. As cheap as things were for us in Cambodia, they are definitely even cheaper for Cambodians!

Fixed up, it was time to head off to Eastern Mebon:

And Ta Som:

And Neak Pean, a dry reservoir. They say that the reason the Angkor Empire expanded so far was their efficient water management system, and the reason for its collapse was expanding too far. Sounds pretty plausible to me, and these guys definitely had a lot of empty reservoirs hanging around:

At the next temple, Preah Khan, we had a longish road up to walk up to the temple. Just like at any other one of these temples, we were immediately assailed by small adorable Cambodian children trying to sell us trinkets. These children were persistent enough that they succeeded in distracting me so much that I walked straight into a tree branch. With my eye. And it was a prickery branch, too! Bleeding copiously from my eyelid, I fished around in my bag to find something to put on my wound. Amazingly, the children didn't miss a beat, and kept up their bracelet-selling spiel like nothing had ever happened. An amused Vicky caught the moment on film:

Once the eyelid-bleeding was under control, Preah Khan turned out to be a really lovely place, with interesting Grecian-looking structures that were unlike anything we had seen at the other temples:

Also, super-huge trees never stop being awesome

We finished all of our templing for the day by early afternoon, leaving plenty of time for crucial activities like lunch and napping. That night, on the recommendation of our adorable tuk-tuk driver Chaa, we went to a restaurant where they had an apsara dancing show during dinner. Apsaras are celestial dancers, and are heavily featured in temple carvings. Our apsaras seemed to be less of celestial beings and more of bored local teenagers, but it was interesting to watch anyway.

Unrelated to anything but nonetheless intriguing: we stopped at a little grocery store on our way home and discovered a product entitled "Instant Pink Nipple." Apparently it is a product for people who feel that their nipples are too dark and would like to make them pinker? Up to this point, I was unaware that there was much demand for such a product, but it exists, so I guess there must be...

(we got yelled at when we tried to take pictures, so I only have indistinct ones)

We still had one more day on our entrance pass to Angkor, so the next morning we grooved on out to the Roluos group of temples, which are older and smaller and not so frequented by tourists.

Preah Ko:

On the way up to the temple of Bakong, we noticed that men were lining the streets with colored flags, and there were strings of colored cloth hanging all along the road. As we were wondering why, a group of boys came through with a wagon carrying a large box. It was a funeral procession.

The temple itself:

When we emerged from Bakong, we found Chaa waiting for us with corn on the cob! Chaa was a really sweet guy, which definitely improved our Angkor Wat experience a lot, because we spent a pretty large amount of time with him every day.

After seeing the temple of Lolei (so small and unremarkable that I don't even have any pictures), we headed back into town. Interesting sight on the way: a couple of men carrying huge live pigs on the backs of their motorcycles! They were strapped on face-up, one pig per motorcycle, and were so remarkably docile that at first I thought they must be dead. Sadly we just caught a glimpse of it while we were moving on the road, and they had sped off before either of us could pull out a camera.

That afternoon, done with temples, Chaa took-took us to visit Artisans d'Angkor, an artisan cooperative where local people learn different artistic trades. We watched some sculptors and wood-carvers, browsed around their store, and then caught the bus off to their silk farm, where they produce, spin, and weave their own silk.

No longer in need of a tuk-tuk, it was time to say goodbye to our pal Chaa :(

It was really interesting to see silk go from the initial raw substance to fine, colorful threads being woven together on a loom:

Soooo shiny! And so expensive...

That evening, we bought random street foods composed of unknown substances (one of them looked like a muffin: it was not.) and poked around the local market, but mostly we slept, because the next morning we had to get up early to try to catch the bus back to Phnom Penh!

Cambodia...truly Ambodia?

2009-08-03T09:25:00.009+08:00

We arrived in Phnom Penh late in the afternoon, and took a tuk-tuk (a motorcycle with attached carriage) to the bus station area, where we found a hostel and, more importantly, a delicious Indian restaurant. That was pretty much all we got to experience in Phnom Penh the first time around though (it wasn't that phnomenal, really), because the next morning we were off on a bus to Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat!

The bus ride was supposedly 6 hours long, although we had heard that it was really about 5. We made many stops along the way, mostly for buying snacks and sitting around. Once we asked if there was a bathroom and they pointed us to a field. At some places the Cambodian passengers went to buy some sort of ugly fried bug snack, which we didn't try. After a solid seven hours, we finally arrived in Siem Reap. A mob of tuk-tuk drivers was already waiting to pounce on our bus as we pulled in. Fortunately, we had actually booked a place to stay in Siem Reap, so their driver was waiting with a sign reading "REBEKAH PORKER." Good enough. We escaped the madness and tuk-tukked into town. We did a little shopping but mostly just chilled and went to bed early, because the next day is...

Waking up to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat! In a special turn of events, Vicky's phone was still on Taiwan time, and we accidentally woke up at 3 instead of 4 (ugh), and managed to get all ready to go before realizing the error. An hour after our false start, we were off in the tuk-tuk, eating sandwiches and grooving off to Angkor Wat.

It seems that all of the tourists have heard about the sunrise thing, because Angkor Wat at 5:30 am is a surprisingly happening place. We actually managed to run into Nell, a Fulbright ETA from Yilan, who we didn't even know was in Cambodia!

Sunrise over the pool in front of Angkor Wat:

Even after thoroughly Angkoring our Wat, there were many temples left to be seen. Our next stop was the Angkor Thom complex.

Easily the most arresting place in Angkor Thom was Bayon, which is populated by scores of huge carved faces:

Our map told us that we would find the Terrace of the Elephants and the Terrace of the Leper King right next to each other. Oddly enough, this is the Terrace of the Leper King:

Doesn't look too leprous to me!

Another favorite was Ta Prohm, now famous for being featured in the film Tomb Raider. Restoring and preserving the Angkor temples has required beating back a lot of forest and vegetation, but at Ta Prohm, the forest still encroaches. Roots of giant trees push between the bricks, jeopardizing the structure, but at the same time making the temple that much more amazing.

These were some serious trees

At every temple, there were copious amounts of locals, particularly adorable children, trying to sell us things. ("hello, lady!") We rebuffed most of their efforts, but one time Vicky was actually considering a purchase, so we started discussing it in Chinese to not be too obvious. It didn't work too well though, because the saleslady just switched into Chinese! The linguistic abilities of the Cambodian vendors were truly impressive.

After so much templing in the morning, we were barely managing to maintain consciousness through lunch. Sometimes, even the most intrepid of travelers need to go back to the hostel and take a sweet, sweet nap. Later in the afternoon, our adorable tuk-tuk driver Chaa came to take us to Tonle Sap, the Great Lake of Cambodia. It was a long ride there, and we arrived to find that the boat tickets were $20 per person, which is straight up outrageous for Cambodia. (although interestingly, Cambodia uses US dollars for just about everything, and Cambodian riel are only used as small change) We left the ticket booth unhappily and without having purchased tickets, at which point the ticket guy followed us and tried to wheedle us into buying them. In the end, we got to $25 for the two of us together, still more than we were paying for our hotel room!

Although I'm sure our driver was well-intentioned, the lake trip turned out to be a bit of a scam. We were taken to a (floating) store, where we could purchase school supplies for the local children...at ridiculous rates like $5 for 10 pencils. Seriously, Cambodia? We were also taken to a crocodile farm, where a man decided that it would be a good idea to hand us a giant snake for a while! I was not expecting this.

Crocodiles!

Snake aside, I think I am pretty scary myself here

On the whole, the trip was still a ripoff, but we squeezed a decent amount of fun out of it, I think. However, unbeknownst to us, our evening was about to get AWESOME. We had a nice pizza dinner in town, and went for ice cream afterwards (there was a lot of ice cream on this trip) at a place called Swenson's. As we sat eating our sundaes, a huge group of people came in and sat at practically every other table in the place. They looked to be all Cambodian, except for one young white dude in an American flag t-shirt. It occurred to us that it was the 4th of July. The white guy got up and gave a little speech about the 4th of July, and then an older man in their party got up and gave a speech in Khmer. The first guy handed around American flags, and Vicky and I started to have the same thought: somebody ought to sing the national anthem right about now, and that somebody should be us. I can do the alto harmony, I volunteered. We practiced quietly at our table.

Finally, we got up and went to introduce ourselves. I gave the one guy a high five, and he explained that they were all on a mission trip, and in fact everyone in the group was Cambodian-American except him. They gave us little flags, and we mentioned that we would like to sing the national anthem. Once we launched into it, it didn't take long before everyone was singing. We didn't stick around for too long after that, but we generated enough goodwill that the older man even went to pay for our ice cream. This was not how I had envisioned my 4th of July in Cambodia...it was sooo much better.

Malaysia, Truly Asia

2009-07-06T17:17:00.002+08:00

I don't know about the US, but in Taiwan we have these commercials for Malaysian tourism that end with the slogan "Malaysia: Truly Asia". I never had any doubts about the Asianness of Malaysia (it's in the name, after all), so this struck me as a particularly silly slogan. However, any time something particularly special happened in Malaysia, the little song popped into my head: Malaysia, truly Asiaaaaaa.

Arriving in Malaysia was pretty special in itself. Apparently our flight was the inaugural flight of the Taipei-Kuala Lumpur route, so to celebrate this special occasion, the flight attendants had a little quiz show mid-flight, with free Air Asia vouchers to people who could answer questions correctly. Upon arrival, we were shunted into a press conference room, where we received "goody bags" that turned out to be full of Malaysian tourism information. Malaysia, truly Asiaaaa! I had my picture taken shaking hands with somebody importantish, and we headed off to find lodging.

Our lodging strategy in Kuala Lumpur was as follows: go to an area with a number of hostels and poke around. We successfully obtained a room for the low price of about $6. Cool.

In the morning, we headed off to see the Islamic Art Museum, which we heard was one of the only things actually worth going to in Kuala Lumpur. We arrived early, so we went for a walk and stopped to sit under a rain shelter. I felt it was quite thoughtful of Malaysia to provide such shelters in case of a sudden downpour, and in fact, we had only been seated for a short while when there was a downpour...of monkeys! A giant pack of monkeys streamed out of the bushes and pitter-patted all over the top of our (transparent) rain shelter. Malaysia, truly Asiaaaa!

The excitement of surprise monkeys put us in just the kind of excellent mood that is perfect for viewing a large amount of impressive Islamic art. The Islamic Art Museum had small scale models of the world's famous mosques, and all kinds of relics from different Muslim cultures. It was pretty awesome, but we had to be quick, because it was off to the airport to catch our flight to Phnom Penh! Don't worry, Malaysia, we'll be back in a week.

More Adventures!

2009-07-01T14:49:00.003+08:00

Teacher Rebekah has been a busy lady recently, cleaning up her stuff and saying goodbye and trying to prepare for what's next. I had many farewell lunches and late nights of hanging out with other Fulbrighters before they left, plus several days of going to school just to hang out with my students (I played a lot of dodgeball during this time). My teacher's dance class performed twice at large school events, and the students got to see me dance with about a pound of blue glitter in my hair. Pictures will have to come later, because I am posting this from a public computer at the airport! (public computers with free internet: the second best thing about Taoyuan International Airport, after the giant pink Hello Kitty-themed gate)

In about an hour I'll be on a plane to Kuala Lumpur, where fellow Fulbrighter Vicky and I will have one night before we zip off to Cambodia! We wanted to see Angkor Wat, and the cheapest flights to Cambodia were through Kuala Lumpur, so we'll have a week in Cambodia and then stop and check out Malaysia for a couple days on the way back. It should be fun, and I'm sure I'll have some ridiculous stories when we get back. I'll be back in the U.S. on July 15th!

I shall leave you with a story: Tuesday night, I was in the night market getting some last-minute stuff for our trip, when a lady came up and started talking to me. "Gina!" she said, "I know you! Do you remember me?" "My name's not Gina," I told her, but I did remember her, unfortunately. I had met this lady before while getting tea near home; she had asked me where I was from and then insisted that I was lying when I said I was American. I braced myself for another similar experience. "Gina!" she brayed. "You hair is curly!" I confirmed that this was true. "It's very yoogly!" she told me with a cackle. I processed this statement in disbelief. "Did you just tell me my hair is yoogly?" She repeated it. Fortunately, it's kind of hard to feel insulted by someone who is obviously more than a little crazy and can't even pronounce her insults correctly. After that, I just turned back to shopping intently and tried to ignore her until she went away...goodbye crazy lady, you will never hassle me a third time because I am leaving the country!

Dragon Boat Festival

2009-05-27T16:01:00.006+08:00

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!

2009-05-27T15:47:00.006+08:00

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

2009-05-26T23:20:00.004+08:00

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!

2009-05-12T22:09:00.011+08:00

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

2009-05-12T07:35:00.003+08:00

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.

Musical Hilarity

2009-04-29T21:46:00.004+08:00

This week is English Week at Yang Ming, which means that every morning there is a different English language competition, like storytelling, singing, reading aloud, drama, etc. As an English teacher, I have to help judge this thing, so I spent my entire morning today and yesterday judging the singing and drama competitions.

I was so psyched when I heard that I was going to judge the singing. It practically negated the fact that they made me come in on my day off to judge. The competition is from grades 1-6, but the vast majority of competitors in the singing competition were from grades 1 and 2 (older kids are too self-conscious I suppose). SO CUTE. A lot of them sang children's songs, but there were some really quality musical selections, like the girl who sang "I Will Follow Him" in angel wings and a halo, with accompanying dance moves. Partway through the song she switched to "we will follow him," and I realized that she wasn't singing the original, but rather the version from Sister Act, where the "him" is God and the "we" is "me and this chorus of nuns." Even better!

The musical selections also included a strange profusion of songs that referenced the American South. When you are a small Taiwanese child with sort of hazy English pronunciation, it's pretty hard to sell lines about how you were born in Louisiana, or how you come from Alabama with a banjo on your knee, or best of all, about how you wish the country roads would take you back to "West Madimba." (a number of kids picked this song, but nobody came remotely close to being able to say "Virginia" properly)

Fun Fact: As far as I can tell, everybody in Asia knows "Take Me Home, Country Roads." Any KTV (read: karaoke joint) worth its salt has this song available for selection, and I have a vivid memory of singing it with Japanese friends in a Beijing taxi at 3 in the morning.

Other highlights of the singing contest: the 6th grade boy who sang Shakira, the minuscule 2nd grade girl who belted all of our ears off, the 3rd grade girl who sang a medley of songs that she made herself, and the 14-person-strong group of 6th graders who performed "Doe, a Deer" with an elaborate Sound of Music-style dance routine and an instrumental ensemble backing them up. Wowser.

Only 4 groups entered the drama competition, but they were all pretty awesome. By far the most unusual was the group of 6th grade boys who performed Little Red Riding Hood: Little Red was a boy in a hooded red T-shirt and a grass skirt, Grandma was another boy in a shower cap, and the hunter who saved them from the wolf had a drawn-on beard and a machine gun. In a slightly nontraditional ending, the hunter left the wolf with a bomb in his hand and ran away. Shades of Wile E. Coyote!

Besides the extraordinary range of musical and dramatic performances that I witnessed this week at school, I also got to spend Tuesday night with some other Fulbrighters at a performance of Hairspray given by the English department of Tajen University. It's quite ambitious for a group of Taiwanese college students to put on a play in English that is so long and slang-filled, not to mention all of the singing and dancing, so I was pretty impressed by the fact that they managed to pull it off at all. The language was sometimes a little unintelligible, and they sang and danced about as well as you'd expect a bunch of English majors to, but it was a lot of fun. The part that I was most interested in, however, was that an all-Taiwanese cast was putting on a play that is all about racial inequality between whites and blacks, considering the negative attitude towards dark skin in Taiwan. In the end, however, the moral of the story was less "down with discrimination!" and more "yay, we put on a whole play in English!"

Kenting, Take 2

2009-04-19T15:17:00.002+08:00

Last weekend, Gered and I went on another trip to Kenting with Gered's host cousin, Ken, Ken's girlfriend, Yufen, and his other friend, Xiaobai. Xiaobai is an important friend because he has a (really sweet) car, so we all drove down there together. Once in Kenting, we got some lunch, which Ken and Xiaobai ordered. Much to the dismay of us Americans, this meant things like a big plate of intestines, or fried fish-egg patties. Mmmm, pass me some more of that delicious rice!

Post-lunch, we went to this place where you can buy coupons to get a discount on the myriad activities available in Kenting, mostly different kinds of water/boaty things. Ken and Xiaobai were running the show, so we just sat around and let them figure it out. I asked Ken what we were going to do that day, expecting that it would involve boats. He told me something that I didn't understand, but Xiaobai helpfully stepped in to explain in English, "we're going to the sexy man show!" Whatttttt. It turns out that apparently one of the big things to do in Kenting is go see performances by transvestites? Hm.

Anyway, it did end up that we were going to do some water sports in addition to the sexy man show, so that afternoon we got all suited up and headed down to the beach. I wasn't sure what was appropriate beachwear for Taiwan, but Yufen told me that she was just going to wear a bikini with shorts and a tank top over it. It turns out that this is pretty much the ladies' beach uniform of Taiwan. Almost every girl at the beach was wearing approximately this outfit (or more, like jeans and a T-shirt), and only a scandalous few were -gasp!- not wearing a tank top over their bathing suits. NOBODY was going without the shorts part of the outfit, however. Why have a cute bikini when nobody is going to see it? Most girls solved this in part by wearing white tank tops so at least you could see the color of their bathing suit, but still. Taiwan is randomly conservative about dress...girls will go out wearing the teeniest little shorts, but if you put your collarbone and shoulders on display? Scandal!

Anyway, my well-clothed self got to do several exciting water activities that day, all involving being pulled by a jetski on some large inflatable boat-thing. (In addition to life jackets, they give you helmets! That is how you know it's going to be fun) We did one that was just like tubing for a lot of people at once, where the boat had sides but not a front or back. Gered and I were on the back, so we were constantly hanging on for dear life and trying desperately not to slip off into the water. Then we did the banana boat, where they bring you out on a giant banana-shaped inflatable thing and then suddenly turn so it flips over. The last one was the roughest - it was another boat, one with a back and not too prone to tipping, but also extremely prone to bounciness, so if you didn't hold on to the handles with all your power, you would bounce right off into the ocean. By the time we were all finished, my arms were so completely drained of strength that they felt like giant wet noodles. Perfect time to play some volleyball against random beach dudes, aka totally get our butts kicked at volleyball!

After a little time to collapse at the hotel, we headed back out on the town, getting food on a stick for dinner and going to the sexy man show. Now, I can appreciate the humor of men dressed in women's clothing as much as the next person, but the sexy man show was just awkward. We felt quite relieved to be sitting in the back row, where we could not be embarrassingly danced on or pulled up as audience volunteers. Also, some mo-rons brought their children along, which was extra awkward. Does your 10-year-old really need to see men dancing around in lingerie? I think not. Anyway, it was a Kenting Experience. Kenting seems to have a lot of Thai influence, so I suppose ladyboys are just one more aspect of that.

In contrast with the activities of Saturday night, I spent Sunday morning going to church! Once I realized that our Kenting trip coincided with Easter weekend, I got the pastor at Kaohsiung's bilingual church to help me find a church to go to in Kenting. Kenting doesn't have any English-speaking churches, so the one I went to was a teeny little all-Chinese church in Hengchun (setting of Cape No. 7, the biggest movie in Taiwan!). I wrote my name and information down on the registration card, and so during the service they called my name by surprise. I guess I must have looked confused, because the pastor started asking this young guy to translate for me, and there was a lot of confusion, and then finally I piped up in Chinese, "I can speak Chinese!" and everyone clapped! It was cute. I understood the service pretty well, so it was good. I have been picking up a lot of Chinese vocab going to Taiwanese churches, like how to say things like "resurrection." The best part was when the pastor made us, in addition to clapping along to the song, raise our fists and go "huh!" after each phrase. Everybody was having a lot of fun.

We spent the rest of the day driving around and stopping to look at pretty places in Kenting, of which there are many. I was pretty wiped out from all of the boat stuff the day before, so I spent almost all of the time sleeping in the car, only to be prodded out when we arrived at some new scenic spot. We also went to see this natural flame, where a vent of natural gas had been lit, providing a constant small fire in the ground. Apparently people go there to make popcorn, but unfortunately we hadn't brought any.

I was pretty glad to go home at the end because I was soooo tired (my arms were not fully functional for several days), but in general I would count this trip to Kenting as a pretty good one, considering that it did not end with extreme sickness and hospitalization. Yay!

Alishan!

2009-04-04T11:27:00.006+08:00

Alishan (shan means mountain in Chinese) is one of the most well-known tourist destinations in Taiwan. According to Patty, going to Alishan is a must-do for foreign tourists. Since I have a year in Taiwan, I felt I would be remiss if I did not get to Alishan at some point. That point was last weekend, which also happened to be during Alishan's high season, when its famous cherry trees are blooming.

I woke up at an unnaturally early hour on Friday, but still managed to be late enough that we just barely caught the 7 am train out of Kaohsiung to Chiayi. Since we were going during the busy season, all of the hotel rooms in Alishan proper were booked up, so our destination was a small town called Rueili, still in the Alishan National Scenic Area, but not so close to Alishan itself. I had intended to take a bus to Rueili, but the lady at the Chiayi bus station informed me that I could not do this because the road to Rueili was under construction and the bus couldn't go through. Super. I called our hotel and tried to convince them to pick us up at the next nearest bus station, but that turned out to be too far away. The hotel advised us to take the Alishan Forest Railway, but the tickets were sold out, and standing room on a little train for two hours didn't sound that great. Resourceful adventurers that we are, we opted for a third option: hire a van.

Now, my van-hiring experiences in mainland China were fairly lackluster, but at least if we had a van we could sit down, right? It turned out that the van we hired was actually the nicest van-for-hire that I have ever experienced in Asia, not that that's saying much, mainly that the seats were not falling off and I could still feel all of my appendages at the end of the ride. So off we went in our van, up and up and up on the road to Rueili. Chiayi and Alishan are at tremendously different altitudes, so the roads are all of the steep, winding mountain road variety. As if this weren't exciting enough, we had the added excitement of taking all kinds of extra random shortcuts (presumably to avoid the construction, but maybe just for fun). On the bright side, we got there about an hour faster than if we had taken the train. Neato!

When we arrived at the hotel in Rueili, I approached the desk, assuming that I should do the talking since I had made the reservation. Instead, the staff focused their attention on Vicky, the only Asian-American in our posse. Helloooo, racial profiling! Later I talked to the guy and told him that I was the one who he talked to on the phone, and he was like, no way! I am fairly sure that they thought Vicky was me. Ooch.

Our rooms were Japanese style, aka no beds, but we did have a little balcony where we chilled and ate lunch. After lunch, we wanted to go hiking, so the hotel boss-man offered to drive us to a place where we could hike. I thought this was a little bit funny (couldn't we just walk there, since that's the goal?), but it turned out to be a good call, since the roads were all extra-mountainous. Even without the walk there, the hike that we went on was extremely rigorous, with all kinds of steps going down the mountain and back up again. The trail was purported to have a bat cave and a waterfall, but the bat cave was really just a little overhang, and the waterfall was just a trickle. We were feeling kind of pooped, but Gered was convinced that there was a real waterfall somewhere up the trail, so he ventured on up quite a ways until he found it, then came back down, and then we all climbed up together until we were feeling REALLY pooped. But we saw some good waterfalls!

Craziest part of the hike: I went off the trail a little bit and climbed a stalk of bamboo, and out of nowhere there was an explosion! At first I thought I was getting shot at, but later we hypothesized that maybe someone had booby-trapped their bamboo. (there was some sort of no trespassing sign that I didn't notice until afterwards) WEIRD.

When we finally made it home, we enjoyed some dinner, followed by a hotel-run firefly tour, in which a large horde of people with flashlights trooped off to look for fireflies. After fireflies, there was tea, sweet potatoes, and a 9:30 bedtime. Tired day!!

One of the things that you just *have* to do in Alishan is get up early and see the sunrise from Jhushan. However, there were no hotels available anywhere near there, so we settled for getting up early to see the sunrise from wherever we could see it near our hotel. Unsurprisingly, the best place to see the sunrise is up the mountain, so it was a very uphill walk, taking us through some rather lovely tea plantations. We got confused and failed to find the spot where you are supposed to go to see the sunrise, but it was nice anyway.

Tea is grown on mountain slopes, so the best way to cultivate it is in little rows following the contour of the land:

This tea has people growing in it!

We got back to the hotel for a Chinese-style breakfast, of which we ate everything except the plate of pickled radishes, which we tried a little bit and found to be weird and not particularly breakfasty. Consequently, the owner of the hotel stopped by our table to tell us all about the pickled radishes and why it was a specialty of the region, made with local vinegar, yada yada yada, and we should not scorn them merely because they are "not like [our] hamburgers." Because of course in America, we traditionally eat hamburgers for breakfast, and we are unwilling to eat anything less American than that!

Hired another van to get to Alishan, which conveniently passed through Fencihu on the way, where our hotel was. We wanted to drop off some luggage, but unfortunately, Gered hadn't brought his travel guide with the hotel name in it, and I didn't actually remember which hotel it was. After a confused phone call to a likely-looking number in Gered's phone, it turned out that we were basically right outside the hotel. Cool.

Since it was cherry blossom season, Alishan was unsurprisingly jam-packed with tourists, although surprisingly lacking in actual cherry blossoms. Huh. There were a lot of very old and very tall trees, and overpriced, non-delicious lunch. Fortunately Alishan has both Starbucks AND 7-11, so we were able to get ice cream, yay! Bought some of Alishan's specialty items, including tea and peanuts covered with Alishan wasabi. Any wasabi peas you find in America are shamefully wimpy in comparison...these guys might make you cry a little bit, but they will clear your sinuses right up! I brought a bag back and have yet to find anyone except me who will eat them. Alishan also featured a posse of unhappy-looking aboriginal people doing traditional dances in traditional clothing (which for the men is rather scanty) in the chilly weather. Also apparently they could not round enough enough women to be in the dance group, because there was one dancer in female costume who was DEFINITELY a dude (and a truly unfortunate-looking lady), but at least appeared to be pretty happy about the dancing.

Alishan has a number of specialties: cherry blossoms, wasabi, tea, the Fencihu lunchbox, the sunrise on the mountain, the mist (yes, mist is a specialty in Taiwan), but most of all the Alishan Forest Railway. I caught my first glimpse of the Alishan Forest Railway in the video they showed on the plane as we made our descent into Taiwan, and the Taipei airport even had a small model Alishan Forest Railway that you could take a picture with. I decided right away that riding the Alishan Forest Railway was a must-do for my stay in Taiwan.

And here comes the train! Through the mist! Next to the blossoming trees! Three kinds of specialty in one picture!

I was sooo sleepy on the train (remember waking up at 5:30?), but Gered poked me and reminded me that I ought to stay awake after having looked forward to this for so long, so I held my eyelids open for the switchbacks down the mountain. It was pretty neat.

Fencihu was a chill little town...we got some dinner and ice cream spring rolls made by a cute little girl and went to ask around about buses back to Chiayi the next day. In the process, I accidentally made friends with a table of random dudes, who invite us to share some kaoliang (local Taiwanese liquor) with them. Dan and Vicky and I have little paper cups of kaoliang with these guys, and it turns out they are from Kaohsiung too! They are pretty funny, but they are chewing betel nut, which is gross, and one of them annoyingly refuses to believe that Vicky is really an American.

Back at the hotel, it turns out that we only have hand towels. Makes showering fun! Oh well, at least we can entertain ourselves with the giant karaoke screen!

On Sunday, we got a little breakfast and left early in the morning without ever having tried the famous Fencihu lunchbox (it has rice and vegetables and an egg and a chicken leg...I am not sure why it is so special). OH NO. We make mental notes not to ever tell any Taiwanese people that we went to Alishan without eating the Fencihu lunchbox, and happily groove back to Kaohsiung to go to Bagel Bagel instead.

Gettin' Cultured

2009-04-03T17:38:00.002+08:00

Kaohsiung has a bit of a reputation in Taiwan for being an uncultured backwater, so the city government is always trying to promote cultural activities in the hopes that perhaps more people will come to see Kaohsiung as a sweet and happenin' place to live as opposed to a dirty industrial hicktown. This is a slow process; even Patty, a Kaohsiung native, has told me that Kaohsiung "has no culture." Part of the attempt to fill this perceived culture void is the Kaohsiung Cultural Center, which is essentially a big park with a performance hall in the center, and which is conveniently located directly outside of my apartment.

Yesterday, the Cultural Center was a bustling hub of activity as people set up for a big ballet performance. The performance was inside, but outside the hall there were gajillions of chairs set up in rows, along with large screens upon which the performance was broadcast. In this way, even random passerby could have the chance to witness an impressive ballet performance, totally free. I love living next to the Cultural Center! But it's not just a home for the fine arts; the Kaohsiung Cultural Center plays host to a wide variety of activities on a daily basis.

Good Things to Do in the Cultural Center, as based on my observations:
-ride a bike
-rollerskate
-practice martial arts, whether individually or in a group
-dance in unison with a posse of Taiwanese ladies (morning only)
-go to the Saturday night art market (more of a craft fair, really)
-get a massage from the blind masseuses
-breakdance
-walk your small, probably clothed dog/cat/rabbit (note: cat on a leash = unhappy cat)
-yell in unison (and in a tuneful interval!) with another person for as long as you can...this is probably good for your qi or something, cuz some guys were doing it yesterday
-practice your trick bartending skillz, like juggling bottles

and of course, you can always:
-stand around slapping yourself

Seriously, a common activity here. Purportedly gets your qi flowing and burns those calories! Now who would dare say that we don't have any culture?

Silly Pictures

2009-03-25T23:31:00.007+08:00

You can buy all kinds of hilarious things in Taiwan. For example, I spotted a product called "F-cup Cookies" at a local drugstore...as far as I know, the US is relatively free of such bust-enhancing snacks. Night markets are also a good bet for ridiculous purchases, such as my beloved bagmonster:

It even says my name on it!

Dressing small animals in clothing is unfortunately but amusingly common in Taiwan.

Found this in a random clothing display on my way home from work. Jiggawhat, Taiwan???

You know it's an awesome place to stay when the floor numbers are just written on the wall in permanent marker

Hotel slippers are generally one-size-fits-all. Obviously they did not take my father into account.

We were on a ferry, and there were rocking waves and a motor providing nice white noise...

This is pretty cute but looks decidedly less comfortable

My favorite item on this menu is "true relative." (although let's be honest, pigeon belly and lumbar tendon look pretty good too) Better than that other restaurant we went to in Beijing that offered "slightly over-cooked balls"!

Sign next to a low doorway

Older women in Asia tend to wear a lot more sequins and rhinestones than American women of the same age. Apparently they also promote dairy products more, too.

Creative sleeping options on the subway

The Great Mosque of Xi'an apparently has a "Complainer"

Creating jobs in a Communist country: Why have a pole to hold up the end of the tape when you can have a person?

Sometimes in China there is no Western-style tolit, so you have to use the pedestal tolit

We felt an instinctive urge to gather at this place...can't say why, it must be something innate

Fact 1: Ghosts do not have knees, so if you make the threshold really high, they won't be able to get in your doorway.
Fact 2: Westerners do not have knees either - this was the rationale given to an emperor by a Western diplomat who wouldn't kowtow to him, and the reason for the phrase "foreign devils." Although as we can see, certain foreign devils are crafty enough to get through the door kneelessly.

Meets the soft love in the snow white world - light dependence this instantaneous eterna!

A group of Asian tourists gave us really funny looks while we were doing this at Taipei 101

Annnnnnd last but not least, this particular moment of ridiculous is brought to you by English Village:

p.s. - Gered does not really punch children, he is very nice and the kid wanted to stage a silly photo
p.p.s. - doesn't he look adorable in a suit? (slash holding a giant teddy bear)

Awwww

2009-03-18T16:52:00.002+08:00

In the West, there's a bit of a stereotype that Asian children are all quiet, obedient, and diligent workers. This is a lie. Sure, I have kids that are like that, but for every one of them, there is another kid who is loud, trouble-making, or just totally spaced out. Therefore, it is unsurprising that there are days when Teacher Rebekah runs out of patience with her classes. Recently, my co-teaching rotation through the other grades has caused me to miss some of my normal classes, and in some cases, my usual students presumed that I left because I was unhappy with them. In fact, Patty may or may not have actually told them in so many words to guilt-trip them into behaving.

My class 5-5 is usually pretty good, and has a lot of sweet and intelligent students, but recently they have been getting a little bit wild. I had to miss a session of their class last week to teach a 4th grade class, and I didn't think too much of it until the beginning of this week, when I found a little note addressed to me on Patty's desk. It was from a student in 5-5, and read as follows (with a fair amount of cross outs and whited-out bits):

Rebekah, I'm Michael! (5-5)
are you sad?

don't sad
, be happy!

Love You!

...And the o in "love" was a heart. SO CUTE. That filled my cuteness quota for the whole week, I think. In high school, Mr. Schmidt used to tell the Goonies, "As long as I have students like you, I'll never retire."* Kids like Michael are why I can go to work every day and attempt anew to wrangle hordes of adolescents into learning English without totally going crazy.

*He retired 3 years later. Apparently subsequent classes of history students were not awesome enough.

Deprivation

2009-03-14T11:07:00.002+08:00

If you're nerdy (which I am) and fairly observant of the date (which I'm not, but this is an exception), then you're aware that today is 3/14, a.k.a. Pi Day. To most observers of this particular holiday, it is a joyous occasion, full of digit recitation and consumption of circular desserts. In Taiwan, however, Pi Day is bittersweet, for although nothing can take away the endless digits of our favorite irrational number, the accompanying comestible is sadly quite scarce.

In America, we cherish our rights. The Right to Bear Arms, the Right to a Fair Trial, the Right to Remain Silent, and of course, the Right to Have Pie Whenever We Want. In New Jersey, we are proud to uphold this right through a multitude of 24-hour diners, dedicated to providing pie at all hours to citizens in need. In Taiwan, there are no 24-hour diners, and those of us not privileged enough to have an oven (only Western diplomats get ovens) or at least a Costco membership have sadly limited options for pie acquisition. T.G.I. Friday's and That Other Western Place That Somebody Told Me Has Pie But I Haven't Been There Yet probably have pie, but if you want a flavor other than apple you might be out of luck. For those of you who are in America today, please make sure to appreciate the availability of pie, as well as all of the other:

Foods that are difficult or impossible to get ahold of in Kaohsiung, Taiwan
-brownies
-authentic Western baked goods, in general
-avocados
-baby carrots
-anything resembling actual Mexican food
-sour cream
-cottage cheese (I LOVE COTTAGE CHEESE)
-in fact, real unprocessed cheese of any kind (except in upscale grocery stores)

as well as...
Foods that are theoretically plentiful but usually unsatisfactory
-cake (usually fluffy and flavor-free)
-whole grain bread (it's all the consistency of Wonder Bread...bleh)
-pizza (frequently topped with things like corn and fish, and often drizzled liberally with mayonnaise)
-coffee (usually 3-in-1 coffee, made from little packets of powder. I actually like it well enough, but it does not achieve the same effect as actual coffee)
-sandwiches (the Taiwanese Sandwich is triangular, with 3 pieces of crustless, flavorless white bread, dried pork shreds, processed cheese, egg, cucumber, and maybe ham. Totally ubiquitous, totally undesirable.)
-salad (often involves cabbage instead of lettuce, plus the only widely available salad dressings are Thousand Island and Straight-Up Mayonnaise)

In short, many staples of the American diet are either rare, nonexistent, or generally butchered in execution. Chew on that as you eat your pie.

The Things We Ate

2009-03-07T15:33:00.008+08:00

The first meal of the trip was actually Irish breakfast at the one pub/sports bar place that was open at 7 am for watching the Super Bowl. Here is how you would look if you were loopy from sleep deprivation and had just eaten a number of greasy things:

Eating noodles on a Hong Kong street corner. They have chunks of brined intestine in them, but Mom won't know that until later.

Chinese breakfast: youtiao (fried dough sticks) with soy milk for dipping

After visiting the giant Buddha on Lantau Island, we had a vegetarian lunch prepared by monks!

Tentacled things on a stick, and it looks like stomach in the background? (note: we didn't actually eat these, just took a picture)

A "boat" of squid balls: tasty pastry outside, bits of squid inside, topped with flakes of seaweed and, of course, mayonnaise.

Our first meal in Beijing! Don't remember what it was, only that it was delicious and abundant and there was an inSANE number of dumplings.

A chicken dish at the restaurant that our tour guide Dawson said was "not too fancy." Apparently something changed when Dawson was not paying attention.

Beef cooked with onions on a hot skillety thing

"Dragon-ball tea": you put a little ball into hot water, and it blooms!

Gered ordered "jujube juice" because it sounded interesting. It turned out that "jujube" is apparently code for "prune."

Our Peking duck, sliced at the table so you can watch!

Our amazing dinner at Quan Ju De, the famous Peking duck restaurant.

How to eat Peking duck: place some duck in the middle of the pancake. Add plum sauce, scallions, and a bit of lettuce. Roll the whole thing up and eat it.

I am a chopstick ninja!

Bimbo bread (red-bean flavor): the breakfast of champions! Particularly champions who need fuel for climbing the Great Wall!

A hearty post-Wall lunch. On the left you will see an egg-and-tomato dish that is pretty common in China, and made with plenty of sugar! Here we firmly believe that tomatoes are fruit, and therefore they are often prepared to be sweet.

Kebabs (aka chuanr) are a ubiquitous Beijing street food...here is Mom with some nice spicy chicken chuanr:

Miniature-banana chuanr: turned out to be kind of meh, but at least we tried it

Our hotel provided Western-style breakfast, aka they provide you raw eggs and your mother cooks them on the hot plate:

Outside the Summer Palace, eating jianbing, a thin eggy pancake with a fried thing, onions, and sauce inside. 很好吃！

A KFC egg tart with bits of something purple in it, I forget what

Xi'an street food: cake on a stick

Xinjiang food in Xi'an's Muslim Quarter: spicy lamb chuanr and naan

Assorted baozi

Preparing to eat pineapple rice at a Yunnan restaurant in Beijing

"Western breakfast" at Mom and Dad's hotel in Kaohsiung...sandwiches and chocolate cake?

When in Taiwan, you can't miss getting hot pot! Here I am poaching an egg in the broth where we just cooked up all our meat and vegetables. The egg collects all the bits of food that are left in the broth, making it extra delicious!

More "Western breakfast": chicken nuggets and French fries. Silly Taiwan.

Squid-on-a-stick in a Taipei night market.

Dad with a nosefruit a.k.a. bell fruit a.k.a. wax apple a.k.a. lianwu

My parents' last meal in Taiwan: MOS burger. Technically it is a Japanese chain, but it is alllll over Taiwan so I figure it's pretty authentic as far as things that Taiwanese people actually eat

Are you happy, Sarah Gorton?

Taipei in Pictures

2009-03-06T18:22:00.009+08:00

Entering Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall...pretty, no?

Wouldn't you want your memorial to include a wax sculpture of you working in your office? The correct answer is yes.

Taipei 101, tallest building in the world!! (for now)

The view from the top...Taipei is hazy

My father, tallest father in the world!!

Outside the National Palace Museum, home to all those historical relics that got spirited out of mainland China to Taiwan.

My favorite piece in the Palace Museum (and probably their favorite piece to publicize) was definitely the jadeite cabbage. I know it sounds silly, but up close it is pretty awesome.

Also up there in the Amazingly Realistic Food Carved out of Stone category is this sculpture (a.k.a. the Meat-Shaped Stone) that is seriously a dead ringer for a piece of fatty pork:

As a food, I think fatty pork is pretty gross, but this is cool anyway.

After not-quite-2 days in Taipei, the time finally came for my parents to start making their way home to the States, leaving me with a lot of blogs to write and a new semester of school on my hands, hence the slow progress of the former. Sorry.

Kaohsiung Love

2009-02-25T15:23:00.007+08:00

After a week of constant traveling and tourist activities, it was nice to be home in Kaohsiung, enjoying everyday Taiwanese life. My parents and I all spent the first morning here sleeping in and then doing some crucial loads of laundry. For my parents, this meant venturing off to Bobo Laundromat on their own and deciphering Taiwanese washing machines. I met them at the laundromat a bit later, and we went to grab lunch next to their hotel.

The menu at the place where we got lunch was mainly just a list of different kinds of noodles, without specifying what was on them. When I asked the lady what the noodles came with (vegetables, or meat, or what), she said "oh, vegetables, meat, everything." Huh. We ordered 3 random kinds and figured we would just try whatever it was. It turns out that the lady was not kidding. Not only did the noodles have the standard green leafy vegetables and little bits of meat, but there were also mushrooms and oysters and shrimp and squid and little octopi and something gross-tasting that turned out to be liver. Wow.

My very own mother, about to eat a small octopus

After lunch, we moseyed on up to the High Speed Rail station to buy our tickets to Taipei, then came back and took a bus to Yang Ming to meet up with Patty. This was good practice for Mom and Dad, who would be taking the same bus by themselves to get to school the next day. We met Patty at school, where she gave my parents presents: a Kit Kat and a rose made of bath salts for my mother, and Hello Kitty chocolates for my father. (You know how he loves that Hello Kitty!) We got some tea and had plenty of Patty-bonding before heading back to the area where I live, where Mom slept while Dad and I tried once more to get an electronic dictionary. Unfortunately we ran out of time, because we had to get down to Sizihwan Bay to meet the Ryans and Gered's host family for dinner. We ate delicious Thai food, and then went to see some fireworks down by the Love River (it's still Lantern Festival, so there are fireworks every night). There may have been fireworks in the shape of hearts. Nothing is too cute for Taiwan!

The next day, my parents came to Yang Ming to do a little Show and Tell-type thing with my classes. They brought in some pictures to pass around, like a picture of me in 5th grade, or a picture of our house in the snow. (Patty tells me the students think 5th-grade me looks like Hermione) Afterwards, the floor was opened for questions from the students. "Your father's hair is white, and your mother's hair is black, so why do you have yellow hair?" "Did Rebekah do anything funny when she was little?" (leading to the story about the time I painted myself yellow) One class ended in a giant free-for-all when the students decided that they all wanted my parents' autographs in the front of their English textbooks. Then, in true Taiwan fashion, we took a big group picture:

On the way to teachers' class, Mom and Dad accidentally got snagged by Dragon, who invited them into his office for tea. "Your parents! Very young! And very health!" he told me. Yes. My adult students were waiting outside the principal's office, too afraid of Dragon to come in, so I extracted my parents and we went to our normal, principal-free classroom. We still got in some Dragon bonding time, though, because after teachers' class, we went out to lunch with Dragon, Jeforly, and Patty. It was a time of excessive dumplings. Dad really enjoyed talking to Dragon, who is a pretty funny guy once you get past his incoherence.

Dumplings with my silly administration:

From left: Dragon, Jeforly, Me, Mom, Patty

After getting stuffed to the brim with dumplings, it was time to meet some of my Little Angels for a tour around the school. In the afternoon, Mom and Dad got to meet my extra-precocious band class, who used their second period of English class to perform some of their new pieces for us. There was one piece that they had never played all the way through, but they wanted to try for us. The teacher discouraged it, warning them that they were just asking to lose face, but they insisted, and they actually did a pretty good job. My band kids would put the UTS band to shame.

The last place to go was my second teachers' class, where in a show of real Taiwaneseness, several teachers presented various gifts to my parents. Presuming that my parents hadn't tried much Taiwanese food, one woman brought a basket of Taiwanese fruit (wax apples, guava, or zaozi, anyone?), and another brought a box of some kind of gelatin snacks. I think Dad had already reached his lifetime quota of gelatinous foods in Asia, but he tried some anyway. Nobody brought stinky tofu or anything made with internal organs, but they definitely considered it! The most curious present was a pair of Santa Claus cell phone charms made out of beads. How...seasonal.

That night, we went to hot pot and then a night market in an attempt to get the full Taiwanese Experience. Taiwanese markets are not as stressful and bargaining-intense as Chinese ones, but they are just as crowded and even more full of delicious snacks, which we were sadly too full of hot pot to try. You have to get hot pot when you are in Asia, because America is way too litigation-happy for restaurants where they serve you raw meat that you cook by yourself. Too bad, because it's pretty fun, plus most hot pot places are all-you-can-eat. Bonus!

Beijing, Take 2

2009-02-24T23:50:00.003+08:00

While Gered and his parents took a 28-hour train from Xi'an down to Guangzhou and then to Hong Kong, we opted to spend one more day in Beijing. We got in early in the morning...almost too early, because I was still in my PJs and quite unprepared to get off the train. We were probably the last ones off, and encountered a little difficulty when I couldn't find my ticket and they wouldn't let me past the gate out into the station. The lady was quite unforgiving, and told me I'd have to buy a new ticket for 400 kuai before they would let me out! I was sleepy and discouraged and just about to cry when I finally found the ticket folded up in my pocket. Whew. Unfortunately, all these delays meant that we were also just about the last ones to get in the taxi line.

This line was INSANE. Now I know that the Chinese government tried to train people to wait in lines politely for the Olympics, but there is no undoing a national bad habit so easily. The taxi line was cutthroat, with everybody trying to edge you out from different directions. One man waiting behind me was standing so close that he was pretty much just leaning on my back. Uncomfortable situation! Finally I turned around and snapped at him a little bit, and he backed off. This morning was not going in an extra fun way. We waited in that line foreeeeeever, but finally got a taxi and got back to our hotel.

The hotel was extra nice and let us into our room early, so we got to take showers and eat breakfast and everything was right with the world again. After a little rest and recuperation, we were off to the university district! I was on a mission to get an electronic Chinese-English dictionary, but after talking to a bunch of vendors, I discovered disappointingly that none of them include traditional characters anymore. LAME. It's funny how little mainland Chinese know about traditional characters (I think they still use them for some official/ceremonial stuff), whereas Taiwanese people seem to have at least a basic knowledge of simplified.

Since we were in the area, I took my parents around Bei Da, where we wandered around campus and my mom (of course) got a Bei Da sweatshirt. Then we headed back downtown, making a stop at Wal-Mart on the way. Sadly, we couldn't seem to find any Tasty Tuna Tidbits, so we just continued on to the Silk Market to pick up the clothes Dad and Mr. Ryan had gotten tailored. They had to fetch the clothes from somewhere, so in the meantime we went to the Pearl Market YET AGAIN, but I had to leave early to meet my friend Sarah (another U of R Fulbright, who lives in Beijing), leaving my parents to get back to the Silk Market and then home all by themselves. Go Mom and Dad!

I went to Houhai Lake to meet Sarah, and because it was the first day of Lantern Festival, everything was going nuts. I was surrounded on all sides by a constant, deafening barrage of fireworks, and everybody had come out to see them. I was worried that we wouldn't be able to find each other, but finally we did, and went off out of the war zone a little bit to a small Xinjiang restaurant. It was excellent to see Sarah, but she was like a magnet for Chinese dudes who want to make friends. Sketchy times. The owner of the restaurant was extra flirty, plus later a guy came up to our table and started talking to us a bunch, trying to get Sarah's number and asking us to come hang out. We finally weaseled our way out and went back to my hotel, where the staff brought all 4 of us complimentary tangyuan, a traditional holiday dessert that consists of chewy balls with various fillings in a thick soup. (in their uncooked form, they're those floury things that I kept seeing at the market in Xi'an) Yay Lantern Festival! Sarah and I watched some people set off sky lanterns (they just float up off into the air to who-knows-where), which seemed like a big fire hazard. I found out later that some big building in Beijing burned down during Lantern Festival. Whoops.

We went to bed as early as we could manage, but I was still extra loopy when I had to wake up at 5 the next morning to go to the airport. We flew back to Hong Kong, where we noodled around during a 5-hour layover. The best part of the layover was when we found a store in the airport selling (I kid you not) "fruity cutie wife cake." They wouldn't let us take a picture, though.

We were reunited with the Ryans for our flight back to Kaohsiung, plus fellow Fulbright Katie, who was returning from Poland and also happened to be on our plane. I took my parents to their fabulous hotel (In English: the Life Hotel and Resort. In Chinese: Las Vegas). How fabulous was it? Well for starters, their doorbell played a different Christmas song every time you press it. Now THAT is what I call fancy.

Xi'an: Wet and Warrioriffic!

2009-02-18T18:42:00.005+08:00

Early Saturday morning, we disembarked from our train and headed out into Xi'an. Outside the station there were some people waiting with signs to pick other people up, and a lot of people waiting for nobody in particular. With our extra-touristy vibe, we immediately attracted some guys who wanted us to pay 500 kuai to hire a car for the day. We bu yao and bu yonged them thoroughly ("don't want" and "don't need"), but eventually agreed to pay 20 kuai for them to take us all to the Ryan's hotel in a van. Getting to the van was an exciting time, as we steered our suitcases around numerous puddles and crossed a busy intersection in a haphazard and fairly diagonal fashion.

At the hotel, the driver hung around, hoping that we would still take him up on his offer. We could have taken taxis around all day with the kind of money they wanted, but when I told the guy so he lowered his offer, and eventually we settled on 300. Finding taxis on a rainy day is hard, anyway.

With a car hired, we were off on the long road outside the city to get to the famous terracotta warriors. We visited a factory where they made replica warriors, and also where we ran into this fearsome character:

At the terracotta warrior museum, we checked out a bunch of kind of random exhibits on the history of the museum before making it into the actual warrior pits. I had been there 2 years previous, and I could tell that there had been some further excavation, although they do it veeeery slowly.

The warriors are pretty amazing, especially if you think about how much effort goes into making just one terracotta warrior. First you make a hollow body out of coils and coils of clay layered on top of each other. Then you mold bits of clay onto the outside to look like a person, and sculpt each one with unique hairstyle and facial features, and with different dress according to rank. After that, the warriors can be fired in a giant oven and finally, painted. Repeat this process thousands and thousands of times, and presto, your burial grounds are ready! You've got about 2000 years of nice resting time before some jerks dig the place up.

We were feeling pretty hungry post-warriors, but it was rather chilly outside, and since it was the slow season for tourists, none of the restaurants had bothered to turn on their heat. We ended up at the one oasis of warmth, where the bathrooms are clean and the food is reliably decent: KFC. After luxuriating in a bathroom with toilet paper and functional hot water taps and soap and an awesome hand dryer, we enjoyed some traditional KFC food, plus hot egg tarts for all (not available at your US KFC!). KFC also has napkins, another feature that is not exactly a given in Chinese restaurants. We were loving it.

We spent so long warrioring and chilling in KFC that eventually our driver got impatient and came to look for us. When we were good and ready, we trucked on back into the city and headed for the Muslim Quarter. (Xi'an is home to a number of Hui people, a Muslim minority group)

My idea in the Muslim Quarter was to go to the Great Mosque, but it turns out that the way to the Great Mosque goes through a bustling Muslim market, so it took us kind of a long time to get there because we kept accidentally stopping and buying things. I obtained a colorful pashmina (the only thing I bargained for this whole trip that was actually for me), and my mom got, among other things, a foot-high terracotta warrior to put in the garden. Cute. There were a bunch of funny little floury-looking balls for sale, but I didn't know what they were, so I asked a vendor what they were made of. She responded with a startlingly vehement, "NO!" After some explanation I was told that the balls needed to be boiled before eating, but still, it's not like I was trying to eat one then and there!

We did get to the Great Mosque eventually, and it was nice and peaceful and picturesque. Although it's a tourist attraction, people still actually worship there, and we were quite impressed by how well the mosque and the local Muslim community had maintained through those extra-anti-religion days under Communist rule. A nice man at the mosque told me about the people who come to pray there, and afterwards, discovering I was American, proceeded to expound at length about his favorite NBA players. This guy knew about a bajillion times more about the NBA than I do. (Just like Taiwanese schoolchildren know more about American baseball than I do...oh well)

It was getting lateish and we had to catch a train back to Beijing that night, so we only made one more stop in the market: dinner. We had to take advantage of the authentic Muslim community to enjoy some traditional Xinjiang food: spicy lamb kebabs and naan. A delicious finale to our day in Xi'an.

From the Muslim Quarter, we hopped an extra-ghetto cab to the train station. The front passenger side door didn't seem to close properly, and when I pushed on it to prove to my parents that it was secure, it popped right open as we were driving. Whoops. At least I wore the seat belt, which was missing the part across the lap.

Unfortunately, we didn't luck out into getting our own compartment on the train back. Dad was in one compartment with some other family, and Mom and I were in the one next to him, along with a couple and their little 4-year-old daughter. It was awkward at first, but then I talked to the little girl a little bit, and then talked to her mom, and they were very nice. The father came in and tried to talk to Dad in Chinese, but I informed him it was useless. "Your father's mustache is very beautiful," he told me. I passed the message on.

Summer Palace and all kinds of shopping

2009-02-15T21:25:00.006+08:00

On Friday morning we tested our expertise at Beijing public transport by taking the subway and a bus to get to the Summer Palace, which is a bit of a ways outside of central Beijing. Once again, we barely had to try to find a tour guide to hire. The guide in question today was a nice little guy named (this is his English name, mind you) Jonvey, who was nice but didn't have nearly as good English as our beloved Dawson. Every time Jonvey was thinking of a difficultish word in English, he would squinch his eyes shut really tight like he was concentrating really hard before he could produce the word. Overall, I found the Summer Palace to be kind of whatever (having been to the Forbidden City 2 days earlier, where there are a lot more entertaining stories about eunuchs and whatnot), but we wandered around and watched a little performance where bored-looking guys banged randomly on bells and some ladies with really long sleeves danced around a little bit and then two guys acted out a Peking opera scene about people fighting in the dark. All of the performers looked completely unenthused, which I suppose is what happens when you put on the same performance for a bunch of annoying tourists taking pictures multiple times every day.

Oh my sleeves are so long, that is about the only interesting thing about this performance

Other famous attractions at the Summer Palace include the Long Hall (which they are not lying about, it is really really long) and what Jonvey cutely called the "marbleboat." Alloneword. The marbleboat was commissioned by the Empress Cixi (aka Dragon Lady), and according to my Beijing guidebook it was some kind of tribute to the navy. Jonvey, however, told us that the marbleboat was symbolic of the government, because the water is like the people, and even though a marbleboat can't actually float on the water, the water can't sink or overturn it either.

The Long Hall...it is actually wayyyy longer than it looks in this picture

Look, a marbleboat!

Unrelated note: I just managed to run over my own toes with the wheels of the chair that I am currently sitting in. Having tried this, I do not recommend it to anyone else. I do these things so you don't have to.

Was there anything else interesting at the Summer Palace? I don't think so. We made our way out, kind of hungry and grumpy, and fixed things with a delicious lunch of jianbing, a fabulous street food that is a sort of egg-crepe combo with a crunchy fried thing in the middle and some onions and sauce...it is hard to describe, but suffice to say that they are delicious. Some random man by the jianbing stand talked to me a bunch and told me that it was the most famous jianbing in the city and all sorts of outlandish things, which I doubted, but it was exactly what we needed.

Tummies full, we braced ourselves for another long haul on public transportation to get to the Silk Street Market. The Silk Market is one of the biggest and most touristy markets in the city, so it requires fierce bargaining to keep from being fleeced by the vendors who are quite experienced with foreigners and know various languages. It's key to not look like you want anything too much, but we needed to be able to remark upon which things we liked so we could stop at that stall. Unfortunately, Silk Street vendors are liable to know what you are saying in any number of the languages we all knew, so our resident unusual-language man Gered provided us with what we figured would be a fairly safe code word: volo, which is Latin for "I want." We used it whenever anyone saw something they wanted to stop and buy, and I am pretty sure that nobody else understood, although one particularly desperate salesman told us that sure, his store carried volo, if we wanted some.

I am usually a fairly amiable and not terribly fierce bargainer, mostly using humor (and my natural charms) to get a price that is decent for both parties. However, I made an enemy at the Silk Market after our moms volo-ed some pretty silk jackets. The price I got her down to still seemed a bit overpriced to me, but it was obviously low enough to make her pretty angry. We had thought about buying something else from her shop, but I just wanted to get out of there before she set me on fire with her eyes or something. Dad got a pretty good price on his own for some fabulous custom-made dress shirts for his long-armed self. Good job, Bobo! Ask him about his "risk color" if you get a chance.

So many pretty fabrics! Volo!

After the Silk Market, we went off to the Pearl Market, which is also a tourist kind of place, but not nearly as crazy as the Silk Market. Having made friends with a vendor last time, we took the Ryans to meet him and bought some things with a much nicer kind of bargaining, eschewing some of the customary insanely-high first price offers and good-naturedly quibbling over small differences.

Laden with treasures, we hustled back to our hotel and packed them into suitcases, then left immediately for the train station. We came thisclose to a travel disaster when my parents' camera slipped out and got left in the cab, but thank heaven, our observant and honest Beijing cab driver found it and ran to return it to us, leaving before any of us could even offer him a monetary reward. My faith in humanity was further reinforced by some awesome gals at a restaurant inside the station who got us the promptest meal we received in China so we could have dinner and still catch our train.

Having only taken hard sleepers during my time in China, I was totally unprepared for what our train ride in soft sleeper class was like. In hard sleeper, there are 6 people in a compartment with no door and no extra space, where you sleep with your valuables under your head at night and go to the bathroom in a squatty potty that empties straight over the tracks where you have to hold a bar while going to the bathroom to keep from falling over from the vibration of the train. I honestly don't mind any of that stuff too much (except when the other people in your compartment sit and rhythmically hock up loogies and spit them into a bag while you are trying to sleep), but man oh man was soft sleeper an improvement. Each compartment has only 4 beds, plus a locking door, and the 4th bed in our compartment wasn't occupied, so it was just me and my parents. We each had a TV at the end of our beds (with personal headphones!), plus cute complementary slippers and decently-sized, comfortable beds. My dad says the train was his favorite of all our accommodations on the trip, and I have to agree that it was pretty awesome. We played cards for a little bit, but mostly we just lay in our beds and crashed.

Chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool on the Beijing-Xi'an train

In the morning: we attempt to do everything interesting in Xi'an in the course of a day. Not that unreasonable a goal, really.

Climbing the Great Wall

2009-02-11T22:19:00.002+08:00

In the process of looking for the bus to Simatai (the part of the Great Wall that we went to), we sort of incidentally ended up hiring a car of our own. These things happen. As a result, 7 am on Wednesday found us in a little mianbaoche (lit. bread car, because they are rather loaf-shaped), freezing our toes off in the insufficient heat and eating 24-hour-convenience-store breakfast (glutinous rice dumplings and red-bean Bimbo bread...say that phrase 5 times fast!).

By the time that we got to the Wall, I could still see that I had toes, but darned if I could feel them. However, there is nothing like climbing the Great Wall of China to put the feeling back into your toes! A lot of people who haven't been to the Wall (like my mom, before this trip) have the impression that it's a kind of place that you go up and just walk around on the top for a while. This is particularly untrue at Simatai, where the word of the day is "stairs." You climb up to arrive at the Wall, then you climb up to the top of the wall, and then from there it is just more and more stairs and slopes, up and up and up.

As we were working our way up to the wall, we came upon a group of Chinese people who looked like they were waiting for something. When we came through, they started talking to us a bit, and I could tell that they wanted to sell us things. However, none of them pushed the issue too much; they just walked with us and talked about other things. In the end, the little posse of Chinese ladies that we acquired climbed every inch of the Wall with us. They told us little tidbits of trivia, pointed out good spots to take pictures, and at particularly tricky parts they would hold our hands and urge us to be careful. When we split up (the moms wanted to go back down, the rest of us wanted to climb to the end), the ladies split up too. My mother, who is not particularly fond of heights, had a little Chinese lady holding her hand the whole way down, while I had another chatting with me the whole way up to the last tower. We had a really awesome faux pas moment when she asked me how long I was going to work in China. "Oh, no," I said. "Actually, I work in Tai-" I cut myself off when I realized that she knew full well that I lived in Taiwan. Everyone knows it's part of China! I apologized a little, but she just laughed.

Of course there is a price to pay for this extended hand-holding service and general companionship. Our mothers went through it first: the ladies stopped them before they got off the Wall and started trying to sell them picture books. This was fine, because the moms didn't have any money. "Talk to the men," they said. When the rest of us got to the bottom, we were swamped with little ladies trying to sell their books. "Your wife said you should buy one," they told my dad, and "make your father buy a book" to me. In the end, we caved and got one. There was a big guilt factor.

While my mom waited at the bottom with Gered's mom and had her picture taken by curious Chinese people, the four of us took a slightly ghetto but pretty fun zipline down. One long, slowpokey lunch later, we were back in our mianbaoche for the 3-hour ride back. We all kind of crashed when we got back to the hotel, but roused ourselves briefly later for a dinner of different kinds of food-on-a-stick. Weirdest one: teeny grilled bananas.

Coming up next: the Summer Palace, plus some intense shopping, China style. Give me a little time, though; the parents are still here and I am busy entertaining them (or something).

Back to Beijing!

2009-02-06T22:19:00.004+08:00

Disclaimer: Sadly there will be no pictures or video on this post just yet, but I promise I will put some up as soon as I get back to Taiwan!

So on Wednesday we left Hong Kong and arrived in a delightfully smoggy Beijing. I had forgotten a lot of the details of life in China, including the fact that many doorways have rows of plastic flaps hanging down to keep the air and dust from the street out. I was reminded when an escalator out of the airport took us down into a particularly flappy doorway, where our unprepared mothers were assaulted quite thoroughly by plastic flaps (not to suggest that this was humorous in any way! certainly not!). Readjusting to the thick Beijing accent was also a shock when I went to buy tickets to the train into the city. The Taiwanese accent is fairly light and easy to slip into, but Beijingers have a way of talking like their mouths are all full of marbles, or perhaps like they are all pirates. There is a lot of arrrr involved.

The first night went pretty smoothly; we only got minorly lost on the way home, and we found a delicious place to eat dinner that was full of families with hyper kids running around and taking pictures of the foreigners. The only rough patch was in the middle of the night, when we all woke up at 3:30 because the room was hot (me), too smoky to breathe (Mom), or just because of the delights of jetlag. I was up the rest of the night worrying that we would have to find a new hotel, but the situation seemed to improve the next day. Hen hao!

I thought I had misheard when they had told us that breakfast would be in the tiki bar, but it was the truth. Amidst tribal-type wall decorations, we enjoyed eggs (you have to cook them yourself though) and toast, which Gered's father spread with what he thought was peanut butter. It turned out to be thick thousand island dressing, but he ate it anyway in the spirit of adventure. Thousand island dressing: part of this complete breakfast!

Side note: speaking of things that are silly to eat, I forgot to mention: in Hong Kong there was one night that my parents and I got some noodles from a street stall for dinner. They offer a variety of things to put in the noodles, including "brine intestine." I figured my parents wouldn't want brine intestine, but before I could protest, they had added it, so I just kept my mouth shut. I didn't tell my mother that she had eaten intestine until today.

Back to Thursday: after a delicious, if island-heavy, breakfast, we made our way to Tiananmen Square. Our favorite feature of this particular location was the mausoleum of the illustrious Mao Zedong, where during the visiting hours of 8-noon, you can view the embalmed body of the late Chairman. Naturally, we had to do it.

Mao's mausoleum is a pretty high-security location, because if it were to be defiled in any kind of way, it would be a pretty giant loss of face for the Chinese government. At the security checkpoint the guard questioned my mother about her hand sanitizer gel, in the end forcing her to try some of it (on her hands, not tasting it or anything) to ensure that it wasn't dangerous. In addition, Gered had to take off his belt to get through the checkpoint, and because they are very efficient at moving people along in the ol' mausoleum, he was still buckling it when we went in to see the body. An security woman made all manner of alarmed noises at him. Perhaps they worry about streakers there?

By the way, if you were wondering how the Maoster is looking these days, the answer is surprisingly orange and kind of fake-looking. Not that we are passing any kind of judgement.

Coming out of Tiananmen Square, we started heading across the street towards the Forbidden City when we sort of accidentally acquired a friend. He was a nice young guy named Dawson, who it turned out was a student at a school of languages and tourism doing his semester of hands-on experience. His price was extra cheap, so we got a whole day's worth of Dawson telling us entertaining facts about historical locations. Here is what I got out of it:

Reasons to be glad you aren't an ancient resident of the Forbidden City:
-if you live in the FC, you are probably either a eunuch, a concubine, or the Emperor
-if you are a eunuch, well that kind of sucks in the first place
-plus they have to make sure you are extra-well eunuched (can't compete with the Emperor for the manliness!), so they cut off EVERYTHING that is at all relevant
-also, in order to be properly reincarnated, you have to have your whole body, so you must raise the funds to buy back your junk from the guy who cut it off before you die, pawn shop style

-if you are not a eunuch, you are probably a concubine (from age 13-17, selected in an American-Idol-style winnowing process), so if the signs are auspicious, you might have to sleep with the emperor, and a eunuch will carry you there naked (wrapped in a blanket) so you can't conceal weapons in your clothes

-if you don't sleep with the emperor, or if you do but you don't bear a male heir, then when the emperor dies, you have to be buried alive with him

-if you are neither a concubine or a eunuch, and you are in fact the emperor, then you have a posse of eunuchs following you around all the time bringing you naked ladies wrapped in blankets

-that doesn't sound so terrible, except the eunuchs have to write down everything that happens in your life, so they are going to stick around and take notes after the lady delivery (8:21 pm: emperor picked his nose. 8:23 pm: emperor looking a little sweaty)

fun fact: the place where the emperor goes to hang out with the concubines is called the “hall of mental cultivation.” Suuuuure.

even more fun fact: all of the doorways in the FC have a very high threshold to step over in order to keep out ghosts and vampires, who (as you all know) do not have knees. Once upon a time a European dignitary in China didn't want to bow to the emperor, so he told him that he couldn't do it because Westerners don't have knees. This is why Chinese people called Westerners “foreign devils,” apparently.

After forbidding the heck out of our city (and getting some lunch), we grooved on over to the Temple of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven is very historical and scenic and whatnot, but my favorite part was the public park outside, where a group of guys with traditional Chinese instruments were having a little impromptu performance. They played some Chinese songs, until just when we started to walk off, when they launched into that extremely traditional Chinese tune, “Jingle Bells.” I was very moved.

Later we went to a little tea shop, where we had a traditional Chinese tea ceremony in which a nice young woman told us exactly how to hold the cup in the proper traditional way, and how many sips to drink it in, etc. The dads were eying the bowls of peanuts on the table, but they held off, awaiting instructions of how to eat the peanuts in the proper ceremonial fashion. It turns out that the proper way to eat them is as follows: however you want.

We left the tea shop of expensive, non-bargainable teacups in favor of the eminently bargainable goods at Hongqiao Pearl Market. Dad made the mistake of attempting to walk through the particularly aggressive shoe section, where salesladies latched onto him like barnacles, despite all excuses. They seemed to be growing fond of him (he ended up passing through many times), calling out “hey! You're back!” and hassling him more each time they saw him coming. The Ryans had a similarly intense shoe saleslady experience, where salesladies forcibly tucked shoes under their arms, and even tried to give Gered a single shoe for free in a desperate ploy to suck him in. We finally left well-harassed, but with our wallets fairly intact. I think we'll go back later.

Post-Pearl Market, we headed off to Quan Ju De, one of the oldest and most famous Peking Duck joints in town. The chef brought our duck to the table and carved it right there, presenting us with a special card stating the identification number of our particular duck. We ate the duck in the traditional style, rolling it up in the special pancake with scallions and sweet sauce. Peking duck is by no means health food but hoo boy is it tasty! (P.S. - huge dinner at a famous and fancy restaurant in China? about US $17/person. Our most expensive meal by far.)

After dinner I had to go check on places to get a bus to the Simatai Great Wall, so Gered volunteered to accompany me. This left our four completely non-Chinese-speaking parents to get home by themselves using Beijing public transportation. It was an adventure, but we gave thorough directions, and they successfully got home without disaster. Good job Mom and Dad!

Too many things to write about now...Great Wall adventures coming later!

EVERYTHING

2009-02-03T21:57:00.003+08:00

The problem with the blog thing is that if my life gets too eventful, I have no time to write about it. Here is some of what I've done with my action-packed past two weeks:

I had a week between the end of school and leaving for Hong Kong. I figured it would all be very low-key, but having spare time meant being able to say yes to a number of silly invitations, so it was pretty busy. Gered and I could finally relax a bit when we got our Chinese visas that we had applied for kind of last-minute, and I did a bunch of preparations for the trip.

It also happens that Chinese New Year started during this time, so my life was full of festivities. I spent one morning with Gered's host family attending a traditional dance performance, and ended up with skin a color typically associated with certain delicious crustaceans. Besides that, it was pretty neat. We sat with a large group of extremely perky people in matching white track suits who were from some Tai Chi academy. The performance was at a military school, so some young men performed a traditional dragon dance. There was also dancing from some guys in giant crazy outfits with huge colored masks that looked kind of like Lego people. One guy danced up to us on the stage and gave us cookies from a basket. Some other men did a Taiwanese aboriginal dance, and then there were a number of performances from the Tai Chi people. The performers all had matching orange jackets, wide-legged purple pants, and orange sneakers. I would estimate that each individual was as perky as 3 or 4 aerobics instructors combined. They jumped around a lot and sang a song and chanted about having energy. There was also some singing and some lion dances (2 guys per lion, and they did really neat tricks but all my photos are on my computer back in Taiwan so you can't see them now), and one song where people came out dressed as trees and flowers and butterflies and hopped around.

I find that one of the large differences between Taiwan and America is the ridiculousness that people are willing to do in public and think nothing of it. If you made an American teenager dress up as a tree and dance around in front of a huge crowd waving leaves, they would be totally humiliated. However, this is Taiwan, and things that Americans find totally ridiculous are taken rather seriously. This is a country where people take lessons to improve their karaoke skills. Giant dancing flowers? Sure!

Actual Chinese New Year is a huge huge holiday to Taiwanese people, kind of like Christmas in America. Joyce, an intensely hospitable dean from Gered's school, invited us over for New Year's Eve because we "shouldn't be alone for Chinese New Year." They stuffed us thoroughly with hot pot, and Joyce gave us red envelopes with money in them. Traditionally adults give children red envelopes for the New Year, so I guess we still qualify as children to Joyce. We tried to give her children red envelopes we had brought, but Joyce was adamant that we should not (I had to do it secretly later). Then we all went to a temple and made an offering of ceremonial paper money (read: not real money), which we threw into a fire. We were home before midnight, so Gered and I went outside to see if we could spot some fireworks at midnight. There were a few, but the showing was kind of measly compared to the reports I hear from elsewhere.

If I did other exciting things in Kaohsiung, I can't remember them, because now I am in Hong Kong with my parents and Gered and his parents! Gered and I came like 5 days before my parents, because the ticket prices were so different that it was actually cheaper to stay 5 extra nights than to fly on the 1st. We spent the time getting our bearings, collecting a zillion maps, and figuring out what things to show the parents on their whirlwind tour of Hong Kong.

I picked Mom and Dad up at the airport on Sunday night, and as soon as we got back to the hostel we got right into the spirit of things by watching some TV show in which a man with stuck-on aluminum-foil eyebrows ran a game show where people played charades and rolled giant dice and got pies smashed in their faces. Welcome to Asia!

side note: my mommy brought me brownies! SO HAPPY.

Features of Hong Kong deemed worth seeing in the 2 days my parents are here:
-the sports bar we found that was playing the Super Bowl (at 7 am our time) although sadly WITHOUT COMMERCIALS OR HALFTIME SHOW...lame, but it was a good game! I have zero interest in pro sports, but I might kind of love Larry Fitzgerald now
-the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbor
-the Central-Mid-Levels escalator, longest escalator in the world! I think this was the thing my mom was the most psyched about, and maybe me too
-the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens, which we went to by accident because it was near the top of the long escalator and I hadn't really planned what we were going to do once we got to the top
-the smallest escalator I've ever seen (about 5 steps long), for contrast...HK has more escalators than any other city ever, I think
-the Symphony of Light, an exercise in cheesiness in which a bunch of prominent buildings in the Hong Kong skyline light up to music
-the Big Buddha on Lantau Island...not the biggest Buddha, but the largest seated outdoor metal Buddha, or something with a lot of qualifiers like that, plus you can get a tofu-intensive lunch prepared by monks
-Victoria Peak, which is really quite lovely and you can see the whole city from the top

I had gone to the Peak before my parents arrived with Billy and Shiela and Kate, but we opted for the far sweatier walking-up-the-mountain route instead of taking the tram. Since our paths coincided in Hong Kong, we also spent a day with them hanging out with Billy's uncle who lives in Hong Kong and driving around on his boss's boat, after which we went into Causeway Bay, where he pointed out all the places to eat and not eat. Billy's uncle is the man.

Other things we did before the parents got here:
-went to the Wetlands Park and looked at birds
-saw a tourist-trappy fishing village out by the Buddha, complete with more dried fish than I ever want to encounter again
-went to Lamma Island and got confused by the number of Westerners who actually live there (there was a restaurant called the Deli Lamma! no way a Chinese person made that up)
-got food poisoning, boo! (Gered only)
-tested out the Buddha and the light show to see if they were worth doing

Tomorrow we are off to Beijing! It's kind of crazy because Gered's parents just got into HK at 6 am this morning, so they just plowed through the day's sights and that's all for them in Hong Kong. Intense. Expect more adventures!

End of Semester Tidbits

2009-01-21T13:51:00.003+08:00

School is over! It was weird not to go on vacation in December, but finally it has arrived. I spent my last two days of school watching and then playing dodgeball with my students. Dodgeball in Taiwan has really crazy rules, and none of the English-speaking grown-ups at school actually knew all the rules, so I kind of got them in bits and pieces. As a result, there were a couple times in the first game where I was like yes, I totally got that kid out, but then no, it wasn't true, because I didn't raise the ball before I threw it. Confusion!

Once I got a handle on Taiwan Rules dodgeball, it was more fun. The only problem was that our classes would just play against whoever else was on that section of the court, which always turned out to be 6th graders. I hadn't realized until then just how giant the 6th graders are compared to my kids, so a lot of my students were really scared. 5-4, my troublemaker class, turned out to be pretty good at dodgeball, but a lot of the sweet little kids in 5-5 spent a great deal of time trying to hide behind me. One chubby little guy kept putting me in front of him and yelling "save me, teacher! save my life!" We were doomed, but it was fun anyway. I get paid for this!

I accidentally made a silly discovery in the process of meeting with my academic director to discuss scheduling for next semester. Patty had introduced him to me as John at the beginning of the year, but he corrected her and said that he had changed his name to Jeffrey because there were too many Johns. It wasn't until now that I discovered that he actually thinks his name is "Jeforly." It's even in his email address like that. I can't correct him without making him lose face, so I just have to let it be. Jeforly and Dragon, my school administration. Inspires a lot of confidence in our quality of education, don't you think? I think my parents might be going out to lunch with these jokers when they come, so that should be a good time.

Now that school is over, I have a week of free time before leaving for Hong Kong and China. It's a time to relax and prepare and try to adjust my sleep schedule for optimal traveling with jetlagged parents and maybe figure out what I'm going to do with my future in between. I'm psyched.

Kenting, plus a little bonus trip

2009-01-18T16:39:00.004+08:00

So Fulbright Taiwan had its midyear conference this past Wednesday-Friday, for which we all took a trip to Kenting. Kenting is on the southern tip of Taiwan, and is known for being a beautiful vacation spot. Local friends often ask if I have been to Kenting yet, and if you wander around by the train/bus station looking like a tourist, it's likely that you will quickly be approached by people asking you, "Kenting? Kenting? Kenting?" Kenting is hard to avoid. Yet somehow I had managed to do it until Wednesday.

After a long trip that involved an unusual amount of sitting in the bus but not going anywhere, we arrived at an aquarium. I did not take any pictures on this trip, but believe me when I tell you that a mental snapshot of beluga whales getting frisky is more than enough. Other aquarium features: lots of pretty fish, loud tour groups of Taiwanese high schoolers who said "hello" to us incessantly, and a completely gratuitous un-fish-related pirate-themed section (presumably for the kids), complete with a computer game where you play rock-paper-scissors with another virtual pirate and the loser has to do a round of Russian roulette. Totally appropriate for children!

Post-aquarium, we went off to our hotel. Fulbright being a classy bunch, they put us up in a nice hotel, complete with a buffet and Western food. If that doesn't spell food coma, I don't know what does. After recovering from dinner a little bit, Gered and I went to try to find the hotel hot tub, or as we say in Chinese, "jacuzzi." It turned out to be what I would classify as more of a merely-warm tub. Oh well. Post-warm-tub: a wild night of Fulbright bonding! But not too wild, because we all had to be up early to go to...

Kenting National Park! The highlight of this trip was actually the video they played for us to introduce the park, in which they may or may not have described Kenting as resembling a contented whale frolicking in the waves. There was also a botanical garden, featuring several kinds of plants that the tour guide tried to get us to taste, plus a "man-biting-dog tree," which if you touch it with a porous part of your skin, your skin will hurt for several days! Fabulous. The botanical garden also featured large tour groups of "hello"-ing Taiwanese high schoolers, to my great chagrin.

Lunch was normalish, except for the first dish they served us that day involved a pile of something that, if it was not actually fish, was at least fish-flavored, covered with a very generous amount of mayonnaise and topped with...you guessed it...rainbow sprinkles. But of course!

In the afternoon, we went to a bird-watching place and other people watched egrets. I opted to take a short nap instead, but I don't egret it. (don't groan; you love it!) We also went to the beach, but nobody had a swimsuit with them, so only a handful of people went swimming.

That night we had a large Chinese-style dinner with a zillion courses. Afterwards, we were sent into another room to socialize, where they gave us even more snacks. I was like a contented whale. Unfortunately, the next morning my stomach was decidedly discontented, and I ended up missing almost the entire day of actual conferencing on Friday in favor of a mix of throwing up and trying not to move so I wouldn't throw up again.

I wasn't the only one who was sick, so we were faced with a dilemma. We didn't feel like we could make the trip home that evening on a big jouncy bus full of people who probably didn't want to be barfed on, but Fulbright didn't like the idea of us staying another night with nobody to take care of us. The compromise was to hire cars to take us back to Kaohsiung, where, at the insistence of the program director, we would go to the hospital. Shana, who wasn't sick, kindly volunteered to come along and keep us company, cheering us up on our queasy journey.

After talking to Dani briefly, the doctor said it was probably food poisoning, and although he knew what the treatment should be, for some reason he couldn't treat us until he found out all the proper protocol for reporting food poisoning. AUGHHH. We spent a lot of time waiting around in the hospital while the doctors did who-knows-what, wishing we were recovering at home in bed instead of waiting in hard plastic hospital chairs. Amanda and Shana hustled around figuring out insurance things and talking to doctors and generally saving our lives, and finally, slowly, things got worked out. After some rather undignified examinations and a lot of debating between doctors, it was shots all around! By the time I actually got the medicine, I was feeling significantly better just because so much time had passed. I only needed one shot, but Dan's sickness earned him 3 IV bags. Dan is a champ.

It was more than 5 hours since the time we left the hotel, but finally I arrived home and retreated into my own nice warm bed to recuperate. With a solid 11 hours of sleep, I actually felt good enough to go to school the next day, although I had to settle for watching my kids play dodgeball instead of playing with them like I had said I would. I wish they had just let me go home and sleep my way to recovery in the first place, but I guess as a Fulbright I am supposed to be engaging in cultural exchange, and what is a better cultural experience than having to go to the hospital in another country? Yeah.

Fun with Stereotypes

2009-01-13T18:06:00.002+08:00

Since my classes have already taken their final exam, we are free to mess around a little for the last couple weeks of school. This week, that meant having a little cultural lesson about American diversity, woohoo! In a Powerpoint, I presented the students with pairs of pictures and asked them to guess which person was American and tell me why they thought so. The results were predictably misguided.

Not to say that all Taiwanese people look the same, but you can't really deny that they don't come in the same variety of hair/eye/skin colors that Americans do. Coming from this kind of environment, it is easy for students to assume that Americans also have one characteristic hair/eye/skin color. When asked why they thought a certain person looked more American than another, the most common response by FAR was, "her skin is whiter." Other frequent answers: she has blonde hair, her eyes are blue. I certainly don't conform to these stereotypes in any way, haha! Another amusing answer that I heard a couple times was, "because she is prettier." Taiwanese children think Americans are good-looking! Do I have to correct this stereotype too? In our next class we will look at pictures of ugly Americans! Or maybe I will just let it slide.

For people whose photos I showed to my class:
a) I hope you don't mind that I used your picture! I just took ones that I had on my computer.
b) How You Look, According to Taiwanese Children:
my father: very handsome, although a couple of kids asked if he was my grandfather
Luke, stroking his beard: like a monkey
Gina Bodoh: very beautiful, nice smile
Arjun: Taiwanese! Italian! Russian! Canadian! UTTER CONFUSION

Oh, children.

Anyway, in the end we all learned that Americans come in all kinds of colors, and an American who looks Taiwanese is no less American than one with blonde hair and blue eyes. Now, if only I could finagle a way to give this lesson to a certain few school administrators...cough coughDragoncough...

Life is Good

2009-01-05T20:14:00.008+08:00

This past weekend was a long one, which allows for a lot of adventures. Gered and I departed from Kaohsiung Wednesday afternoon for Taipei, where we started off the fun with a trek to our hostel. Lots of people come to Taipei for New Year's, so almost everything was booked up; hence, we ended up staying outside Taipei City in a hostel up on the side of a mountain. We went into the city to see the fireworks at Taipei 101 in the evening, along with apparently everyone else in Taiwan, so getting out of there after midnight was a little tricky.

By the time we finally got back to the hostel, it was probably 1:30 or 2 am-ish, and we were real ready to pass out. Except for the teensy little inconvenience that, say, the outer door to the building was locked and we didn't have a key for it and there wasn't a bell. We knocked, and pressed a button that didn't look like it did anything, and looked for a back door, but nothing was working. The lady who ran the hostel had told us that she lived across the street, so we went over to try to get her, but she didn't have a doorbell either, and nobody responded to our knocking or hollering. We were feeling pretty lame, and couldn't really think of what else to do, when finally the lady's sweet old husband came to our rescue, shuffling out in his pajamas and slippers to open the door for us. Whew!

The next day, we didn't really have a plan. We woke up late, and although the prospects for ferries to the Matsu Islands aren't that great in the winter, we poked off to Keelung anyway to ask, just in case. Sure enough, when we found the ferry, a nice guard informed us that it wasn't running because there was some weather. Oh well. The next option was to rent a car and drive down through the mountains, past Sun Moon Lake and into Yushan National Park, if time allowed. We took what ended up being a veeery slow train to Taoyuan, hoping to find car rental places by the airport.

My Rough Guide to Taiwan describes Taoyuan as "wholly unattractive," and I have to agree. Taoyuan features a normal train station, a high-speed rail station, and the Taoyuan airport, all of which are located conveniently really far away from each other. We took a bus to the airport, where our main achievement was to get a list of car rental locations from the lady at the car rental place. Then we went back to the train station area and stayed there for the night. The best feature of our hotel was the little toothpaste that they give you:

I guess Black Man Toothpaste was already taken.

On Friday morning, we went to try to rent a car. We thought it would be fine because Gered got an international driver's license before he came to Taiwan, except apparently after a certain period of time you're supposed to change it for a Taiwanese equivalent, so it turned out that we couldn't rent anything. Phooey. (Although the friendly man at the car rental suggested that we get a ride with the other foreigners who were renting a car there, because obviously they were our friends) Feeling discouraged, we poked off to the high speed rail station.

The next option was to go to Tainan and take a bus from there into Yushan National Park. This seemed doable, but when I called the only accessible hostel in Yushan to book a room, they were all full. Lame. Determined to do something with the long weekend, I looked around in my Rough Guide to Taiwan (I LOVE THIS BOOK) to see if we couldn't still go to Sun Moon Lake. Most of the hotels around Sun Moon Lake are pretty expensive, because a lot of tourists visit there, so I called up the one cheap hostel, where I muddled through an interaction with an extra-incoherent and slightly shouty man before he put someone more articulate on the line. Hooray, they had space! Then it was off to Taichung to catch a bus to the lake.

My experience in Taichung reminded me of my layover in Helsinki on my trip back home from India. I have an extremely positive impression of Finland, partially because I was just so relieved to be out of India. In the same way, Taichung seemed like an extra-marvelous place, having just come from frustrating Taoyuan. It was so green and nice and everything was convenient and everybody was extra-nice, actively helping us find the right bus and buy tickets and even recommending a place to get lunch. You go, Taichung! The bus was long and jouncy, but it was worth it, because check it out, Sun Moon Lake is BEAUTIFUL:

(you can click on it to make it big)

Once we arrived, a nice man named Diang from the hostel came to pick us up, bringing his 10-year-old sun. He warned us that there was nothing to eat at the hostel and nothing nearby, so we got some dinner to-go to bring back. To get to the hostel, we had to park on the side of the road and climb down a long and fairly slippery path down the side of a mountain. The hostel itself turned out to be more of a camping-style place (the actual name is Holy Love Camp, it was founded by an American priest), with one large room featuring a raised floor with a thin mattressy thing and a number of sleeping bags. Awesome.

As we were eating our dinner on the patio, Diang poked his head out of the building and called, "Libeika? Can you come speak English to someone on the phone?" The person on the other end turned out to be a Norwegian guy named Lars, looking for a place to stay. Fortunately for Lars there were some English-speaking guests around! Gered and I decided to go with Diang to pick up Lars so we could buy some tea in town. On the way there, we stopped by Diang's house and picked up his other kids. Well, it wasn't really on the way, because his house was on the other side of the mountain. Although Sun Moon Lake is traditionally the home of the Thao tribe of Taiwanese aboriginals, Diang and his family belong to the Bunun tribe, who I guess live on the other side of the mountain. The kids were very surprised to see foreigners, but they were quite friendly. Diang told me that the CD we were listening to in the car was their absolute favorite, and the kids had listened to it so much it was wearing out. The beloved CD? A mix consisting primarily of Celine Dion and Mariah Carey, with a dash of Backstreet Boys and something that might have been Hanson? Anyway, that is how I came to be riding in a car up a mountain with three Bunun children and a Norwegian, having a Celine Dion singalong. (Lars turned out to be quite an amiable fellow and a good sport for that sort of thing)

The oldest brother, Usung, was very shy, but definitely the biggest Celine Dion lover of the bunch. He sang a lot, and also took pictures obsessively.

Usung and Gered looking at pictures.

The middle child was Biling, who was extremely outgoing and seemed to be unable to go more than an hour or two without getting himself extremely dirty or wet or both.

Full of mischief, but how can you be mad at that face?

And the youngest is Lilu:

On Saturday I woke up and came downstairs to find these jokers and their father around the campfire. Biling told me an excited but unintelligible story ending in a "poong!" and Gered told me that they had made some kind of nut explode in the fire. Then a lady brought out some pieces of bamboo that had been filled with sticky rice and bits of meat and beans for breakfast. You roast them over the fire until the outside is dark, and then take the bamboo and whack it against a rock until it splits, at which point you can open and eat it. This was an entertaining food.

Later in the morning we explored the facilities a little more, playing with their bicycle-boats as well as the obligatory karaoke machine (of course there is a karaoke machine!), and playing some random volleyball-ish game with Lars. We were originally planning to go home Saturday afternoon, but we were having so much fun that we decided to stay another night. On Saturday afternoon, the kids had a basketball game to go to, Lars had to leave, and Gered and I wanted to go explore around the lake. They talked us into all going along to the basketball game, which was at their church. It turns out that there are a lot of Catholics in the Bunun community, but maybe not so many people who had seen foreigners before. When we came up the road, every head in the court turned to the three waiguoren. We watched basketball for a bit, then made our way back down into town.

Lars had to leave...goodbye Lars! As the only Norwegian I have ever met, you have done a nice job at giving me a favorable impression of Norwegians.

The next order of business was to explore around the lake. We had spotted what we thought was an electric bike rental place earlier, but upon closer inspection it was a scooter rental, which required an international driver's license. Although we had already determined that Gered's isn't particularly valid, the lady didn't really look at it, she just gave him the papers. When he was all set up, I casually asked if I could get a scooter too, prepared to weasel my way around the fact that I haven't got even an invalid international driver's license. Conveniently, she didn't even ask for so much as my name, just gave me a scooter.

When we started scooting, it was earlyish afternoon, and the weather was quite warm, so we weren't wearing any warm clothing. However, once we got into the shade plus the wind from the scooter, things got very cold. By the time we had circled the whole lake, we were so absolutely freezing that we didn't stop to take pictures anymore, just hightailed it for home as fast as we could go. When we got back into town, we got hot tea and food and tried to figure out how to get back without calling Diang to bother him. We stopped in at the police station and asked if any buses went our way, but they said no, nobody was going there, especially so late in the day, and there are no taxis in this town. Don't worry, the police said, we will help you find a car. What this actually means is that the policeman went out on the street and essentially hitchhiked for us, finding somebody who would give us a ride home for a little money. Thank you, Taiwanese police!

When we got back, there were no kids, but there were random fireworks! Other than that, it was a quiet night until the kids came back, after which we had a little party up in the big old room o'sleeping bags and played Michael Jackson for them on Gered's computer, which they liked a lot. Biling asked us tons of questions about all kinds of things (for example, do American Indians kill people? he was very interested in what aboriginal people were like in America), and the kids clamored to hear about our families and wanted to see pictures. I didn't have a picture of our family on me because I hadn't anticipated making friends, but we did watch the video of me doing YMCA at age 7, which happened to be on my flash drive, and which they ended up downloading onto their own computer, haha. Then we taught them the dance to YMCA, which seems to be a main component of my cultural exchange here in Taiwan.

On Sunday we did some canoeing and raced canoes, which somehow ended up in Usung and Biling drenching each other. Gered and I were going to walk into town to get lunch, but when we mentioned it to the kids they wanted to come too, and then Diang said he could just take us on the boat, so it ended up that everyone went. Diang went to visit his wife at work, and we took the kids to the traditional market and got a bunch of street food for everybody. Back at home, we spent the rest of the time playing random games. The silliest of these was probably the one where the kids would all run at this giant ball that they had and try to kick it from different directions, which almost always ended in everybody colliding and/or falling down, but they did it repeatedly nonetheless. We also played something like water bike polo in the lake with the giant ball and the bicycle boats. Then we played a little Calvinballish something, followed by a fairly organized game of baseball (I now know a number of baseball terms in Chinese). Gered had brought a small ball that said "Life is good" on it, which we used for baseball. Biling had asked me what the words were, and once I told him, he and his brothers started repeating it on their own. However, their favorite random phrase (and one that was repeated many times) was "because of love." Usung in particular kept blurting it out, but all of them said it at random times. I asked Usung if he knew what it meant, but he actually did, so I have no idea what possessed them to say it all the time. Still, they were a good set of catchphrases. "Life is good!" "Because of love!" It was a sad time when we had to get on the boat to leave, but I can't think of a better way I could have spent my weekend.

Adventures!

2008-12-31T14:06:00.003+08:00

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

2008-12-29T19:43:00.002+08:00

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...

2008-12-27T23:51:00.003+08:00

...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

2008-12-21T22:13:00.005+08:00

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

2008-12-18T22:07:00.007+08:00

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

2008-12-09T23:12:00.009+08:00

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

2008-12-07T12:18:00.002+08:00

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.

Fire Chickens!

2008-11-26T11:46:00.016+08:00

Since Thanksgiving is coming up, we devoted part of our class time this week to special Thanksgiving activities. Also, since Fulbright wanted photos of us co-teaching, I happen to have photo documentation of these activities for your enjoyment (photos by Jeffrey, the YMPS academic dean)!

First there was some 'splainin to do, being as Taiwanese children don't know much about Thanksgiving:

Me: "And what do Americans like to eat on Thanksgiving?" (hint hint, look at the giant picture behind me)
Students: "Chicken!"
Me: "No, but close..."
Students: "Huoji!"
Me: "Yes! How do you say that in English?"
The funny thing about turkey in Chinese is that the Chinese word for turkey, huoji, literally means "fire-chicken." There was always some smart kid in my class who knew the word "turkey," but I kind of prefer the literal translation myself.

Then we made hand turkeys! I showed them a paper one that I had made first, and then I demonstrated my hand turkey technique up on the board. Despite the fact that I had JUST shown them an actual completed hand turkey that I made, they were totally amazed when the hand-thing I was making on the board turned out to be a turkey. One class even applauded!

Then it was time for the kids to make their own hand turkeys. I was quite surprised by how meticulous they were about it! I mean, it took me about 5 seconds to trace my hand satisfactorily, but the students were very careful, and would erase and redo it if they thought their hand didn't look good enough.

Peter and Melody beginning their hand turkeys:

Side note: the boy on the left, Peter, has always been kind of a space cadet during class, and never seemed to understand what was going on. Then two weeks ago, he started coming to class wearing glasses. I asked him about it yesterday, and it turned out he is kind of blind without them. What was he doing before, I'd like to know! Perhaps these things are related in some way?

A lot of the kids were taking their time so much that they didn't quite finish their turkeys in class, which is a shame, because then I could have shown you the alien turkey or the turkey with mushrooms for wings. One girl came to visit our classroom after school, and examining my example turkey more carefully, asked Patty if in fact she hadn't been supposed to make all of the fingers into heads!

Although some kids made really crazy things, a lot of them modeled their turkeys pretty closely after my example turkey. Each student had to write "I am thankful for ____" above their hand turkey, and some of them just copied mine verbatim, which was silly because mine said "I am thankful for my students." One girl was just confused about what "students" meant, and after talking to her a little bit I helped her change it to say "I am thankful for my classmates." My other student Goofy (yes, that's his name, although he spells it "Gofy") was just being silly, and when I pointed out that he didn't have students, he changed it to this:

Thanks, Goofy.

A lot of the turkeys turned out pretty special, for various reasons:

Sometimes you just forget some of those middle letters.

It's a little hard to see, but if you look at the middle of the turkey, you will notice that this particular turkey is actually celebrating "Manksgiving," a lesser-known, more testosterone-fueled November holiday.

I think this is actually a pretty cool turkey, despite the excellent spelling of Thanksgiving.

My student Michael asked Patty how to say "grandmother" in English so he could make this sweet little guy. Michael is very small and super adorable!

Lightning turkey!

Extra-colorful turkey!

Extra-perfect suckup turkey! Haha, just kidding, Amy.

Mmmm all this turkey is making me tired. I'll leave you with a shot of my beloved Patty:

All these turkey shenanigans can be so perplexing! Must be time for a nap.

Assorted Pictures

2008-11-24T21:16:00.011+08:00

Some things that I wrote about before but didn't provide pictures of, plus some other random little things.

Baiyang Waterfall Trail in Taroko Gorge National Park:

Taking pictures in a photo booth with Maya and Taiwanese teenagers:

My fierce pirate Halloween costume! The best part was that the students kept asking me if my anchor tattoo was real. Actually I drew it myself with a sparkly blue gel pen, but close enough:

(it's an attractive face I'm making, I know)

Christmas started in early November at the coffee shop near my school:

My school courtyard on a nice day:

Giving a talk on American campus culture with super translator Eric! I am so official:

And just for fun...my student Sandy (center) came in one day wearing a striped shirt, striped pants, and striped socks, and I just had to take a picture:

And there's soooo much more cuteness where that came from...I love my students!

There's a lot of cuteness in my life

2008-11-23T15:50:00.008+08:00

I've been making more of an effort recently to get up and get to school early so I have some buffer time to prepare before my classes start. One pleasant side effect of this was that I discovered that there's a school dance competition that takes place first period (not all year long, just recently). The day I happened upon it was the day that all of the 2nd grade classes were competing against each other. Each class had its own little dance, and all of the students had costumes that they apparently had made themselves out of household materials. Behold:

Garbage bag skirts decorated with stickers! Little white hats that are really just upside-down paper bowls! Giant plastic blue bow ties! Socks with faces drawn on them worn on the hands! To me, this class easily took the cake in the costume department.

This class was less coordinated in their dress...the girls in the first row have leis, the boys in the second row have cowboy hats with flowers on them, and the children in the back rows have large cardboard fish strapped to their foreheads. The first two rows also have garbage-bag loincloths (blue for boys and pink for girls, of course). Also note that some kids in the back row have brooms, which they danced with during the performance. You can't say they aren't resourceful!

Also in the performance vein, this past Tuesday my Little Angels class was scheduled to perform a song in English on the morning TV show that is broadcast to the whole school. We voted in class to sing "Boss of Me," the Malcom in the Middle theme song, and I made some posters for them to hold up during the instrumental break in the song. We held a quick extra practice session the day before the performance, and things were good. On the day of the performance, the kids were really nervous, and they couldn't get our music to work until the very very last minute before we went on! Despite their anxiety, the kids did a really great job, and the gal who taped the performance said she would get me a copy...we'll see if that really happens.

I had kind of forgotten the possibility that the kids might be nervous about performing, because at this point in my life, I've been in enough performances that I don't really get nervous about being in front of an audience. That's why I said yes when AIT (the American Institute in Taiwan) asked me to give a talk on American Campus Culture at the American Shelf, a special section of the Baoju Library. I didn't exactly know what I was supposed to do, but I've had pretty good luck with agreeing to do things where I don't exactly know what I'm doing (how do you think I ended up teaching English in Taiwan?) and then sort of figuring it out as I go along. They told me to send my talking points to the translator beforehand so he could prepare, which was good because it ensured that I actually prepared my talk before the last minute. The talk was on Wednesday, and it was an interesting time. I don't mind public speaking, but I've never had a translator before...it's kind of weird, because the audience doesn't react to what you're saying at the same time as you actually say it. Except the one guy with really good English who laughed riotously at anything that was vaguely funny. I loved that guy. Eric the translator was really sweet, too...he made everything I said sound so much better (and, you know, so much more Chinese). The best part was when I was talking about eating on campus and I mentioned the concept of the "freshman 15." For their reference, I said that 15 pounds was about 6 or 7 kg. When Eric translated, this turned into "6.8 kilograms." He was not kidding about preparing himself beforehand. A number of other times, I noticed that things from my notes that I had forgotten to actually say made their way into the Chinese translation. Eric, you are the man. At the end, we had a Q & A session, and they gave me oranges. It was a good time.

One of the reasons that I haven't posted much recently is that a lot of things haven't been that exciting...in school I spent the better part of the past 2 weeks doing English Village stuff, which was a little bit lame. First I had to teach my students a dialogue about a hotel, and the next week I had to go pretend to be the hotel receptionist and act out the dialogue with them. The only good part was the fact that they had to perform the dialogue in groups of 4, which gave me a little room to mess around with them. Example:

Me: "What kind of room would you like?"
4 students, in unison: "A double, please."
Me: "But you have four people! A double is only for two!"

A lot of students were boggled by this deviation from the dialogue, but some of them gave me some good, inventive answers. Many changed their request to 2 doubles, some told me "it's okay, we are so small" or "he will sleep on the floor," but my absolute favorite was the kid who told me he wanted "a fourple." Not quite, kid, but points for effort. And for cuteness!

On the subject of cuteness...as you may recall, earlier this semester I taught the English Angels to do Y.M.C.A. My dad had been digitizing some of our old home videos, and he found a video of me doing Y.M.C.A. at a wedding when I'm about 7 years old, so he sent it to me. I took it into school on Thursday and showed the Little Angels, and they couldn't believe that the small fuzzy blonde person was me. There was a lot of "Teacher, so cute!" and "Teacher, that is YOU???" Many students also wanted to know about the little boy running across the screen, and were amazed when I explained that it was my little brother, who is now thiiiiis tall, and has a beard! Experience small Rebekah and Luke for yourself:

In other news, today I managed to buy a pair of pants that, in spite of being Taiwanese, still manage to a) actually fit me and b) not have a single rhinestone on them!!! I know, I couldn't believe it either.

Taiwanese Wedding, featuring Principal Dragon!

2008-11-08T22:01:00.005+08:00

A while ago, all of the Fulbrights got invited to the wedding of the son of the principal at San Min, the school where our main office is and where I work at English Village. I agreed to go, but I had kind of forgotten about it until this morning when Billy asked me if I was going to the wedding. I took a peek at my invitation and realized it was today! Ha. Good thing I didn't have anything else to do!

So this evening around dinnertime, six of us got mildly fancied up and went to Principal Lin's son's wedding. This is very different from going to a Western wedding. For one thing, wedding dress is less formal here. Suits and fancy dresses are not necessary. Also, usually if you attend a wedding in America, you are presumably a friend or relative of the bride or groom. The only encounter I had ever had with either of these parties before was the one time during orientation when we were leaving San Min and we ran into them taking some wedding pictures outside of the school. For another thing, in Taiwan the wedding pictures don't happen on the wedding day...the bride and groom spend lots of time before the wedding getting dressed up in all kinds of fancy outfits and taking lots and lots of pictures in different settings. Also, there is no gift registration to help you pick out some nice kitchen implements for the happy couple, because in Taiwan you just give them money in a nice red envelope. Not too complex, except you have to be careful about the amount you give to make sure that it is lucky. Even numbers are good, but you don't want a number including "4" because 4 in Chinese sounds like death. We gave $1200, which various Taiwanese people assured me is an appropriately lucky amount.

The event that we went today didn't include a ceremony, nor was there any dancing or anything. There were some speeches and a slideshow, but mainly there was eating. It took place in a giant hall full of tables, and you pretty much stay at your table the whole time. At some point, the bridal party comes around to all the tables and toasts everybody. They appeared to be using cranberry juice, which was probably wise given the number of tables.

The meal was 12ish courses, and featured a lot of things that I didn't know exactly what they were or how to eat them. I snagged a thing that looked kind of like a sweet potato chip, only to be informed by Shana as I bit into it that it was made of compressed fish roe. Let's be honest: it was gross. I was relieved when the desserty courses came, because they had far less questionable contents. Although there was the fruit soup that had weird white things in it (a kind of seaweed or fungi, I would guess) that supposedly would make me beautiful, as I was informed by the helpful man sitting next to me.

Dinner was a bit of an awkward time in general, especially because our table had six Americans and 2 Taiwanese couples who seemed fairly averse to talking to us. The Taiwanese couples didn't even really talk to each other. It was only the one guy who talked to us at all. So that was awkward, but the awkward highlight of the evening was when the principal of my school came over to our table.

To explain: I can't remember if I've said much about him before, but the principal of my school is a CRAZYPANTS. His English name is Dragon (he picked it himself!), and he is generally incoherent in English and not much better in Chinese. Even the other teachers at my school acknowledge that his Chinese isn't very clear. He came over to our table while one of the Taiwanese guys was gone, and *borrowed* his wine glass to toast all of us. Seeing our confusion at his original mixed-up toast, he clarified with "happy! nice!" and a thumbs-up. There were a couple of these toasts in a short period of time. Then he poured all of the wine left at our table into Dr. Phil's glass and made him drink. With our table out of wine, he disappeared momentarily and then reappeared with another bottle of wine, apparently snagged from a different table. More toasts all around. Did I mention that Dragon is looking pretty pink at this point? I ask him if the bride is a teacher at Yang Ming, because I thought I had heard someone say that. He said no, it's the groom who is a teacher at Yang Ming. Then he says that I can be the bride of Yang Ming. I'm a little confused by this. He clarifies, and it turns out that he means he thinks I will be the next person from Yang Ming to get married. Oooooookay. Then he goes on about my boyfriend, mispronouncing his name so thoroughly that I would never have known he was trying to say Gered if someone else didn't guess it. He reminds me that Gered is tall and slim, and pantomimes this. I'm doing the smile-and-nod thing here. It is basically a necessity in any conversation with my principal. He toasts me with a ganbei(lit. "dry cup"), which means I have to finish my glass of wine. Fortunately there isn't much in it. Then, he inexplicably asks me if I want to marry a Taiwanese man. Not the next question I would have expected. I tell him I wasn't planning on it. He asks me when I'm leaving Taiwan, and when I say June, he tells me that I should stay here, because I can get all the men. Super. With a lot more thumbs-up action, Dragon tells Dr. Phil that I am very good and that the students and the teachers all like me. "The boy teachers like you," he says to me, by way of clarification. He's still sitting in the other man's seat...why hasn't the other guy come back yet? Dragon has been at our table for a while at this point and everybody is feeling very awkward. To be honest, I am kind of enjoying myself, because it is a hilarious kind of awkward. There are some more toasts, and Dragon attempts to bond with Dr. Phil a little bit. Dr. Phil looks completely overwhelmed.

Several times during this extensive and sometimes painfully awkward conversation, it looks like Dragon is about to leave, but each time it turns out to be a false hope. Finally he comes over to me to put the final touches on what has been a long and hilarious conversation. He tells me once again how great I am, and how the other teachers all like me, and I assure him that I like them a lot as well. He tells me that the students all think I am the most beautiful, and does a little impression of them for my benefit. Another great part of this is that when he talks about me in Chinese, he gets my Chinese name wrong every time, calling me Bei li ka instead of Li bei ka. I feel that since he knows that my English name is Rebekah, it shouldn't be too hard to keep my Chinese name in order. Apparently this is untrue.

Finally, after a couple glasses of wine and an amazing amount of awkward, Dragon departed from our table, and the night was henceforth quite uneventful. The End.

Black Person Toothpaste

2008-11-07T21:05:00.004+08:00

Observation 1: Taiwanese people like white skin. The whiter, the prettier; that is our philosophy here.
Observation 2: While they care a lot about their skin color, Taiwanese people don't seem to be nearly as invested in having straight, white teeth, as far as I can tell by looking at them.

True fact that, given these observations, strikes me as slightly unusual: The most ubiquitous brand of toothpaste around these parts is Heiren Yagao, which translates as "black person toothpaste." Literally. (Although the English brand name on the box is "Darlie." You can't fool me!)

Upon further inquiry, I learned that there is a stereotype among Taiwanese people that black people have very white teeth. I guess it's not that unreasonable, if you consider it relative to skin tone.

For your own examination, a box of Black Person Toothpaste:

How about that guy on the left? Does he or does he not remind you of the stereotypical vaudevillian blackface look? It's enough to make me feel a little bit weird.

For the record, other than the cultural preference for pale skin, I've never heard anything from a Taiwanese person to suggest that they actually harbor any kind of serious negative opinions about black people. Also, I have to confess that I myself own a tube of Black Person Toothpaste...I was in urgent need of toothpaste, and it was the only kind they had at 7-11 in the big tube. Plus it guarantees whiter teeth in 14 days! But still, Taiwan. Maybe we should class it up a little bit here and drop the racial stereotypes.

Obamarama!

2008-11-06T20:27:00.005+08:00

So of course this week in my classes we had to have a little American Culture Time and talk about the American election, with occasionally hilarious results. Here is a typical dialogue from my Tuesday classes:

Me: Does anybody know what's happening in America today?
Students:..................(someone says something in Chinese about picking a new President)
Me: Riiiiight, a presidential election! Who knows who the President of Taiwan is?
S: Ma Ying-jeou!
Me: Okay, and who is the President of America?
S: OBAMA!!!!
Me: Ummmm who is the President of America RIGHT NOW?
S: ...............................
(finally someone yells "Bu shi!" which is an excellently silly Chineseification if I do say so myself)
Me: Right, George Bush. And who are the two men who want to be President?
S: OBAMA!! OBAMA OBAMA!!!
Me: Okay, right, Obama is one; who is the other one?
S: ..............................
(finally I get a little "Mai ken," which is apparently what they call McCain)
S: OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA!!!!!

The moral of the story is that Taiwanese elementary schoolers are totally in the tank for Obama. As far as I can tell, this is primarily because his name is easy and fun to say. Can't argue with that! In general, I was impressed by the amount that my kids knew about American politics. Take a class of average American 5th graders and see if any of them know who the candidates for President or Prime Minister or anything are in any other country. I know that Taiwan is little and America is big and important, but still. Good job, Taiwanese kids, is what I say. I asked them what they knew about the candidates and this is what they could tell me:
-McCain is old
-he has white hair
-Obama is black
-Obama is handsome (this comment surprised me because everybody in Asia knows white skin is prettier)
-Obama is "old," "young," or "so-so," depending on who you ask

In my smartie band class today, I tried to explain that at 47, Obama is quite young for a U.S. President, and one little kid piped up in protest, "but Teacher, I am ten!" I guess he has a point. Also it was really cute.

Probably my most Obama-riffic student is my girl Tina. Tina is tall and very friendly and wears all pink all the time. I have her for two classes a week, and every time she sees me she comes up and stands like 6 inches away and tells me, "hello, teacher!" followed by whatever sentence she has been practicing to say to me. Our last unit was on feelings, and on Tuesday Tina came up to me at the beginning of class and told me, "Teacher, I feel great and excited." Tina's English isn't that good, but out of all of my students she is one of the most motivated to speak English. This seems to spring from the fact that Tina is crazy about me. Tina is also crazy in general. She hadn't heard of Obama before Tuesday, but when she heard his name she just couldn't let go of it. A brief transcript of our conversation:
Tina: OBAMA! OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA!
Me: Yes, Tina, his name is Obama.
Tina: Obama is Obama and Obama. (her exact words)
Me: Right...hey Tina, what day is today? (our current unit is about days of the week)
Tina: OBAMA!
Me: Umm...well maybe tomorrow will be Obama day (because of course election night in America was on Wednesday in Taiwan).
Tina: OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA!!!!!
Me: Never mind.

Needless to say, Tina was sufficiently delighted to give me the answer when I asked her this morning who won the election (although a classmate had to translate the question for her).

As for me, it's been kind of interesting to experience a U.S. election from abroad. I didn't have class Wednesday morning, so I was able to keep track of the election results as they were coming in, but it was just me, waking up early on my morning off to drowsily watch CNN in my pajamas. It took the calling of Ohio for Obama to really wake me up, and by the time I was showered and dressed, California was coming in for real and it was all over, officially. It was so hard to believe that after the seemingly endless months of campaigning, the moment had finally come, and it was over, just like that. Very little pomp or ceremony around here...nobody was running out to celebrate in the streets. Nobody was even there to high five. So with my own little self, I spoke my thoughts to the television and did a little democracy dance around the living room. Later, I talked to Luke on Skype and we watched McCain's concession speech together from opposite sides of the world. It was cool.

Full disclosure: I voted for Obama. I think he's an intelligent and respectable guy, with generally good priorities, and the kind of leader that the country needs right now. He channeled a little FDR in his victory speech, and I think he's got more where that came from. But I have to say, McCain's concession speech was all kinds of classy. I was totally impressed. I think he'll be a lot better off just being John McCain than he was when he was trying to please all the different factions of the Republican Party. And that's about as much politics as this blog can handle...over and out!

My Legs Have Become Suddenly More Delicious

2008-11-01T11:13:00.005+08:00

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.

Life at school

2008-10-22T19:49:00.002+08:00

This week we have our midterm, so we reviewed by playing a game of Jeopardy where all the questions are things they were supposed to learn in the past two chapters (hahaha). It was kind of good because the kids are really competitive, so they tend to get pretty involved in any kind of activity that pits them against each other. What I didn't anticipate is the pressure that playing team Jeopardy entails...one player from each team comes up for each different question, but because the team as a whole loses points for a wrong answer, the rest of the team can be kind of hard on the kid who gets something wrong. I hadn't thought much of this, and in most classes this didn't turn out to be a huge deal, but in one class I had a little boy who couldn't take the pressure. He was sure that he wouldn't know the answer, so when his turn was about to come, he put his head down on the desk and just sobbed quietly. Of course the other kids, with the sensitivity of 11-year-olds, were all like "TEACHER HE'S CRYING" and crowded around him. I made them leave him alone, and tried to comfort him a little bit myself, but since he barely knows any English, there wasn't much I could say to him to help. I ended up dispatching Patty to take him outside and talk to him a little bit to make him feel better, while I got back up front and kept the game rolling to take the other students' attention away from the problem.

My heart just breaks in a situation like that, for one because it's my fault for giving them such a high-pressure game, but also because I have something like 280 fifth graders that I teach, and it's so hard to give them all the help they need. Many of my more privileged kids have parents that pay for them to go to buxiban ("cram school") after school, where they take supplemental classes to stay ahead of their classmates. However, for the kids who don't have this opportunity, school can be a constant struggle. When they're having trouble with material that their peers have already mastered outside of school, they experience a great loss of confidence, and sometimes start feeling like it's useless for them to even try to catch up. In every class I have some kids like this, but in a class of 36 kids, it's hard to notice and give individual attention to them on a daily basis. When we grade classwork and quizzes, though, it's impossible to ignore the fact that some of the students haven't even tried to answer a lot of the questions. Patty and I have been working on identifying the kids who need the most help, and trying to figure out a way to give it to them.

On Tuesday, I have an open slot last period, which I usually use to talk about lesson plans and random stuff with Patty. This Tuesday, we had a small group of students come in during that period to retake their lesson 2 quiz, which they had all bombed. As they were about to leave, I asked Patty if they had this period free or not. She informed me that they had a sort of flexible class for the last period, so I asked if I could keep them to do some review. When she proposed this to the kids, they all opted to stay and work with me. At first I was just trying to chat with them a little bit, but because they didn't really know what I was saying or how to talk to me, it ended up turning into a full-fledged vocabulary and grammar lesson on the words we were supposed to learn in the past chapter. I had to break out some of my Chinese in order to communicate with them effectively, but they took it in stride, and we actually started getting somewhere. Having only seven kids meant none of them could slip under my radar, and everybody had to talk. Producing their own sentences of spoken English seemed like a foreign concept to them, but by the end some of them were getting really into it. At the end of the period, I asked my quiet-as-a-mouse student Jason how he felt, and he told me, "I feel happy!" I was totally jazzed. I still have lots of students who need extra help, and even the students I got to work with for a bit still have a ways to go, but you have to take small victories where you can get them. I probably have something like 40 or 50 students who need a lot of help, and having that many kids in one session of extra-help would probably ruin its efficacy, so I need to find another solution.

It's been a good learning week for me too, so far...on Monday I went to bellydancing again and we tried doing this one dance all the way through and I felt like I had caught on pretty well. The teacher even complemented me on something, which was special because since I am the newbie in the class, I am usually the one who does things wrong and has to get corrected. On Tuesday the English Angels taught me how to say "photosynthesis" in Chinese, and my little swim team girls taught me how to say "submarine" (preceded by me trying to explain to them what the English word "submarine" meant, which is a lot easier to do when you are in a pool). Also, the swim coach Jessica decided that it would be fun to teach me how to do the butterfly. Fabulous!

East Coast Adventures!

2008-10-19T23:36:00.006+08:00

Note: I hope you have a fair amount of time on your hands, because this might sort of be a post of gigantic proportions. Sorry.

English Village was still on break last Friday, so Gered and I took advantage of the 3-day weekend and jaunted off to Hualien! We left Friday morning at 7-something, and after a mere 6 hours on the train, we were there.

Where exactly is Hualien? I'm glad you asked.

The skinny red line from Kaohsiung to Hualien is the railroad (approximately; I drew it in myself but I think it's pretty good).

On the way to Hualien, I'm checking out my travel guide to see exactly what there is to do in Hualien. Here is a summary:
-there are these special dumplings you should eat
-it's next to the ocean, so I guess you could go check that out
-there is this special dessert that you should eat, mochi
-there are a couple of temples and museums...of course Taiwan is covered with temples but if you're in town you could go check out these ones if you wanted
-I hope you didn't want much in the way of nightlife or anything

Basically, Hualien is not a super-hopping town. Also it rains a lot. So our Game Plan upon arrival was: 1) check into hostel, 2) eat some special dumplings for lunch, 3) go down to the beach, 4) poke around a little bit, maybe see a temple and find some mochi? Beats me.

As you can see, it was a highly specific game plan. The hostel was nice, they had cute little dogs and I think we were the only people staying there. The special dumplings were pretty decent, and came in an oniony broth that tasted pretty much like the flavor packet from a package of ramen. We got to the beach okay, except it turned out that the beach was under construction, so we didn't actually go down to the water. The edge of the beach was comprised of giant cement things that looked like jacks, presumably a sort of breakwater. So maybe the construction machines down on the beach were putting in some more jacks. I didn't look very closely, plus there was a fence. It was a different sort of beach.

Anyway, we walked down the coast and chilled a little bit, when it started to rain. It was a nice little refreshing drizzle for a while, but then it turned into pouring buckets. Annnnd the rest of the afternoon and evening was on-and-off crazy rain. Welcome to Hualien! Also it got dark really early. Gered was ready to go to sleep by the time we got back to the hostel at night...at 7 pm. However, the hostel did not in fact have towels available (the internet lied to us about this!), so in order to shower we had to venture back out into the dark and stormy night on a quest for towels. Which then turned into a quest for mochi, after we had found towels and were feeling a bit hungry. If you have not had mochi, they are a kind of dessert-thing that I believe is of Japanese origin, with a chewy outer layer made of glutinous rice and some kind of filling. It is a dessert well-suited to the Taiwanese, who are pretty much suckers for anything glutinous. There are mochi shops everywhere you look in Hualien, EXCEPT for of course anywhere in the vicinity of our hostel, so it was kind of a longish mission to find mochi, but it was totally worth it.

On Saturday, we woke up early and got a bus up to Taroko Gorge National Park. I'm going to go ahead and say that Taroko is probably the most beautiful place I've ever been. The mountains are breathtaking, giant and green and gorgeous, with rushing rivers wrapped around their feet and occasional waterfalls tumbling down their sides. True Fact: there are taller mountains in Taiwan than there are anywhere in the entire eastern half of the U.S. Perhaps this is part of why I was so impressed. True But Lame Fact: my camera failed to work at all on this trip so I have no pictures of any of this. I will steal Gered's pictures whenever I get the chance.

From the entrance to Taroko, we hopped on a big old tour bus and hulked our way along some skinny little roads, winding around and sometimes underneath the mountains, until we ended up at a small town called Tianxiang in the middle of the park. Tianxiang seemed to consist mainly of a bus stop, a visitor center, a few crummy little restaurants, and 3 hotels: a big resort, a medium sized but still expensive hotel, and a cheap little hostel. Guess where we stayed.

Aside from having extremely firm (shall we say) beds, the hostel was actually kind of amazing and very idyllic. Perched up on a small hill, it was surrounded by plants and flowers, and there was even a rooftop garden as well. A hilarious little dog guarded the door, and a mama cat lounged around the patio while her kittens wrestled with each other. There are towering mountains on every side, and on the other side of the street the land drops off sharply into a gorge. For less than US$20 per person, you can have a room with a balcony that overlooks all of this. Taiwan is so excellent.

Having found a home base in Tianxiang, we launched off to hike the Baiyang Waterfall trail. Although the trail itself was very flat and easy to hike, it involved passing through a number of tunnels, some of them quite long and quite dark. At the entrance to the first tunnel, a sign reminded us to bring our flashlights. We had no flashlights. Consequently, I found myself walking fairly long distances in the dark, carefully treading ground that I was unable to see. Usually there was some glimmer of light in the distance or around a corner or even from another hiker's flashlight, but at times I found myself in complete pitch blackness, clutching the handrail for direction. The thought even crossed my mind: what if there is a giant pit in the middle of the trail up ahead of me? I would fall right into it! This was closely followed by the thought: Gered is a couple steps ahead of me, so if there were a pit, he would fall into it first and yell, so I am probably safe. Dear paranoid part of my brain: way to be rational! Gered later referred to this part of the hike as a Tunnel of Doom, which I appreciated, and you should too if you are a Kreher. Unfortunately, I neglected to bring my Tunnel of Doom kit with me to Taroko (or Taiwan for that matter...I believe it is at home under my bed), so I was woefully underprepared for a real live Tunnel of Doom.

Anyway, all of the doom tunnels were totally worth it, because there were some spectacular views along the actual sunlit portion of the trail. The trail was not named Baiyang Waterfall for nothing - several times I rounded a corner or came out of a tunnel and was met by the view of a waterfall or two or three. One particularly picturesque set of waterfalls had what can only be described as a Crazy Death Bridge in front of it. It was the kind of skinny wooden thing suspended by ropes that you always see in movies. In the movie, there will be some kind of crucial chase going on, and when our hero tries to cross the bridge, the rotting wood collapses under him and the ropes snap and how will he ever survive!?! but of course he does. In real life, the Crazy Death Bridge was not rotting and the ropes were made of metal and it seemed generally sturdy, but that does not negate the fact that it swayed and bounced when I walked on it, and there was a warning sign saying that the bridge had a 10-person limit. Also it was over a GIANT FRICKIN GORGE. Nevertheless, I managed to survive and make it back through the doom tunnels safely. Hooray!

I forget if this happened before or after we went on a hike, but we also had a kind of amazing experience at the visitor center in Tianxiang. First, I must explain that when we left on this trip, Gered still didn't know whether or not his Frisbee team was participating in a tournament in Taizhong on Sunday, so we weren't sure if we'd have to leave Saturday or Sunday. Hence, when we found out Friday night that they weren't going, we didn't have much of a specific game plan for the rest of the weekend. Since we were already in Tianxiang, we thought that we might possibly kind of just make a loop and go out through the west side of the park and down the west coast to Kaohsiung. Here is my amazing map again, in case you forgot what it looked like:

This would mean taking the yellow route home (the red is how we got there). The east-west portion of this route goes along the Central Cross-Island highway, straight through more of those spectacular mountains that run down the middle of Taiwan. It seemed like it would be a pretty cool scenic route to get home. We also thought we might just go out to Hehuanshan (one of the big peaks on the far western edge of the park) and then come back the way we came, if going all the way through didn't work. With these goals in mind, I peppered the nice lady at the visitor center with questions about how we could pull it off. She told us that there was a bus that went as far as Dayuling (about 2/3 of the way into the park), but after that there were no buses, and the only way to get any further was dabianche. This was a word that I had never heard before, but since che means "vehicle," I knew it had to be some form of transportation. I asked again a couple times about getting to Hehuanshan, but the answer was always the same: you can take the bus to Dayuling, but after that the only possible way is dabianche. We were at an impasse until another man entered the visitor center to ask the woman a question. He overheard our conversation a bit, and tried to help me out with a little English. Finally I asked him directly, "what does dabianche mean?" He informed me very matter-of-factly, "Dabianche means hitchhike!"

My eyebrows pretty much hit the ceiling on this one. This is the recommendation from an official park visitor center! Isn't it dangerous? I asked. Oh, just try to find a family with kids, she told me. It's pretty safe. Ooooookay.

Well, we pondered hitchhiking our way back into the realm of Available Public Transportation, but in the end we just didn't have enough buffer time to risk it. If you glance up at the map again, the black section of the route is the part where there is no way to travel besides hitchhiking (well, and actually having your own car), and over the rest of the yellow part between there and Taizhong (T'aichung on this map) we'd have to rely on the occasional public buses, which probably wouldn't be running anymore by the time we got there at night. In the end, we resigned ourselves to going back the way we came.

That evening, I had a kind of exciting experience, for Taiwan: I was cold, and not just from being in an overly-air-conditioned space! No, it was genuinely cool outside in Tianxiang. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt! It was crazy. We went for dinner at a little cafe in the other hotel, where it turned out that the fare consisted mainly of microwave personal pizzas. Mmm, deliciously mediocre! And of course it had peas and corn and random stuff on it, because we are in Asia here, let's not forget. Eating microwave pizza in a secluded village in the mountains of Taiwan: kind of surreal. After a pot of raspberry tea (because it was cold enough out to really want hot tea!! this was amazing), we retired to the hostel for a wild and crazy night of reading a little bit and falling asleep promptly at 9:30. Woooo!

Our bus back to Hualien left at 9 am, so we got up at 7ish and did some final poking around Tianxiang. There was some kind of pagoda up on the side of one the mountain at the edge of town, so we went up to investigate it. Apparently it was a temple to the God of Stairs, because getting up to the pagoda involved climbing approximately 547382534982795392 steps of stairs. I'm pretty sure that I filled my entire stair quota for all of October in that one morning. The pagoda was nice...very pagoda-like? I don't really know what to say about it. The temple also had a gift shop and a little stand where I got some sort of fried pancake and a couple slices of tofu for breakfast. We took the breakfast to go, because it was time to catch the bus back to Hualien!

In Hualien we grabbed a little lunch, bought some more mochi, and tried to find a bus that would take us down the east coast. The train line is further inland, but you can take a bus right down the coastal highway, which is really pretty. My travel guide informed us that there was some kind of restaurant by the normal bus stand where you could get bus tickets to go down the coast. The normal bus station didn't have any buses that would take us all the way to Taidong, where we wanted to go, and we asked at a restaurant around the corner that looked promising, but they only rented vehicles. It was really hot and sunny at this time, and I was feeling hot and a little bit grumpy. I wanted to just take the normal bus and transfer, but Gered was convinced that we could find the bus line mentioned by my travel guide, so we poked around the area a bit more, ending up at the visitor center. The helpful folks at the visitor center gave us free postcards of Hualien, and pointed us to a nearby row of mochi shops. It turns out that one of the shops, in addition to selling traditional local snacks, sells bus tickets down the east coast. Go figure.

So we grooved on down the east coast on a bus, taking in the sights. One of the characteristic features of Taiwan is unusual juxtapositions: ornate temples in the midst of weather-beaten concrete buildings, bus tickets in a mochi shop, and huge mountains right smack dab next to the sea. It's really amazing that Taiwan has such high peaks, considering that they have to get all the way up there from sea level over a pretty short distance. Driving down Taiwan's east coast, you can have the ocean on your left, and on your right, a big ol' mountain rising right out of the sea. It's definitely a must-see part of Taiwan.

The bus ride was pretty, albeit rather long. This was alleviated a bit by the presence of a really adorable small girl in the seat in front of me. First, I noticed the shiny black top of a small head peeking over the seat. A pair of eyes appeared, and I smiled at her. She immediately ducked back out of sight. This little peekaboo ritual was repeated a number of times, but each time she came up for a little bit longer, and each time she ducked back down, Gered and I would grin like fools at the cuteness. Once I even got a little answer to a question in Chinese! Then her mother moved the two of them to another seat on the bus, and I was a little bit sad.

It was already dark when we got into Taidong, and we still needed to catch a train back to Kaohsiung. At the train station, the ticket agent informed us that the next train was at 7:13, but there were no seats left. The next train after that didn't get into Kaohsiung until very late, so we opted to suck it up and just take the first train. Riding the train was another one of those Great Adventures in Staring for a little bit...when we were waiting to sit down, a little girl pointed at me and asked her mother loudly, "What kind of person is THAT??" Then we sat in some unoccupied seats for the first leg of the journey, across from a man who blatantly stared at me the whole time. Staring Man got off at the next station, but our seats' owner got on, and we were forced out. We ended up just sitting on the floor in the back of the car, tiredly typing up our weekly reports for Fulbright (due every Sunday night!) on Gered's little computer.

When we got into Kaohsiung, it was quite late, but the subway was still running, so we subwayed it to the stop near our apartments and walked the final stretch. It was around 11 pm when I finally arrived home...one looooong day of transportation, considering that we left Tianxiang at 9 am, but definitely worth the trip. Maybe sometime when there's a little more time I can do it again and dabianche my way home.

Banana Dog!

2008-10-14T08:15:00.003+08:00

Ingredients: 1 slice of bread, 1 banana, peanut butter

Step 1: spread peanut butter on bread
Step 2: peel banana
Step 3: wrap bread around banana
Step 4: EAT!

Serves 1.

This has nothing to do with Taiwanese culture or anything, but it's such a fun (and nutritionally balanced!) breakfast that I just had to share. It's sort of the lazy man's peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich, I suppose.

Living it up in Taipei

2008-10-13T20:58:00.004+08:00

This past Friday I went to Taipei with some of the other Kaohsiung ETAs to attend a 10/10 celebration hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Now 10/10 is sort of like Taiwanese Independence Day, IF Taiwan were in fact an independent nation, which everyone knows it is CERTAINLY NOT, so I guess it's really NOTHING LIKE Independence Day after all. Right, People's Republic of China?

Anyway, it was a real fancy shindig, held at the President's mansion, and there were tons and tons of guests in attendance, most of whom were bona fide dignitaries of some kind, as opposed to elementary school teachers. I caught a glimpse of the President himself, but having been unceremoniously pushed aside by an army of security guards, I was unable to shake his hand, as some lucky Yilan ETAs got to do. There were people in traditional costume performing traditional arts around the party, like weaving on a loom, or mashing rice with a giant wooden smashing stick. In fact, after the President's triumphant entrance on the red carpet, he came down and did a little rice-smashing himself. I think it's one of those things that presidents do sometimes, like throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game or whatever. Anyway, I guess he smashed the rice pretty well, because everyone seemed very pleased.

The rest of the party mostly consisted of waiting in line to get things to eat, eating things, and walking around awkwardly, not knowing how to begin introducing myself to random dignitaries. (Side note: I was having lunch at school the day before the party, and talking about anticipating this kind of awkwardness, and I taught the other teachers at my table the word "schmooze." Score!) I ate a lot of delicious things, although there was one incident in which, intending to get a red bean cake (the desserty sort), I got one with salted dried turnip in the middle instead. Fabulous. There was a traditional Chinese opera-type performance, with lots of high singing and ridiculous slow-motion fight scenes, so of course that was excellent. And the house itself was huge and elaborately decorated...the most amazing part was actually the walk to the bathroom, which involved going through almost a maze of corridors with crazy glass floors. And did I mention there was FOOD everywhere?

Here I am being fancy in front of a tasteful display of produce:

The Chinese character for the number 10 looks like a cross, so the big red thing on top of the fruit is sort of the 10/10 logo - two 10s put together. The 97 is because it's the year 97 in the Taiwanese Minguo calendar, which is measured from the founding of the R.O.C. I must confess that my first thought upon seeing the abbreviation ROC is usually "hey, Rochester!" Then I remember where I am, and that it's slightly more probable that they mean Republic of China.

Although the party was theoretically from 6-7 pm, we kind of went a bit earlier than that and stayed a bit later. They were definitely turning off lights and playing slow, boring, go-home music by the time the Fulbright crew finally headed out. Afterwards, I opted to go out to karaoke with the Yilan posse and a couple of Fulbright staff. Maya and I were the only Kaohsiung folks in attendance, but we represented to the best of our ability. We sang and danced and were generally silly for a full 3 hours, when our time ran up after a magnificent rendition of Gettin' Jiggy With It. Then we went out dancing! It was an exhausting night, but so good for me to get out what seemed to be a reserve of pent-up ridiculousness. Of course I am silly on a regular basis, but usually to a milder extent.

On Saturday, I spent the whole morning sleeping until the very last possible minute before I had to check out. As I was leaving, I noticed that the room I stayed in last time was open and had been vacated, so I snuck in real quick to get a picture of the spectacular Love Tub. Here it is, in all its heart-shaped glory:

Yes, that's the kind of hotel Fulbright puts us up in! It's pretty super.

In the afternoon, I wandered with Gered up to Danshui, which is north of Taipei, on the coast. We went to what seemed essentially to be the boardwalk. It was cobblestone, but definitely the same concept. With the exception of the university that we went and strolled around, the town of Danshui was a densely packed mass of humanity. On the bright side, there was Dunkin' Donuts at the Danshui train station! Their Boston Cream didn't quite live up to my expectations, but still: Dunkin' Donuts! Unhealthy fast food chains have got to be America's first or second biggest export, right up there with pop culture. No wonder the rest of the world thinks we're so silly.

Came back from Taipei Saturday night. Sunday I went to church and made some new friends (I don't think I've ever escaped a church service in Taiwan without making some new friends and probably getting a couple phone numbers), and I went out to lunch with this gal Vivian, after which we went to Costco! Haha I have never been to Costco in the U.S., I don't think, but now I have been in Taiwan. I think Vivian figured I would want to go because, I don't know, Costco is a bastion of American-ness in Taiwan? Also I kind of did really want to get lettuce. Taiwanese people don't really believe in raw vegetables, so salad is kind of rare here, and often consists of shredded cabbage and Thousand Island dressing. (Asia's favorite kind of salad dressing, right up there with straight mayonnaise!) So I got a giant thing of lettuce, and today I went out and bought tomatoes and chicken and Parmesan cheese and salad dressing, so now I have to eat chicken caesar salad like a fiend or else I won't finish the lettuce before it goes bad. I had some tonight and mmm I miss salads! And raw vegetables! Taiwanese food is pretty good, but the vegetables are rather few, and often are cooked into oily oblivion. Also, it's nice to cook my own meat so I know it isn't full of surprise fat globs. A lot of times meat here is covered in/chock full of fat, which I guess Taiwanese people think is super, but I think it's kind of gross.

Oh man, so this next weekend I don't have anything on Friday (no English Village this week!) so Gered and I are planning a trip to Hualien on the east coast. I think it's a sort of sleepy little town, but Taroko Gorge National Park is right next to it, which is supposed to be pretty spectacular, and has lots of hiking and majestic views and hot springs and whatnot. Also Patty says you can go whale watching in Hualien? Might be fun...

Today was tiring. No English Village this morning, but I still felt exhausted at the end of the school day. My kids are on such drastically different levels that it's impossible to work with everyone effectively. On one hand, I have kids like Ryan, who's from Pennsylvania and is bored to tears when I'm teaching everyone how to say things like "I feel happy." On the other hand, I have kids who know next to nothing. My troublemaker Kevin is at such a loss when we do workbook activities that he writes down random strings of letters. I sat down with him a little bit today, and I had to break out a little bit of Chinese, but we were making some progress. Unfortunately, we don't have the class time for me to sit down with each kid who's fallen behind, especially when some of the others are so far ahead. Several times today I was in the middle of helping some student who was having a lot of trouble when Patty steamed on to the next activity, obliging me to move on as well. I know that we can't pace the whole class to suit the lowest common denominator, because it's so low, but I wish there was more I could do. It makes me a little annoyed that they have me teaching the gifted kids to sing English songs in my free period, and I don't have enough time to work with the kids who really need help. Not that it isn't fun to teach the good students to sing Y.M.C.A., but the English Angels program is really just to make the school look good, not really to serve the students. And of course it's our priority to look good! ...LAME.

Great Moments in Elementary School

2008-10-11T23:44:00.003+08:00

Heading into the bathroom between classes, I'm spotted by a couple girls. By the time I emerge, there is a veritable HORDE of them waiting for me outside the bathroom, and when they see me, they all freak out and flock around me, screaming my name. This has got to be what it's like to be a rock star.

It's going to be so weird when I go back to the States and people treat me like a normal person again...

Sorry

2008-10-08T22:59:00.008+08:00

I know, I haven't posted in forever. Life has been busy. Things that happened recently, as well as I remember:

School was canceled last Monday on account of typhoon. It turned out to be a generally nice day, fairly sunny and no hazardous weather. Nice forecasting.

My classroom was really dirty and still had junk in it left over from last year's teacher. Patty tried to get the administration to send someone to clean it, but to no avail. Solution: I came in on Friday afternoon (usually I'm off) in my very best cleaning clothes, and put in a little elbow grease. Spent an amazing amount of time just cleaning the door, which was practically painted with dirty old tape residue. Took a scrub brush to the wall, which was covered with footprints. Apparently people walk on it? During the break between classes, students saw me scrubbing the wall, and one little girl came up and asked "can I help you?" Sure thing, honey, I said. Some of the other girls asked the first girl if she thought they could help too, and she said they had to ask my for my permission first. (It's exchanges like this where secretly knowing Chinese is kind of delightful.) One by one, they politely asked in English if they could help me. Soon I had a whole brigade of 11-year-old girls with scrub brushes helping me clean. Patty got in on the action too, and got another student to take pictures of the two teachers on their knees scrubbing. I believe this was for the purpose of shaming the administration later.

I stuck around in the afternoon, making posters to decorate the classroom. It was a productive time for me, although it turned out later that the class was far less productive than usual. These particular students never have class with me, so Patty surmised that my presence was sufficiently distracting to keep them from getting their work done. Whoops.

Guo Laoshi (Patty) and Teacher Rebekah cleaning our dirty wall:

Teacher Rebekah hard at work making beautiful posters, a.k.a. distracting the students:

This past Sunday, I went with Patty, my host sister Grace, Steven (an English teacher at our school), and 4 other ETAs to Meinong, a Hakka village north of the city. I was told by several people that the Hakka people are famous for their paper umbrellas, and I should get one. I kind of expected to see a lot of handicrafts, and there were a number of handmade things in the little shops around the "village" (it wasn't really a village, it was just shops for tourists, I'm pretty sure). However, some of the shops had a lot of stuff that, face it, looked like it was straight out of Oriental Trading. Much of it didn't seem to even be related to local culture at all, like the ceramic statues of black jazz musicians. This same shop also featured a classy wooden statue of mating pigs. Taking photos was forbidden.

One shop in the village sold ceramic tea sets, but you could also throw your own pot there, so naturally we did. It's been forever since I attempted pottery, and I am woefully out of practice, but it was fun anyway. At the end you pick a glaze and give them a few characters to write on your pot, and they will fire it and glaze it and then mail it to you when it's done! I made a vase-like thing that I intend to be a chopstick holder for my classroom. I made a bunch of chopsticks with numbers on them (each student in the class has a number), so when I want to call on someone in class, I pick a chopstick and that student has to answer the question. It keeps things fair, and keeps everybody a little bit scared, so it's good.

After throwing pots, we had a lunch of traditional Hakka noodles. I have had a lot of special local noodles in different places in China and Taiwan, and I have to say that I don't really differentiate that much. They are all noodley. However, my Taiwanese friends made a big deal about the specialness of the Hakka noodles. I'm not sure why they are special, but they were pretty good. Anyway, after lunch we went and picked lemons from Patty's farm. Patty recently bought a little piece of property out in the countryside that has lemon trees growing on it, and she kind of wants to retire there and have a nice little lemon farm. The farm was looking a little rough on Sunday - there isn't anybody actively maintaining it - but we had a fun time picking lemons anyhow. At school on Tuesday I had an interesting discussion with Steven about lemons. I told him that our lemons weren't ripe because they were still green, and he said no, lemons are always green. Umm no, lemons are traditionally yellow, I said. No, he said, limes are yellow. Lemons are green. I disagreed. In America, I said, lemons are definitely yellow and limes are definitely green, but he was adamant that it was the other way around. Lemons are green! Limes are yellow! Up is down and down is up! This is a crazy country, I said.

School is pretty normal...some of my classes are amazing, some are awful. Twice yesterday I had to make a student sit at the *special desk,* a.k.a. the desk that's all by itself in the very front of the classroom by the blackboard. I am still trying to work out exactly what I should be doing with my handful of completely uncooperative students. I have one kid who never opens his book or tries to follow along with the lesson, even when prompted repeatedly. He does, however, get out of his chair and wander around, sometimes leaving the classroom. The other students told me that he has some kind of problem, and Patty says that she thinks he has ADHD and his medication is not working. I'm really not sure how to get through to a student like that, especially since nothing I say or do to him seems to register.

I have a few bad classes, where a number of students have behavioral problems, and the class performance seems to suffer, but some of my classes are just fabulous. Tuesday morning I had a few classes in a row that were just torture, but then in the afternoon the kids were so sweet and so attentive that it changed my mood completely. In one class, we played a game that I made up on the spot: I wrote pairs of words on the board that differed only by one vowel (bad and bed, for example). Then I covered my eyes, and Patty would point to a word. The students would all say the word that she was pointing to, and I had to guess which word it was. This was surprisingly tricky, and there was a huge reaction every time I guessed wrong. A number of times I guessed "cap" when they were trying to say "cape" (pronouncing long A correctly is a perennial difficulty), and by the second or third time this happened the kids were like "NO, TEACHER! C-A-P-EEEEEEEE! Augghhhhh" It was hilarious, and an interesting illustration for the kids of how their speech comes across to a foreigner.

We played another good game in my band class (a.k.a. the smart class) last Thursday...they finished all their work early, so I had them play the snowball fight game. I discovered this game because it was mentioned in a newspaper article about our superb kindergarten teacher back home. The band class only has 30 kids, and the 7 top students were missing class to go to some invitational lecture or something for top students, so the class was nice and small, plus all of my spotlight-hogging star students were gone. It seemed like a great opportunity to let the other students do something a little crazy and have a chance to talk some more. Each pair of students brainstormed the most interesting word they could think of, and wrote it on two pieces of paper, once in English and once in Chinese. Then they balled up the papers and for 5 minutes we had a boys vs. girls "snowball fight" with them, after which everybody had to pick up a paper and find the person with the matching definition. Afterwards, each pair had to introduce their word to the class. Then we played another game where one student throws a ball to another and asks, "What does ___ mean?" and the student has to answer or else they are out. We used the words from the snowball fight, which was hilarious because they were so random. Some examples: organization, scorpionfish, Ancient Egypt, and, of course (we are in 5th grade here), "underwear." Underwear was definitely the hit vocab word of the day.

Today we had to do a special English Village event where the principals from all the Kaohsiung City schools came to see our English Village. We were supposed to perform the English Village dialogues with them, but this turned out to be kind of a lie, because of course it would be a terrible loss of face if one's spoken English is not very good, which is true of many school administrators. Whatever. On the bright side, they fed us twice! And called us aliens. Well, specifically, one of the principals was talking about us to everybody else, and she said that we were all E.T., which ostensibly stands for English Teacher, but everybody knows E.T., even in Taiwan. My feeling is: foreigner, alien, close enough. In Chinese they are very similar words; foreigner is waiguoren (outside-country-person) and alien is waixingren (outside-planet-person). I might as well be an extraterrestrial for the way people here react to me sometimes.

Ooh, so I've started swimming at my school on Tuesdays after class, because Gered's host sister Isabella takes swimming lessons at my school then. I get to swim with her and the swim team, and it's fabulous. The swim coach is an awesome lady. Also, one of the teachers in my teacher class (also the mother of one of my band kids) invited me to come with her to a bellydancing class that the teachers have after school on Mondays. I had never bellydanced before, but it was pretty fun. The other teachers were very encouraging, and seemed highly impressed by my proficiency at the booty-shaking move. I suppose this is where my comparatively large American rear is an asset. (zing!)

On Monday I also went shopping after bellydancing...we've been invited to a party in Taipei hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to celebrate 10/10, Taiwanese Independence Day. The invitation said cocktail dress for ladies, so I had to go on a quest to find one. First I tried a dress-rental place, thinking it might be cheaper to rent than buy. Wrong! The only dress that I like much at the rental place was over US$200 to rent, which seemed not worth it for a single-night event. Instead I wandered home, stopping in any store that looked promising. I was feeling discouraged, since it seems like Taiwanese dresses come in my size, but not my shape. Finally I found a dress at a little boutique with an adorably effusive little saleslady. When I came out of the dressing room in the dress, she practically squealed, hao ke'ai! (how cute!) Then I discovered that it was 75% off, since the fall merchandise was coming in so all summer clothing was crazily on sale. Total damage: US$40. Much better. Still need shoes and a bag that's not my giant everyday one...that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Last time in English Angels we tried to learn "I Just Can't Wait to be King," and it was wayyyyy too fast for them and the words were too hard, so I promised I would find a replacement that is easier to sing. I'm thinking of "My Girl." Our best song by far is "Y.M.C.A.," though. Now my kids are all prepared to attend American weddings.

Ahhhhh must sleep! Look at the sacrifices that I make for you.

More Typhoonage

2008-09-28T14:15:00.003+08:00

Several times in the past couple weeks, we've been warned that a typhoon is coming. And several times in the past couple weeks, the anticipated typhoon has missed Kaohsiung and all we get is a little rain. So when they started telling us earlier this week that a big typhoon was coming around the weekend, it was hard to take it seriously, even though on the satellite pictures Typhoon Jangmi was headed straight for Kaohsiung. Sure enough, the typhoon changed course a bit, and now northeastern Taiwan is going to get pummeled once more. However, this one is so big that we're still getting some pretty intense winds and rain here in Kaohsiung...I think tomorrow might be supposed to be the worst of the typhoon, but there is definitely some crazy wind going on out there right now. It sounds like a giant vacuum cleaner. Anyway, we are all safely inside, and we have candles and ramen and bottled water, just in case, so please put your minds at ease. Maybe they will cancel school tomorrow!

Oh man, so this week was funny because I started having to teach real classes for the English Angels. The first unit in our syllabus is "Songs and Dances," which was silly to begin with, because I felt like there was some base assumption that as an American, I obviously know how to sing and dance and generally act like a trained monkey. Conveniently for everybody, this isn't such an incorrect assumption. They told me to pick some songs to teach the kids, so I basically just went through my iTunes and picked out songs that seemed kid-friendly. The kids are 3rd-6th grade and advanced English learners, so I needed something that wasn't too childish, but also wasn't too hard for non-native English speakers to sing. I played my top 6 picks for the kids in class, and then everybody voted on which ones they liked best. The top vote-getter was "Y.M.C.A.," followed closely by "Boss of Me" (the Malcom in the Middle theme song, for those who are unaware). On Thursday we learned the dance for Y.M.C.A. and I told the children that they are now prepared to attend American weddings. It was excellent. The other two runner-ups were "Yellow Submarine" and "I Just Can't Wait to Be King," so we'll see how many we have time to learn.

So this past Tuesday I was hanging around talking to Patty after school, and someone said my name outside the door of our classroom, and when I looked it was Gered's host sister Isabella! She doesn't go to my school, but she was there for swimming lessons, and her mom came and met Patty, and now I think the two of them will be plotting things together. Patty is also in cahoots with my host sister to plan trips out of Kaohsiung for us. Also she potentially has some kind of matchmaking scheme going on...I'm not allowed to tell, but it does not involve me, although heaven knows Patty loves to scheme and gossip about me. She's also teaching me to ride a motorcycle. The general moral of the story is that Patty makes my life more hilarious on a regular basis, and I love her to pieces. The other moral of the story (the one I was getting to in the first place) is that I went down to the Yang Ming swimming pool to see Isabella's swimming lessons, and I ended up talking to the swim coach, who invited me to come swim with them and then gave me an official Yang Ming school swim cap. It is neon green, and the first swimming cap I have ever owned. So I suppose I'll be going swimming after school on Tuesday...I even went out this weekend and bought a nice, ultra-modest one-piece bathing suit that I can feel okay wearing in the presence of students. This was kind of tricky to do, given the general makeup of bathing suits in Taiwan. A handy diagram:

As you can see, it is especially difficult to buy a modest, inexpensive bathing suit that isn't hideous. Actually, this diagram is slightly misleading, because most of the bathing suits were quite modest, it's just that most of the cheap ones were really ugly, and a lot of the expensive ones were too. I ended up getting a plain navy blue suit that says "Macarena" on the front in white. Not so bad, but not nearly as interesting as I prefer to dress.

It looks like bathing suit weather outside right now...just the 10-minute walk home from church this morning drenched my legs AND turned my umbrella inside out. Whooee!

Yellow Man

2008-09-28T13:39:00.003+08:00

On Wednesday, I was waiting at the bus stop, watching down the road for the bus, when I happened to glance at a man parked on his scooter by the side of the road. He was wiggling something at me, and for a moment I didn't process what, and then I realized that he had his shorts open, and was wiggling THAT thing at me! Aughhhghhghhhhdhgjkalbdfjhkadsfhjfbjasd. I was totally disgusted, but I still had to catch the bus, which meant that I still had to look in that direction to see if the bus was coming so I could flag it down. It was an exercise in selective vision, where I just kind of had to block the man out of my view. This went on for an agonizing 5 or 10 minutes until the bus finally came, to my great relief. As soon as I stepped foot on the bus, it occurred to me that I know a couple of good humiliating things to yell at people if they are behaving inappropriately, and I really should have yelled some things to publicly disgrace the guy. So without further ado: Rebekah's Short Guide to Yelling at Perverts in Chinese!

1) Ni lao segui! = 'You old pervert!' Start the shaming by getting everyone's attention with this one. I've translated the word segui as pervert, but if you want to be totally literal it says color-ghost. I'm not sure about the 'color' part (although in Chinese culture they do associate the color yellow with things that are inappropriate or pornographic, kind of like "blue movies" in English, so maybe that has to do with it), but in Chinese 'ghost' also means 'devil,' so it seems like a pretty good thing to yell at someone bad.

2) Ni bu yao lian! = 'You have no shame!' (lit. 'you don't want face') In Chinese culture, it's very important not to lose face, and to maintain one's dignity. Therefore, to intentionally exhibit face-losing behaviors like exposing oneself in public is almost unthinkable...only a really shameless person doesn't care if they lose face.

3) Bu yao peng wo! = 'Don't touch me!' Hopefully it doesn't come to that, but it's a good expression to know.

4) Zou kai! = 'Go away!' 'Nuff said.

Birthday and weekend and anything else I can remember

2008-09-22T23:51:00.003+08:00

This past Thursday was my birthday, so there were all kinds of festivities throughout the day. For one, Patty told all of my classes that it was my birthday, and then made them sing Happy Birthday to me in English, Chinese, and Taiwanese. Consequently, I probably received as many Happy Birthday songs on Thursday as I have the past 10 or 11 birthdays combined. Fabulous! My school's director got me a cake, which we had before lunch. It was surprisingly realistically cake-like, which is rare in Asia. Then I had lunch and went to the introductory class of English Angels. The class was short because it was the first session, and afterwards the director busied himself demonstrating to me all of the facilities I could use to teach them. In addition to a computer and a projector and a big screen, our classroom has a karaoke machine. Naturally. I think the director really loves his own voice, because of course he just HAD to demonstrate the karaoke machine, and then he wanted me to sing a song too. Now, something I had at lunch must have disagreed with me, because at this point I was really nauseous and feverish and dizzy and generally feeling awful. I sang a little bit, and then tried to explain to the director that I felt sick and I really just wanted to rest and not sing or talk or anything. He decided that I was just sad because it was my birthday and I missed my hometown, and I had to do a lot of explaining to make him understand.

Patty covered for me in the afternoon while I sat on the sidelines, and it didn't take long for me to feel better. I made the students guess how old I was, and got answers ranging from 18 to 30. Hmm. Then we talked about how in America, you don't get to be 1 until a whole year after you are born. In Taiwan, you are 1 when you are born, then you become 2 when Chinese New Year passes, and when your next birthday comes, you turn 3. At least, I think that's how it goes. It is definitely different.

In the evening, my host sister Grace threw me a little birthday party. It was the first time I met her, and she's really nice. She even went to the restaurant beforehand to put up some decorations. After dinner, we had pseudo-cake, which was really muffins arranged in a circle, one with a candle in it. We asked Grace what the muffins were, and she said, "It's a traditional Taiwanese dessert...prawn muffins." Now, you think it sounds weird, but here in Kaohsiung everything has seafood in it, so you have to be ready for things like prawn muffins. Poor Maya is allergic to shellfish, and she has to be really careful because they are always sneaking into things. Anyway, Maya put her muffin aside and made a mental note not to eat it so she wouldn't die, when a dubious Gered asked Grace again exactly what kind of muffins they were. "Prawn muffins," she said. "P-L-U-M."

Oh. Well, they were very delicious, and I was certainly glad that they contained plums and not prawns. After dinner we went across the street to Birthday Park, where you are apparently supposed to go on your birthday, but it had just rained and it was dark so we only went and looked around for a minute. It was all right, though, because my birthday was pretty fabulous overall. I am the big 2-2...twice as old as my students. Sweet.

On Friday I think I slept all day...don't remember. But Saturday I went with Gered and his host family to pick up their nephew from his military base and bring him home for the weekend, which was fun. His family has a 9-year-old daughter named Isabella, who is incredibly hilarious, and we are totally pals now. Isabella and Andy (the nephew) spent the whole car ride home (~1 hr) teasing each other, which was very entertaining for me, as the three of us were together in the back seat. My favorite excerpt (translated and paraphrased for your convenience), on the topic of Isabella's rather round face:
Andy: You little fatty. You look like a puffer fish.
Isabella: I am not a puffer fish! You are a puffer fish. I am the moon.

During the course of the day, Isabella also: played Frisbee, played badminton, tried to do chin-ups on the bars at the base, played cards, made a cow puppet, played mancala, played Chinese checkers, played regular checkers, played Mamma Mia and sang, disappeared for a minute and came back with her face painted and a "tattoo" drawn down her arm, and danced with me on the light-up sidewalk at Urban Spotlight*, among other things. It is a busy life, being 9 years old.

*the hip downtown hangout in Kaohsiung...lots of food and drink places, live music, and everything is covered in multicolored lights

So Saturday was a really full day...then on Sunday I woke up feeling really sick and slept all day. It's okay though, because today I felt better, plus I went to the doctor and he gave me like 57382945783429 kinds of medicine to take at all different times of day, so surely I will be better in no time. He also told me not to talk too much, to which I say hahahahahahaha. I am a teacher. Wish me luck with that one.

Also, there is a new typhoon here, potentially one with a silly name. Basically, it is rainy out, and delightfully humid. Yes!

Chao hao!

2008-09-21T22:14:00.002+08:00

I learned from my laogong that people in Taiwan don't say ting hao ('quite good'), instead they say chao hao (something like 'super')! I like it.

Sorry for not posting this earlier, but I should mention that Kaohsiung was barely affected by the typhoon, so no need to be worried about me. The city is on the west side of the island, and typhoons all come from the east side, off the Pacific Ocean. Also, there are some really tall mountains in the center of Taiwan that shield western Taiwan from the force of the typhoon. At any rate, northeastern Taiwan got hit pretty badly, but down here all we had were a couple of really windy days and a bit of rain. It was actually pretty nice. After the typhoon left, the air was really gross - humid and heavy with pollution - and I wished the typhoon would come back. The pollution here can get pretty bad...it's just palpable in the air sometimes, and you can feel it settling on your skin. Ew.

So! At the beginning of this week, I spent a number of hours interviewing 3rd-6th graders at school for spots in the Little Angels, the school's elite group of English students. It is apparent to me that the whole concept of Little Angels is less to provide enrichment for advanced English students and more to give the school something to show off. Whatever.

Anyway, the auditions went like this: each student gives a speech in English to two of the local English teachers, who then ask some follow-up questions. The student then moves into the next room, where they have to face...dun dun dun...a NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER! ONE-ON-ONE! This was me. Naturally, most of the students were very nervous, so I threw them a couple of softball questions and tried to work up from there. I started with things that I knew they had practiced, like "what's your name?" and "how are you?" The answer to the latter question is, invariably, a robotic "I-am-fine-thank-you," sometimes with a little "and you?" tacked on the end. I think at some point I will do a lesson for my class in which I explain that there are other things to be besides fine, like "fabulous!" Once I got into more open-ended questions, the interviews got more interesting. When I asked, "what do you like to do?" one student cheerfully announced, "I like to hit my brother." This turned into a common follow-up question - after asking the students about their siblings, I would ask how they got along.

The funniest, though, was the one little girl who I could barely get to talk to me. I got her to tell me her name, but she stared at me blankly with every other question. I asked her what she liked to do, and when she didn't respond, I gave some prompts..."do you like to swim? read books? play baseball?" Finally, I got a very soft "bicycle." I responded with lots of enthusiasm and encouragement, but my further questions got more blank stares. Do you have brothers or sisters? Mumble. Do you have a brother? Head shake. Do you have a sister? Mumble. How old is your sister? Stare. Do you play with your sister, or do you fight? Long stare, finally followed by one whispered, barely audible word......

"Bicycle." Aaaaaaand the interview was over. Heard all I needed to hear.