Over the Halfway Point

We're now a little ways over the three month point. We're slowly getting to the end of my spin here. Also, apparently today is Teacher's Day in Taiwan. I've received a couple different cards and a bag of chocolates from a couple different students of mine.

So I have a question. Is child labor technically child labor if the children WANT to do the work? There are lots of times when I'm cleaning up after a class and the kids will immediately try to help me clean up and carry everything back to storage. I had a big box of blocks that we used to build houses for when we were reading the Three Little Pigs and at the end of class, I had to store everything away. I would have been happy to do all the work myself, but the children insisted on packing the blocks away and hauling the box back to storage themselves. Where does the willingness to do manual labor disappear after they get a bit older.

Sometimes I realize how many conveniences in America I took for granted. This week, our washing machine AND our shower water heater broke. I'm not experienced with hand-washing my clothes, so I've been putting off doing laundry for a while until the washing machine finally got fixed. As for the shower, I'm sorry, but I refuse to take a cold shower if I can help it. There were a few days at the beginning of this semester when I loved the cold showers, but now that it's getting cooler (finally), hot showers are the only way to go. Jeez, I'm spoiled.

I'm not feeling too good at the moment. It's just a cold, which I probably got from the children. As my sister would say, schools are like petri dishes. I'll give you guys pictures from my trip south of Hualien. A friend of mine took me on his motorcycle. It was my first time riding on a motorcycle. They go really fast and I could feel the power behind it! The scenery was absolutely gorgeous! It's like nothing I've ever seen in America!

We also went to see a move called Seediq Bale, a movie that is famous in Taiwan for showing the story about an aboriginal tribe's rebellion against their Japanese colonial occupiers. At least that's what I got out of it. The language of the movie was in the aboriginal language and Japanese, neither of which I understand. The subtitles were, of course, in Mandarin, so really I didn't understand what was going on at all. But it was pretty to look at, so I was happy.

This is a bouquet of flowers the tutoring student in the dance recital gave to me. I feel like I should have given some to her instead.

One of our kids had a birthday party last week. To celebrate, his mother brought a Spongebob birthday cake to the school. Here, Spongebob is known as Hai Mien Bao Bao and is insanely popular. At least one thing hasn't changed from America.

View from a lookout point over some cliffs.

The lookout point's architecture is Japanese-style, at least that's what I've been told.

This is the beach that we stopped at. The sand here is very dark, almost black when it's wet, but at least this has sand instead of boulders like the shore I usually stop at. Although one good thing I have to say about the boulders is that they don't leave sand in your shoes.

George and I. George is the guy who gave me a ride on his motorcycle. I wanted to see more of Taiwan and he wanted to give a foreigner a tour, so it was a win-win situation.

These are pictures from another rest area/lookout point. A wooden structure had flowers hanging from the roof.

We had lunch over at someone's house on Sunday. This was our feast.

Behold the cleanest dog in Taiwan!

We've been having so many storms that the tides have really gone up. I suspect part of it is because of the typhoon that passed south of us.

To the Show

I'm way tired tonight, so I will make this a quick post (I always say that and they almost always turn out long).

Yesterday morning, I helped out at a Primary activity for my church. The kids were decorating the covers of notebooks for themselves. They had a choice of several designs; they could glue on random shapes or they could make characters from different video games. Last week, I made a Spongebob Squarepants cover to demonstrate to the kids what they would be doing. A lot of them really liked it and wanted to make them immediately, but they had to wait a week. Too bad!

Later on that night, I went to a dance recital that one of my tutoring kids was in. Her mother gave me tickets, so I was happy to go. I invited one of my friends from the church to go with me since I didn't want to go alone or have to take a taxi since he has a scooter. The recital was absolutely gorgeous and their costumes were amazing! The guy I went with, George, took a lot of pictures of the costumes. I will have to see if I can get a few of them so I can put them here. He was taking pictures during the performance, which I couldn't do because my camera isn't cool enough and we were too far away for me to take clear pictures. I got a couple of pics of the entire dancing group afterwards, though.

I think my favorite dances were the ones between two dancers representing fire and water. Their outfits were great (fire had a red wig and waved flags around and water had dry ice floating all around the stage and blue streamers she waved around) and they were amazing dancers. The second half was filled with ballet dancers, who also did a beautiful job. It makes me think of my mom, who always wanted a ballet dancer as a daughter. My older sister and I took ballet lessons for a while, but neither of us intended to do it professionally. Maybe my mother will have better luck with my niece, Maddy. After the recital, George said that before he had seen the ballet, he hadn't really liked it, but now he wants his future children to all take ballet!

Here's the group at the Primary activity with all of our notebooks.

I helped the little girl with her Spongebob notebook. The woman on the other side is the girl's mother and also the nursery teacher that helps me in the nursery on Sundays. And by help, I mean she mostly teaches them since my lesson manual hasn't arrived yet and the little children will only pay attention to some crazy American speaking to them in English for so long.

The Spongebob notebook I made in preparation for this activity.

One of the kids at the activity was having a birthday, so we got some cake. This is one of the few cakes I've seen that has this much frosting on it.

The dance group. The blond haired character to the far right was a gag role. She/he/it wore a gigantic skirt during the performance from which a whole bunch of little girls came out and danced. I'm pretty sure my tutoring student was one of them.

George and I on the stage after the recital was over.

My tutoring student in her outfit. I saw a few other students from the preschool in the building, but they were all in the audience.

Steph and a gecko she caught earlier today. The little guy was very fast.

Moon Festival Weekend

After this week, I'll be happy if I never see a circle again. This week's theme was circles and for my Wednesday thru Friday activities, I had the kids trace and cut out pages for Circle Books. During the classes, the kids focused on making the pages, and then I spent about three hours stapling the pages together and making sure each child had all the pages. This week is holes, so we're talking about foods with holes, pipes, and stuff like that. I'm planning on having little to no crafts this week. The other English teacher does enough crafts for the both of us, anyway. I prefer games with big groups of small children rather than crafts. You don't have as big of messes to clean up.

This weekend was the Moon Festival, which people celebrate by having tons of barbecues. I wondered if I should feel a little guilty about celebrating this weekend while everyone at home was all sad about September 11th. I read a few articles about people remembering September 11th and felt a bit better. I remember exactly what grade and class I was in when the attack happened. My mom and sister came and picked me up after school that day because they were worried.

Anyway, I didn't want this post to be about that. Steph was away in Taipei for the weekend. I got invited to two barbecues, both held by church families. It was interesting to see the kinds of things that the Chinese barbecue compared to Americans. They have the basics, like hot dogs and chicken (mostly for the children) and then for the adults, its squid, bacon wrapped around onion sticks, and a meat called Tianbula. It doesn't have an English name since it isn't really exported to any English-speaking countries. The fact that there was a full moon this weekend had special significance, too. If there's a full moon, it means everything is complete.

It was very relaxing, at least. The kids were all playing while the adults were cooking and I had the chance to try and listen in on their conversations and practice understanding what they were talking about, with varied success. I have plenty of pics from both events so you can see what it was like. They really know how to stretch out the cooking so that you can eat all you want, but it takes longer to get full so you can enjoy more. It took us three hours to cook all the food during my second barbecue, but it was delicious!

One thing I find funny is that the people with dogs as pets shave the fur on their tales except for the ends. They have pom-poms! Like lions! It's a style that they think looks cute. They don't really have a beauty standard for dogs.

Earlier today the missionaries invited me to go out with them to explore a giant temple close by our church building. It's the largest one I've seen since I've been here. Apparently, it was built in the memory of a woman who had a saint-like status. I took a lot of pics. One of the people working there said that we had to ask the God for permission before taking pictures. You do this by placing your hands together and bowing them a couple of times. People who haven't asked the God for permission sometimes find that the pictures they took of the inside of the temple have disappeared. I love stories like that, but when I checked my camera, all of mine were still there. I did ask for permission, I just wasn't sure if you had to do it every time. Maybe the God recognized my awesomeness and was pleased, so he/she allowed me to keep my pics. I'm truly honored!

The parents of my tutoring kids have been giving me tons of mooncakes for the festival. They come in really nice gift sets and boxes. I've been slowly eating through them throughout the entire weekend. I swear these people are trying to fatten me up. XD

This is a more traditional style of mooncake. You might notice the others are more rounded and the insides are filled with different stuff. The most common fillings are red and green beans, I think.

A couple of pictures from my usual Saturday excursion to the ocean.

On my way home from the beach, I spotted a farm with some turkeys. One of the turkeys was waddling around outside, so I stopped to take a picture. Her husband wasn't too happy with this development and paced back and forth behind the fence. There was a goose back there too, honking its head off. If I hadn't been protected, I probably would have gotten torn apart by some pretty pissed off birds!

We spotted a Ferrari on our way from the first barbecue. So of course, we all had to stop and take pictures with it.

There's workout equipment in just about every park here. They take fitness seriously.


The clouds and the mountains were actually a lot brighter than show in this picture, but I thought that the amount of exposure in this one looked cool.




This is one of the pieces of grilled squid in my bowl. I've actually tried grilled squid as an appetizer in a sushi restaurant in Illinois, so I wasn't new to it.

The middle gate to the inside of the temple, marked by a red gate, is strictly the entryway for the God. Us mere mortals are supposed to get in by the side doorways.



A statue of Confucius. The native Chinese missionary said that it was strange that the statue would be at this level since it elevates Confucius to a God-like being, but he was really just a man whose teachings the Chinese respected.

These murals depict stories. I just thought they looked pretty.





This hall had huge, gorgeous statues. I find it interesting that each one has its own unique face and thing that it's holding.