A Couple Days of Sleepiness

As the title suggests, these last few days (although if I think of it, maybe the last week), I've felt more down than usual. It's not all sleepiness, just a general lack of energy and loneliness. The people here are very cheerful and friendly, but homesickness hit me hard this week. That, and my boss told me I wasn't being stern enough with the 3-year-old kids and that is why I can't control them. It isn't in me to be a mean teacher though. I just need to build my confidence back up.

Saturday I went to the McDonald's again, this time with my camera so I could get a picture of their menu. Actually, it looks pretty much like an American menu, just with Chinese writing. Still no riceburger, tho. I sat next to a teenage girl who was looking at some pages copied out of an English textbook. I started asking her about them and next thing I knew, we had traded Facebook info. Look at me, being all social. Wouldn't Mom be proud.

On my way back, my chain dislodged itself from the gear. I'm not someone with a lot of mechanical skills, so I had no idea what to do at first. I was walking around, trying to find a bike repair shop when it occurred to me how ridiculous it was that a 22-year-old, summa cum laude graduate couldn't fix her own freakin' bike. So I tugged at the chain and reset it, but my celebration was short lived since my fingers were covered with oil. I stopped at a nearby restaurant with an outdoor sink to wash as much of the oil off my hands and then headed home.

Later on, Steph and I went to a church potluck. I was planning on taking crackers with some kind of spread. Mom suggested that I should take peanut butter since it's actually a very American food and not a whole lot of people are familiar with it outside the US. They had a bunch of delicious foods there. I took pics of them, even some of the ones I didn't know. Someone had brought Stinky Tofu. It smells disgusting and tastes exactly how it smells. I tried it once and I wasn't a fan, but apparently tons of people here love it.

Today after church, I went up another bike trail to have a look around out of boredom and to try and cheer myself up. The mountains are always so beautiful, but some people's obnoxious dogs kept barking at me and even started chasing me on my bike! I've found that if you yell at them, they usually back down but still! Some people should chain up their dogs if they know they are going to act like that. I know they weren't just strays because a guy came out and started yelling at the dogs like they were his.

One of the things that I miss about America is being able to get TV dinners or stuff like Pasta-roni; things I lived off of in college. These people have aisles dedicated to every spice known to man and even more with shelves and shelves of soda crackers and dessert crackers, but there's not one Hamburger Helper or TV dinner in sight. If you are lucky, you will track down a bag of frozen chicken nuggets, but they aren't really high quality and have a weird texture. There's an entire three shelves for cereal, peanut butter, and jelly at the Amart (equivalent to the Walmart). This is why I don't cook much. The ingredients are all in Chinese and the meat they sell is so weird. Even the beef has a different texture, though that might be because it's a different cut or something. All the other meat they have is chicken feet or liver or cow intestines. I miss good ole' ground beef and hot dogs.

Actually, there are a couple of hot dog stands at the night market, so I stop by and get one if I'm in the mood. For all the other days of the week, there's bakery rolls, PB&J sandwiches, and Chinese Ramen (actually much better than American Ramen; it tastes better and has a spicy kick to it.)

Here is a pic of my meal to prove that it's really not that much different than in America.
At the potluck Saturday night. To the left is my offering of crackers and peanut butter. To the right are rice patties, which actually go very well with peanut butter.

These are deviled eggs with tomato-pigs on them. Aren't they so cute?!!
Grapes and sweet potato cakes on the "purple table."
A pic of my bowl after I was done picking out my food. There's no such thing as separating flavors here. Everything is meant to be eaten together. I know a few people who can't stand it when anything on their plate touches who would have a heart attack if they saw this. The books are my dictionary and notebook. Even while eating, I study Chinese as often as possible.
They had a kind of grapefruit called "youzi." The kids were taking the peels and turning them into hats, so I did too.
There's a graveyard down the street from our house. The tombs look very cool and some of them have offerings of incense and other stuff. Others are either destroyed or look like they haven't been cleaned in a while. Actually, there is no set path through the graveyard. Most of it is overgrown grass and weeds. There was a tiny road I went on, but there was no other way to get to some of these tombs. I'm tempted to set up a stake out for ghosts here when October rolls around.




Isn't placing a rock on top of a gravestone a Jewish custom? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Pics from the bike path.



I found a cool-looking temple while in the mountains. This crooked tree was in their courtyard.
On the top of the roof are three giant characters, but I didn't think to get a pic of them. I guess I was too tired from the ride up there.

A birthday cake from another church activity. They don't have very much frosting around here, so they use fruit on top of the cakes instead.

After the Typhoon

So over the weekend, everyone here was really busy preparing for the typhoon (which passed south of Hualien, so we were safe). On Saturday, we were tying everything on the playground down and moving as much stuff inside as we could so that if there were strong winds, it wouldn't be blown all over the place. On Sunday night, I stayed with the family of one of the kids I tutor. They were kind enough to take me in so I wouldn't be alone and terrified if the typhoon hit our house. Actually the apartment Steph and I stay in probably wouldn't last long in a typhoon, but the concrete school below it could, so if I needed to, I could have moved down there. Truth be told, I wasn't really nervous, more curious and excited. I've never been in a typhoon. One of the elder missionaries told me that's exactly how he was during his first typhoon. He and his companion were staying in a house with tiny windows that they were always trying to look out of to get a glimpse outside.

Steph was staying with a family that she knows really well, so I locked up everything and turned off the gas before I left. Our gas tank is outdoors, so if the wind blew the tank away while the gas was on, we would lose all of it! Me and the teenager I tutor talked during the evening and swapped pictures from America and Malaysia, where she had been during a family vacation. The resort she stayed at was a "Club Med" resort, and trust me when I say it sounded relatively cheap and amazing. When i get back to the states, I'll have to convince my folks to take a vacation there.

So the typhoon came and went during the night. I slept like a rock, but I guess the wind and rain couldn't have been too terrible. Still, because it's been raining with few breaks, the fields all around the city are flooded. I can't imagine what that is going to do to the crops. What kind of things do the farmers around here have to do to recover from really big storms?

I took a long walk after I got back home and found a biking trail up by the mountains. The clouds looked so cool that I wanted to just keep walking and look at everything! But...lemme tell you about a couple of inconveniences I've experienced while being here:

1) No trash cans. Or at least, very few. In America, there's a trash can on just about every corner. Not so much, here. There are recycling bins around the 7-Elevens and Family Marts, but most of the time, you have to carry your trash around for ages until you find something.\

2) Where the heck are the bathrooms?! I was trying to find one during my walk, and I asked around (in Chinese, yay!) where I could find one, but there weren't any in the restaurants or 7-Elevens! What do the workers do if they have to go to the bathroom? Are there bathrooms in the Buddhist temples? The preschool has lots of bathrooms, but that's understandable since we can expect the kids to have bladders the size of walnuts!

Oh well, I'm still enjoying everything else there is to experience here. I took a couple videos of the waves when they were getting really high along the shoreline. I will try and post them here. There were guards everywhere and they had blocked off the paths to get to the ocean. These people don't fool around!

Sometimes when you walk around, you'll notice paw prints in the concrete. Taiwan has a ton of stray dogs. I think that some of them may have walked through the concrete after it was poured and was still fresh.

The clouds after the typhoon.
This dog started following me during my walk. It broke my heart because I wanted to pet it but it was wet and probably filthy. Poor thing. :(
Our rooftop got a little bit of flooding. It made it awkward to walk around the back so I could turn off the gas.

This bridge had all the signs of the zodiac. I found Aries and took a pic. Go rams!

I think this is a drainage ditch in case there's a landslide from the mountain. Or whatever you call something like that.

The headpiece for the trail I followed. Why does the character's head on top look so familiar?

I stopped at a Buddhist temple on the way back and got a few neat pics of the inside. They always have the best artwork!

Another temple, but I don't know if it's Buddhist. This is also a view of its back. The front view was more impressive, but I couldn't find a path from where I was at to get around to look at it. :(

To the Mountains

On Sunday, after church, Steph wanted to go up to the mountains. Never wanting to miss the chance to explore, I went with her and we took a path up near a Buddhist college, when things really started to change. If you go outside of the city, further than the gardens and fields surrounding the school, it's seriously another world. It's so green and the mountains are huge up close and covered in plants I've never seen before. We both thought it was like entering a fairy tale. The mountain village we passed through was even called Eden Paradise (spelled Pardaise on the sign).

We kept going up the path, getting more and more tired as we went, but the thought of how much fun that ride down was going to be kept us going. So we kept it up until we hit the end of the trail, which opened up to a spring where people were swimming. There was a tour that was going over a dam and further upwards, but I stopped at the spring where a group of people were barbecuing. They wanted to give us fish and shrimp (they taught me how to chew on places like the head and the legs so you got the flavor; you spit out the shell) they were catching. They had shrimp, mushrooms, pork, fish, fish, and more fish. Steph went on to explore where the diving group was going while I stayed behind to talk to the barbecuing people. They were all very friendly and it gave me some great practice speaking in Chinese. Unfortunately, they kept trying to give me Heineken Beer, saying that OMG Taiwan beer is the best beer in the world. I politely declined, explaining that my religion doesn't allow beer and they grudgingly accepted it.

After that, we decided to go home before it got dark. The ride down was extremely fun and it felt great because I was soaked in sweat from the long ride up.

Fast forward a few days to today and I have more to share. Across the hall from our apartments is another pair of rooms meant, I guess, for more teachers. One is used for school storage and the other is an empty room. The door to that room is always locked, but I was curious, so I tried to see if I could open a window and crawl in. It turns out I could. Inside was a big pile of pencil shavings, a pencil sharpener, a bag of pencils, English pamphlets for tutoring kids, and a bunch of skirt hangers in the closet. Figuring no one would miss them, I took the pencils, sharpener, and skirt hangers. I'm practically a pillager, but at least my skirts won't be wrinkled now.

Now I'm just sitting around, planning for tomorrow's lessons so I don't wake up feeling anxious like I usually do. I always have the grave expectation that I'm going to flop when I get into the classroom, that the kids won't pay attention and that the teachers will think I'm a waste of time. I think I might be jinxing myself. If anyone has a piece of advice on how to keep the attention of 3-5-yr.-olds, feel free to speak up. We have a field trip we are going on tomorrow to a nearby festival. That should be awesome.

There's a lightning storm going on outside, not overhead but off in the distance. It's weird because the sky right above us is clear. Oh well, it probably has to do with this tropical climate.

This is an orchard of either Longan or Lychee fruit. Steph wondered how people harvested the fruit. I'm pretty sure they just climb the trunks. They have to be strong enough to withstand the typhoons here, so I don't see why they wouldn't hold up the human body.

Magnificent view of the mountains. The further in you go, the higher they rise.
A lizard we encountered. If you can't see it, it just above the gray part. There's a yellow streak on its back.

Me with the woman I was talking to the most at the barbecue. I can't remember her name, but she was awesome.

This is the dam that the tour group and Stephanie were going over to explore further up.