新年快樂!

Happy 2009, everyone!

Things That Are Going Well

In which several Good Things are Enumerated

Number One: We have been graced with the gloriousness of a new-fangled and hi-falutin' water heater.  It 'most glows with freshness and practicality and, most of all, not-being-broken.  We now are the fortunate recipients of such amenities as water pressure and warm showers.  All praise be to those that deserve it.

Number Two: My delightful conversation partner, Sarah, introduced me to a gentleman friend of hers (more of a proletarian most times, he hastens to assure me) with whom I enjoyed an absorbing dinner last Sunday.  He is Taiwanese, but spent last year at the University of Chicago studying public policy.  We seem to have a great deal to talk about, and I am quite pleased to have another Taiwanese friend.  He has promised to help me with my Chinese.  I think he will be a firm teacher with strict goals, which is beyond useful for me right now.  Exactly what I need.

Number Three: My classes are going splendidly.  There are occasionally hiccoughs, but primarily things are running quite smoothly.  I did a story-writing exercise with my A3 class today, and I think I may have actually managed to explain the importance of continuity in tense and topic.  Whether they follow through with it is another matter entirely, but it was nice to have their attention all focussed on the thing to which I was pointing.  They left the room laughing, five minutes after the bell rang.  Another teacher sat in on the earlier part of my class today and mentioned before-hand that he'd been told I was one of the best.  I am sure that's at least a little hyperbole on the Academic Director's part, but it was lovely to hear.  

In Short: Things are going well.

Drunk and Incompetent

I should never have gone in the first place.  I don't like bars, I don't like drunks, and I don't particularly like being up very late in the company of the latter at a table in the former.  But it was a farewell party for a friend/co-worker, and I'd said I would attend, so I did.  We'd been through a rough week: the water heater in our apartment has been broken for about two weeks, and this week the landlady sent someone in to fix it.  After many, many miscommunications about the time and the keys and the apartment number (they replaced the water heater in a different apartment, but not ours), a workman showed up, punched a hole in the wall, turned the lights on and off, and left.  Today another three came, punched a couple more holes in the wall, and now we can get hot water, but only if the sink in the bathroom is on at the same time as the shower.  Katy and I got home from our respective schools and had a lovely talk about hardcore music and the debatable merits of being angry, so perhaps I was not in the right frame of mind to be patient by the time we left.  

The friend -- let's call him Bob -- was obviously drunk by the time I arrived.  He was banging on the table with enough force to knock glasses over, and somehow still being served and not being thrown out.  I sat on the other side of the table, ordered some mulled wine (first experience - not bad), and tried to be entertaining and entertained instead of appalled and angry.  I don't think I succeeded very well.  Bob kept apologizing to me, but as the evening wore on, he got less and less coherent about it, until he was just saying "I'm sorry," at regular intervals, without anything in between.  Finally, after lots of shouting and banging, he came around the table and sat next to me, leaning in.  "Rowan, I'm sorry," he said.  "For what?" I asked.  "Just, I'm sorry."  I looked across the table.  This appeared to be the wrong thing to do.  He grabbed my face with his hand and turned my head back toward him.

Now, maybe it's the teaching, maybe it's the brief amount of time I spent learning the basics of street fighting (cheat, cheat early, often, and ruthlessly), or maybe it's the ridiculous ways people tend to see me, but I don't have any trouble communicating when I'm really, truly angry.  "Bob," I said.  I did not yell.  The guy across the table heard me and immediately started paying attention, but I'm pretty sure no one else did.  "Bob, if you touch me again I will disembowel you."  He dropped his hand and cocked his head to the side.  "Really?" he said, like he was questioning the answer to a confusing math problem.  "Yes," I said. "Really."  The guy across the table said, "Bob-" and Bob said, "No.  I want her to kill me."  I decided it was time for me to leave, so I slid under the table and shook hands with everyone and toddled off to the MRT.

Now.  Can anyone tell me what is so attractive about drinking to excess?

More Snapshots

Once again, my loyal readers, it has been far too long.  It's not quite a month since I last put finger to keyboard in an effort to catalogue my activities here for the enjoyment of those elsewhere.  I'm sure you've all gotten quite bored in the mean time.

It's solidly autumn here now, although the locals keep telling us it's winter.  The weather has been pretty consistently under the 75ºF, 23ºC range.  It fluctuates pretty wildly - in the morning it's been around 12ºC (that's 53ish in ºF), gets up to 21ºC in the afternoon, and then back down to 11 or 12ºC at night.  The rain mostly seems to come in the evening these days, usually while I'm teaching.

I was elated at the US election results.  Everyone was talking about it in the days leading up to the election, but since then there's been nary a word.  Katy and I sometimes talk about the things going on in the States, but most of the other people here seem pretty unaffected.  Of course, I'm the only FT in my school from the US, which might have something to do with it.  All the other FTs are from Canada, England, South Africa, or Australia.  

This has been the month of getting sick.  Katy's been fighting a cold for the last forever or so, and I picked it up last week.  I'm almost entirely recovered now, but for the residual cough.  I got a jacket and a scarf for the cooler parts of the day, and felt like a wimp doing so, but I'd rather be warm and feel foolish than be sick.  Our apartment isn't heated, but so far that hasn't been a problem.  I'm hoping it will remain a non-issue.

My students are wonderful.  They're teaching me a lot about teaching, and about learning.  Each of my classes responds to a different style, and it's exciting and challenging.  It's incredibly rewarding every time I learn what works well for a class.  Last week one of my classes refused to leave the classroom when the bell rang because they wanted to keep playing the vocabulary game we were in the middle of playing.  Made my week.

I will try for more frequent updates.  I have more to say if I'm not trying to cover a month all at once.

Snapshots Between Classes

My eternal apologies for being so silent for so long, my most estimable and patient friends and kin.  In the last two weeks, my teaching hours have gone from 12 to 21, bringing my total hours on paper to 27 per week.  This estimate, of course, does not take into account the preparation time, nor does it make clear that I've been working seven days out of every week.  My time for doing other things, in short, is in short supply.  This log suffers.

I find myself with a bit of time now, though, and will do my best to rectify the abominable void that has replaced news of me in the past weeks.  

I went up to Danshui with a fairly new acquaintance, Basharat (from England) to see the sunset and wander.  The sunset was lovely, although Bash missed it.  The sun appeared to be crashing into the horizon very slowly.

I got a new M1 class, and oh my stars and garters they are cute.  Challenging, but cute.  They're the first class to be really affectionate - they all give me hugs.  They're all quite rambunctious, too.

Halloween was also cute.  Uneventful, but cute.  Rita, the Sanchong librarian, decorated the Sanchong school rather too well, I think.  

Jenny (Katy's conversation partner), Sarah (mine), Katy and I all went to Yinghe a while ago and managed to find a place that would let us throw some of our own pottery.  It turned out pretty well.  We got to choose the glaze.  I will always miss kick-wheels and the experimentation of making my own glazes in Ms. Parson's class.  But they turned out alright.

We went to dinner with Chris and Debbie and Chris's class for his birthday.  There was a very cute little girl there who had perfected the art of eating soup.  

If this entry is disjointed and flighty, forgive me.  There is much to tell and not enough time to devote to telling it.  I am sacrificing quality for quantity.

The weather has cooled significantly.  Today was lovely - in the 70s and mostly sunny, breezy, dry.  It's been raining a lot.  

Yuan Shan

I have been tragically unable to find a mask for Halloween.  This weighs on my thoughts unexpectedly, since I haven't cared at all about Halloween for quite some time.  Madison's festivities were not the sort I prefer, and I forgot that it can be about having fun in a good, old-fashioned, sans-tear-gas kind of way.  I know there are masks, but they don't seem to be in my area.  Ideally, I would find some basic masquerade eye-mask and add ears and whiskers and wear black, but perhaps this dearth is a blessing in disguise.  It's still routinely 80º here, and a black sweater and black pants would probably turn me into a cat passing out from heat stroke.  I'll content myself with giving my A3 class Halloween related fake tattoos (if they want them).

My editing job is going well.  Last week I spent three hours rewriting a version of Rapunzel that my employer had on file.  The Taiwanese get confused by Western fairy tales.  "I don't understand," said my boss.  "How could she live for so many years if she was tied to a tree?" and "But how can he see again if his eyes have been poked out?"  These are fair points.  In the finished version, she was merely banished to the desert, and his eyes were not so much poked out as occluded by the thorns.  When she cried on him, the thorns were washed away.  

On Sunday, Katy and I went to Yuan Shan (Round Mountain - everyone says it with a bit of a smirk, so I assume "mountain" is sort of a euphemism for "hill with big ideas") and walked around.  About 1/5 of the way up the stairs, we stopped to take pictures and were overtaken by a gentleman who said in clear, heavily accented English, "It is so beautiful," and nodded to us.  I asked him if he came every day, and he said, "Yes, for more than 15 years."  He climbed on, and we continued taking pictures, but when we got to the next little clearing, he was sitting on a bench waiting for us.  He beckoned us over, and offered to lead us around the mountain.  This turned out to be a very good thing.  The paths on the mountain were warrenous.  He took us to the very top and showed us the tiny marker that indicated the peak, then wandered with us for a while.  He told us his name was Huà Yèfǔ, or George.  He worked for the China Times until he retired twenty years ago.  He said we could call him Huà Sir, which is a charming combination of English and Chinese.  Eventually, he took us to a place where he said we could get food ("It's free!") and something to drink.  I assumed he meant some kind of cafe or temple tourist something, but he led us down into yet another little clearing and shouted to the still out of sight occupants, "Chuān yīfu! Chuān yīfu!"  ("Put on clothes! Put on clothes!") I choked a little trying not to laugh.  When we got to the clearing, there were four or five shirtless elderly gentlemen and their wives all gathered laughing and talking and cooking and eating.  They have a little semi-permanent tent set up where they go every Sunday to have a potluck and drink coffee and whiskey and tea.  After lunch (we were, of course, invited, stuffed, and encouraged to "make ourselves at home"), the men all went off to play cards around a rickety old card table, and the women sat down and discussed a number of things I didn't catch, although some of it was about the two waiguoren in their midst.

The mountain (or hill with delusions of grandeur) itself was lovely.  There were enormous butterflies in iridescent black and brown and blue, and flowers, and greenery.  Every turn had a surprising little plaza with a couple playing tennis or a group singing karaoke.  Some of the plazas were deserted, and I liked those best of all (Katy will say to this: "You would").  There were funny little fuzzy snails and dragonflies and birds.  I didn't notice when the traffic sounds faded because the birds were so loud.

Katy and I had to leave, but George gave us his phone number so that when we are next in the area we can call him up and have him take us around a museum thing.  He kept calling it the President's house, but it sounded like it was no longer inhabited.  

We went home, showered, and went to a farewell party for some of her co-workers, after which I headed south to enjoy some tea in what I was told was a traditional tea house.  It was quite peaceful, apart from the rowdy crowd with whom I sat.  

We have had more adventures since, but for the sake of getting this post up, I will relate them in the next.

Symbolism

This is the top of a package of instant noodles that I bought for myself back when we didn't have a cook pot.  That symbol you're offended by? That means it's vegetarian.  I look for that symbol when I wander through the night markets, hoping to find a meal that doesn't include beef or pork.  It's an odd symbol to want to find, among the Hanzi characters of Taiwan and the Katakana characters that are sometimes scattered among the Japanese restaurants.  It's strange to look around and say to myself, "No, that means mutton, and that means fish...Ah, there, that means I can eat it!  Only if you flip it around and turn it a bit, it also means Very Bad Things."  The phrase "cognitive dissonance" comes to mind.  So I looked it up.  Turns out it has a pretty long and colorful history, but its existence here is mainly Buddhist. 

Speaking of history, Friday was Double Ten day here, so there were Taiwanese flags everywhere.  Katy and I went to the National Museum and looked at a lot of different kinds of art.  I bought a book of old Chinese paintings, hoping to learn more about drawing trees that don't look utterly foolish.  It started raining on the way there, and we caught a rainbow out the window of the bus.  While we were there, we met Jim, a docent at the museum who was (are you reading carefully?) a friend of the gentleman who is friends with my uncle who lives in Virginia.  My uncle got me in touch with Mr. Paxton, who suggested I ask for Jim if I was ever at the museum.  Jim, when we met him, asked if he could give our email addresses to a relative of his who was coming to Taiwan and wanted to know more about teaching here.  So now we also are in contact with Ray.  I'm going to need a chart soon.

In other news, I've posted pictures of my M2 class (aren't they cute?) performing for the camera.  I also took a picture of Rita, the librarian at the Sanchong school, and had pictures taken with Elegance, the manager of the Sanchong school.

On Sunday we went with Jenny (Katy's language partner, remember?) to the beach.  I always forget how much I miss large bodies of water until I'm standing on the shore of one.  There was a group of people drumming under a tent, and a woman flinging herself around in some kind of wild dance.  We walked  up and down the beach and teased the waves (we lost - you almost always do) and found strange life-forms in odd colors.

I came back and went to meet Marc, a teacher from School 8, who helped me buy an external hard-drive and pointed me towards a lot of movies (probably more than I can really watch in 3 months).  The hard-drive will come in handy in a month or so, when the new MacBooks finally reach Taiwan.  I am patient, I swear.

Spoor

For those of you who missed it, I've updated Spoor.

Animals and Children

Animals and Children

There are certain computer and video games in which you have to travel through an area using the information found in a journal left behind by some eccentric loner with occasionally very poor handwriting.  I got a little notebook to take notes in about my classes - not the official class notebooks in which I write my finished lesson plans, so I don't have to worry about making mistakes.  It was intended to be a book full of rough outlines of my lesson plans.  It's turning into that Eccentric Guide in a Spidery Hand.  It contains obscure phrases that correspond to certain computers which must be turned on in a certain order.  It stores the phone numbers of important people who can help you on your way.  It has mysterious admonitions in different colored ink, and occasional notes about the local language.  There are maps that only make sense if you're standing on a certain street.  And it's all in a little plastic-jacketed notebook graced by two stylized monochrome bears and a yellow bird.  The text on the front says: "a cute little milk&charcoal bear."  The bird says hello.

I started my A10 class since our last update.  It went very smoothly.  They're very advanced English speakers.  We talked about concepts like have to vs. got to vs. should and must.  I also have a job editing textbooks that starts tomorrow.  I don't yet know how that will go, but it's extra income doing nitpicky work that I can enjoy without giving it my soul.  More on that as I know more.

Katy got a little sick about a week and a half ago, but I'm managing to so far stay healthy.  Expect news of my ill health next week, now that I've made that claim.  Schools are breeding grounds for illness, and I have two schools, plus whatever bugs Katy brings back from hers.  Fortunately, fresh orange juice is readily available (and I'm thinking of getting a juicer and making it myself, we'll see) on the way to the MRT station at Minquan, so we're getting plenty of vitamin C.  Also, we have lots of garlic to put in our food.

Our food, which we're cooking ourselves, now.  We bought a wok, a sauce pan, and a rice cooker, and those are really all we need.  The Wellcome supermarket (I did not spell that wrong, there are two Ls in the name) has a pretty decent selection of vegetables to put in our stirfried concoctions.  Right now we've got carrots, pea pods, some kind of sprout that doesn't shrivel and die (or vanish) upon contact with heat, a very hearty cabbage that needs to be cooked for a long time, and some stringy mushrooms.  I'm hoping to find some spinach sometime soon, although I'm not sure what to do with it here.  It's not really a stirfry vegetable.  The supermarket also sells a lot of tofu, broccoli, tomatoes, and various other vegetables that I may have seen once in a dream.  We do most of our cooking at night, throwing rice into the Supa Fine rice cooker and vegetables into the wok and mixing them all up later.  Katy wanted me to point out that she also cooks.  I have proof, for those of you who doubt.  She made a very good dinner with carrots and other vegetables, and nothing was burned.

She and I and her conversation partner, Jenny, went to the Taipei zoo on Sunday last.  She told us it was the largest zoo in Asia.  They had no cephalopods.  I was deeply disappointed.  Nevertheless, it was a beautiful place.  We took the MRT there, and used our MRT cards to pay for admission.  These Easy Cards (a rough English translation of the Chinese casual way of referring to them) are possibly the most convenient things in the world.  We saw the Formosan animals first, which Jenny was kind enough to tolerate, but she was the most excited about the penguins.  I thought the lion and cub were entertaining, but the zoo's very colorful version of Chicago's Cows sort of took the cake.  It was a long trip, and we were tired when we got home, but it was fun.  Jenny seems very charming and friendly.  

Today is "Double Ten Day" ("Shuāng Shí Jié" in Chinese) which is Taiwan's national celebration of the ultimate collapse of the Qing Dynasty.  Everyone gets the day off.  Fireworks, military parades (probably what I saw them practicing for when I walked through the Art Park), etcetera.  Katy and I are going to the National Palace Museum.  We've heard good things.

Things That Aren't Classes

We had a movie night on Wednesday at our apartment. Joel and Gill and Dave came over and we watched The Sting, which I had never seen. It was fun to have people over - made me feel like we actually live somewhere. We had another movie night last night at the home of Georgia and Cat, two of Katy's co-workers. We watched The Princess Bride, because no one doesn't like that movie.

On Friday, I did some laundry (which I hung in my closets with the doors open - laundry dries in about 24 hours here, unless it's fabric like denim, in which case it takes more like 30 hours), got some groceries (tomatoes, scary individual cheese slices, and sprouts !sprouts!), made myself a sandwich, and decided I'd walk to meet Katy at her MRT station near Shilin.  The first thing I passed when I walked north of the Minquan/Linsen intersection where I usually turn for the MRT was a pretty building that looked like a temple.  For all I know it could have been a tchotchke shop.  There was a restaurant that had three bird cages outside, and one of them had birds the restaurant manager called "qise" birds, or seven color birds.  They were very pretty and not at all frightened.  The other cages had canaries and finches, but I'd passed them by the time I thought to take a picture.

I walked up to the Art Park, which has clearly seen better days.  Nevertheless, it was nice to be walking in a park.  It smelled like a park, which was nice.  It smelled like 4:00 in a park on a late summer day, and since it was 4:00 in a park on a late summer day, it was a very appropriate smell.  I forget how things are connected until something is familiar and it strikes me as odd.

There was something going on in the military complex next to the park - some kind of rehearsal or drill or something.  I took a few clandestine pictures (I wasn't the only one), listened to the music for a while, and watched them twirl their rifles like batons.  They were very good at it.

I passed the Art Museum itself, which was pretty cool, and the Taipei Story House.  I hung out in another park for a while, watching the airplanes fly overhead and watching some little boy throw his sister's shoes in the sand.  She didn't seem to mind.  After a while I headed north again to cross the river towards Shilin.  I took a bunch of pictures of the clouds (they were very pretty) and set my camera on a wall to take a picture of some leaves.  When I turned around, there was a gentleman in a shocking state of deshabille, casually doing his business there on the side of the road.  I made a hasty exit.  This was clearly not the place for young ladies of delicate temperament.

Every time I pass beneath a bridge here, I want very much for it to be an aqueduct.  It never is, but I can pretend.  This isn't Taiwan, it's ancient Greece.  Complete with huge letters graffitied on a hill in the Roman alphabet.  Just like Hollywood, but different...

As soon as I got to the Jiantan MRT station, where I was to meet Katy, it started to rain.  I had very thoughtfully neglected to bring my umbrella, so I sat under the overhang of the rails and waited for it to let up a little.  As soon as the rain got somewhat more like mist, I made a dash for the nearest café, where I sat down and ordered myself some tea (rose tea!) and toast.  There was some confusion about the toast.  The waitress asked me if I wanted one of two options on the menu, but I knew what neither of them were.  She went back to the woman who turned out to be her mother, and after a whispered conference, the waitress came back and said, quite clearly, "Butter. Or. Penus Creme."  I did my best to hold it together.  "Peanut butter?" I asked.  She shook her head.  "Penus Creme."  Her mother came over and repeated the same phrase four or five times, to make sure I'd heard correctly.  I had.  Then she gestured to indicate little nodules.  "Peanut butter," I said firmly, and made them repeat it.  "You know how you have this word for bird?" I said.  "And how sometimes it doesn't mean bird, but something different entirely?  That is what you are saying.  Peanut butter is the right way."  They laughed and nodded.  I hope that people will correct me when I'm saying terrifically laughable things in Chinese.

Classes

I have three classes of my own now, with a fourth coming relatively soon, and a fifth approaching some time after that.  On Mondays I have an M2 class.  There are 10 kids registered for the class, and the youngest two are are about five years old.  The oldest is probably around seven.  There's a pretty wide range of what they've learned so far and how they learn best, and it's a bit of a challenge to accommodate them all.  We play a lot of games.  The rule for M classes and K classes particularly is to play more games than not.  Any time the kids are sitting in their seats is time they might not be learning.  The games get them up and running around and engaged (usually) in the topic at had.  One of the hardest things about my M2 class is that one of the students is very bright and gets bored easily, and one of them is alternately very quick and very slow and hates being touched or encouraged.   Making room for these two to learn what I have to teach is sometimes frustrating, but I've only had 4 classes with them, so it is, as the saying goes, early days.  If anyone has any advice, I'd be delighted to hear it.

On Wednesdays I have a K1 class.  It's a larger class, with 15 kids registered.  The youngest is probably around seven, and the oldest is more like eleven or twelve.  She seems a little embarrassed all the time to be in a K1 class.  This is the easiest class I have.  Everyone is happy to be there, more or less, and everyone thinks I'm hilarious.  We got a new student last week, and she was shy enough that Elegance (the Sanchong school manager) was worried about whether she'd do alright in the class.  But after the first hour she was laughing at me with the rest of them, and during the break she joined the rest of the kids trying to sneak up on me while I wrote on the white board.  Both my K1 and my M2 seem to really enjoy varying decibels.  When we drill words or letters, I say it in a normal tone of voice and have them repeat it ("A /a/ apple!").  If they're not paying attention, I drop to a whisper, say it again, and have them repeat it in a whisper.  Once they've all whispered back correctly, the reward is shouting the pattern at the tops of their tiny lungs - which gets pretty loud.  I may need to invest in earplugs one of these days.  They love it.  And it keeps their attention on me and on the topic at hand.

My A3 class, on Saturdays, is easily the most difficult for me.  There are so far only five kids in the class, although there are seven registered.  They all sit several seats away from each other, and they're all pretty quiet.  The youngest is eleven, and the oldest two are about fourteen.  There are two girls and three boys, and it's difficult coming up with activities to keep them interested.  One of the boys is clearly at a level higher than that from which the class starts, but the student at the lowest level can barely understand me when I ask a question.  The class goes for three hours, and I have no co-teacher (she's on vacation in Canada for the next couple of weeks).  I'm going to have to come up with some way of engaging them.  Again, any ideas are welcome.

My two upcoming classes are an A4 that starts very soon, either this week or the next, and an M1 class that is waiting for another couple of students to register.  

Travels and Travails

I left the house yesterday morning at around 11.  On my way to the Minquan MRT station, I crossed Zhongshan N. Road, which was under construction.  It hadn't been under construction the day before, but today there were machines and men and the general milling about that comes with road repair.  Except.

The milling was significantly less aimless than that to which I'm accustomed.  There were more than three guys there, and none of them were standing around doing nothing.  Not only that, but when I came home at 6:00 pm, and pay careful attention to this part, the road was finished.  Not just kind of finished, but still blocked off.  Finished.  And repainted.  And dry.  Ahem, Chicago.  Ahem, Madison.  Ahem, everywhere I've ever lived before.  A friend once told me that a city that didn't have construction going on somewhere was a city that was dying.  Taipei's got the not-dying process thoroughly expedited.

People have been asking about that last post.  I apologize for being obscure.  The ARC card is like a green card or a work visa.  It allows us to get paid here without being deported, which is convenient.  It was easily achieved, with only a morning spent in the DMV-like National Immigration Agency.  I may have to go back to add my other school to my card, but the card itself is in my possession and shiny and new.  Now I can do things like open a bank account and get a cell phone.

...which I have done.  Katy and I went with Chris, Debby, Jill and Dave (a couple from Canada) today to purchase cell phones and SIM cards.  And now we have them.  Mine even has an English to Chinese dictionary on it, but no indication of pronunciation.  It also has modified Tetris (I fear for my productivity), and a coin-flipping program for all your most important decisions.  After we bought the cell phones, we all went and ate pasta at a pseudo-Italian place, which was Orientalized in the same way that it's Americanized in the States.  We sat and talked for a while, then started making our way to Taipei 101 for the bookstore and its Dictionary.  Katy and I both purchased one, and I presently remembered what pasta does to my metabolism.  The Wife and I dragged ourselves, zombie-like, from Taipei 101 back home, where we both passed out for 6 and 3 hours, respectively.  I guess we're not quite adjusted to our schedules yet.

ARC achieved!

Signs and Portents

At first I thought it was an ice-cream truck.  The song was Für Elise, and I could hear it coming down the street, even from inside our temporary apartment.  Robyn and I were the only ones home: Katy and Elaine had both gone to work and weren't expected back for another hour or so.  We'd had instructions to take the garbage down if we could catch the garbage truck, but I didn't hear any beeping at all, so I figured it hadn't come.  Later, of course, I put two and two together, and after much scribbling and carrying of remainders came up with the shocking sum of four.  The garbage trucks here play Für Elise, over and over again, like the ice-cream trucks in the States.  When you hear it, you have to grab your garbage and run down with it to the street, where the truck is collecting the neighborhood trash.  If you have more than one bag to throw away, you have to pay a fee.  

Recycling is separate - all plastic bottles can be recycled, as well as all glass.  All paper gets recycled, including waxy paper from food containers, as long as you rinse it off first (this means milk cartons and most to-go boxes...keep up, US!).  Matte plastic bags can be recycled, but not shiny transparent ones.  Plastic containers of all kinds get recycled, as long as they're rinsed first.  As far as I know, you don't get charged for having a bunch of stuff to recycle.  

Katy and I are fortunate enough to have a service that takes care of garbage and recycling for us, so we take ours out to a red bin in one of the stairwells whenever we like instead of running down the hall whenever we hear the tinkling strains of Beethoven (apparently he's popular here?) drifting through the window.

Sometimes, here, I could swear I smell plantain roasting on charcoal stoves - a smell I associate exclusively with Ghana.  It's always very briefly coming out of a lane or on a short-lived breeze, and then I'll pass a bakery and smell buttery baked rolls, or milk tea from a shop, or stinky tofu from a night market.  The hairstylists' places smell like a US mall.  The bookstores smell like bookstores, and the 7-11s smell like 7-11s.  (The snozzberries smell like snozzberries!)  I wonder which of these I'll associate with Taiwan.  I thought I had it the other day - an almost sweet smell, a little spicy, like cinnamon perhaps (or maybe cassia).  

After work today I wandered around a little bit, discovering many interesting signs and fashion, and then walked home over the bridge from Sanchong and took some pictures of the area around the city on the Danshui River.  Katy's school is to the north, and my School 8 is to the south and east.  Sanchong is over the river to the west.  Every time I cross the river I'm surprised by the mountains again.  I love having mountains around.  They give me a horizon to look for.

Baby's First Typhoon (also other things)

Our first typhoon hit Friday, Typhoon Sinlaku.  By "hit," I mean grazed.  Taipei is in a bit of a valley between mountains, and most of the wind and weather gets absorbed by them.  It's mostly just rained a lot.  All day, in fact.  Since Friday night, in fact.  So far it has rained for a solid 36 hours and counting.

But back to the beginning of your time without me (I know, it's been agonizing, hasn't it?):  That club that I mentioned last Saturday was full of a bunch of wàiguórén who all seemed pretty desperate to find mixed drinks, make outs, or both.  Neither The Wife nor I were particularly interested in seeking out either, so we avoided the bar area and went straight up to the dance floor.  Chris and Debby were at the club, nearly passing out from the jet lag.  We talked to them for a bit, then danced for a while until the press of people and music got to be a little too soaked in desperation, after which we came home.

On Wednesday Betty died, after having refused to eat anything at all since she arrived.  In taking her out to the garbage, I very smoothly forgot that our outer door locks automatically, and locked myself out.  Katy wasn't due back for another 4 hours, so I went down to the guard of the building and played the Stupid Foreigner card.  He kindly called a locksmith, who showed up in after about 10 minutes.  Perhaps it would be more accurate, actually, to say lockpick.  He was a charming old fellow as dextrous as a monkey, and got our door open distressingly quickly.  I want to learn.

On my way home from the Sanchong school the other day, I stopped in a bookstore/office supply shop to get a pencil case (ubiquitous items here), and I saw a copy of Blankets in Chinese.  Kudos to Craig Thompson for that.  Or his agent/publisher, I suppose.  It was a little jarring to see an American graphic novel authored and illustrated by a Midwesterner sitting on the shelf in the local office-supply/book store.  I guess it's not an industry entirely overrun with manga.

On Thursday, Katy and I brought our paperwork to the National Immigration Agency/Ministry of the Interior, the inside of which bore a striking resemblance to the DMV, and waited for a few hours to begin processing our ARCs (Alien Resident Certificates).  There was a very cute little girl in front of us who kept staring and making faces.  I tried to get her to take a picture with my camera, but she steadfastly refused.

Both of my schools had their Autumn Festival feasts this week.  This consisted of grilling various meats and vegetables (mostly bell peppers and mushrooms) and tofu on a portable grill, eating them with pig knuckles (for those inclined...I wasn't) and moon cakes, and drinking tea.  It was very informal, and a little bit like an indoor office picnic with a barbecue.  The one at Sanchong was on Tuesday, and School 8's was Friday.  While we were eating at School 8, Kojen announced that, due to the Typhoon, classes would be cancelled from 7:00 for the rest of the weekend.  There was much celebration.  One of the FTs promptly went and bought a bunch of beer.  I ducked out and got tea with Annie, one of the new CTs, who kindly showed me around the area and talked about religion and faith with me until I decided I should head home.

My route home from School 8 requires two transfers on the MRT, and at the first one I found myself walking behind a couple of wàiguó gentlemen who were chattering away in English.  I couldn't believe my luck.  One of them was Sebastian, who was in China with Chris and I back in 2005.  He took me along for cheese sandwiches with his friends (they were a pleasant bunch) and we caught up a bit.  He has promised to show us the way to telephonic communication later this week.  We may yet join the legions of the socially available.

We have spent the rainy weekend indoors, enjoying the Typhoon Days (like snow days, only with big, playful, tropical storms!) by watching all three of the Bourne movies, catching up on our respective writings and laundries, and being generally useless to society (which is also useless to us until the rain lets up a bit).  I went out this morning (and by morning I mean afternoon, even by our time) and Found A Grocery Store.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have discovered the shining beacon of sustenance, from whence all nourishment will hereafter issue.  It was really close.  Seriously, it was about two doors away.  I was thoroughly embarrassed after asking after it's whereabouts when the very helpful gentleman led me a whole 30 feet away.  I didn't even really need an umbrella.

But hey, now we have food.

Happy Big Bang Day!

Although why they're calling it that I certainly don't know.  They've only just started the first beam going 'round.  There won't be a collision for another month or so.

What the blazes is she talking about?

I think it's pretty cool, myself.  

Reasons you shouldn't panic:

Slashdot  The comments are more revealing than the blurb.

Livescience  A while ago, but pertinent.

Discover  They even did the research again.  So stop worrying.

Fish and Other Friends

So we went to purchase Betty last Saturday (many apologies to my adoring public for not updating for a Whole Week), and got sent on a veritable treasure hunt for fish stores (apparently normal pet stores do not sell fish).  I'd been asking around a bit, and everyone told me something different.  I went to the first place I'd been told to go, and there were no fish there.  In fact, there was no store there.  The guy outside the address said that they'd recently moved, and waved his hand in a direction I might have called North if I'd been feeling charitable.  When he found out I wanted to buy a fish, however, he changed his mind entirely, told me the store I was looking for didn't even sell them, and said something about some other area of Taipei.  I gave up on that particular conversation and came home.

We next asked at a pet store.  They were very helpful and hence very helpfully told us that the nearest place to get fish was somewhere on the part of the MRT that was too far south to be on our map of Taipei.  We thanked them (effusively), they told us they were sorry not to have been more help (bù hǎo yìsi), and we went to another pet store.  They also were anxious to be of service, and informed us that we could most easily and conveniently purchase fish at a location that could not be reached by the MRT at all, but must be driven to in a car.  They were also bù hǎo yìsi, and we moved on.  I could tell you the entire story of how we eventually had to climb a mountain and consult a Zen Buddhist Master living in solitude upon a crag overlooking the sea, and how he told us that a fish could not be bought, only attained, and how we spent the next seven years studying a single fish scale in pursuit of enlightenment, and how at last with kind words to and from our Master we descended from the mount having learned the fishy secrets of Ichthus, and how the gods descended from the heavens to reward us for our patience, with Sūn Wùkōng at their head, and how the Monkey King bestowed upon us the Four Heavenly Fish to represent the four changing seasons and to remind us of our own mortality (sì, the word for 4, is reminiscent of sǐ, the word for death).... but that would be a lie.  We eventually asked someone who gave us the address for another pet store that didn't have fish, but did conclusively have the business card of a place that did, and wasn't at the ends of the earth.  

On Monday we found the place (the gentleman at the pet store drew us a map with all but a red X on it), and it was indeed full of aquariums with fish in them.  There were skates there.  For sale.  As pets.  I was tempted.  But we were on a mission to find Betty, and find her we did.  We also found Yán, Hújiāofěn, and Làjiàng.  We brought them home in plastic bags full of water and dumped them in and exulted over them.  We both had to go off to work, though, so we fed them and left them to get used to each other and Leonard.

My Monday consisted of a pretty thorough lesson plan dictated to me by my AD.  I was not sad about that.  It was good to have a guide.  There were games to be played, and he explained them to me, and there were letters to teach (A B C D, also the lower case versions of those same four) and rules to explain.  I observed two more classes (one a CT's class) and came home briefly before Katy and I headed out to spend the evening with a couple of other Reach to Teach folk - Andrew and Daniel (and also Andrew, a Reach to Teach staffer, but I haven't a link for him).  We had an enjoyable evening of debate about whose apartment was better (ours wins), and Katy and I came home to find that Là had vanished.

A word about our fish tank.  It's glass.  It's covered.  There really aren't many places for a fish to disappear to.  I speculated that perhaps Là had gotten into the internal filter, which wasn't working anyway, so I unplugged it and let it sit.  In our close inspection of the tank to find our missing fish, however, we discovered a baby fish.  Oh, wait, it was 3!  No, 12...18...30?  We're really not sure how it happened.  Fish lay eggs, right?  Not live babies?  But we didn't see any eggs in the tank, and it was less than 12 hours since we brought home the new four.  

By Wednesday, it was clear that the baby fish were Yán's progeny.  Most of them are white (although there are two rather puzzling blackish ones), and they're big enough to escape the pull of the filter by this point.  On Thursday Là reappeared, looking fine, and slightly less tweaky than he had been before he went on his little vacation or whatever it was.  I blame Dr. Who.

My first class was on Wednesday.  I misled you all by saying it was a Y1.  It was, in fact, a K1 class.  They were a little older, much quieter than I expected, and they all already knew everything I was trying to teach them.  I therefore had to play more of the games than I expected (oh woe, oh woe) to fill the time, but my co-teacher (who is also the librarian for that school) needed a bunch of time that first class to explain a lot of the rules to them in Chinese.  There were 11 kids in the class, but I imagine that will change a little bit over the next week or two.  So far I can't imagine disliking any of them.  They're very responsive and cooperative.  They're willing to like being there.  They want to like me.  

I made notebooks for keeping track of my classes.  I have one notebook for my K1 class (I get to keep them all year, by which time they'll be K3, probably!), one for my M2 class, which is starting on Monday and is at School 8, and one for the classes I teach as a substitute.  I subbed for an A8 yesterday.  It was long, but enjoyable.  They were all similarly cooperative - told me what to do when I forgot something, enjoyed the games thoroughly, tried to outsmart me into not giving them homework, but gave up when I was firm for 30 seconds.  They got a little alarmed at one point when they misunderstood something I said and thought I could understand Chinese, but I reassured them that I could not.  I asked why they were so concerned about it, and one boy said, "Teacher, we are speaking secrets."  I looked at them guilelessly and asked, "What is secret, mìmì?"  They exploded into gasps and chatter.  The boy said, reprovingly, "Teacher, you know Chinese?"  "No," I said, "I don't understand it at all."  He (and the rest of the class) persisted, and he said, "What is school?"  I laughed, and said "I don't know!  I don't know Chinese!"  "But you said mìmì," he said.  "What is mìmì?" I asked.  "Teacher, you said it just now," said another girl.  "When?" I wanted to know.  I redirected us back to the lesson at hand ("should have vs. shouldn't have"), but at the end of the three hours when the boy who'd asked what school was was almost out the door, I looked at him and said "xuéxiào."  He gasped like I'd thrown water at him and eyed me up and down.  "Teacher," he said, downright disapprovingly, "you know Chinese!"  I laughed and told him to go home.  

Yesterday we got a PPPoE internet connection in our apartment, which makes things rather more convenient.  Tonight I think we're going to some gathering of people - A club, perhaps.  I shall try to blend in with either the other attendees or the wall, depending upon with which it seems I have more in common.  I am not historically fluent in Clubbing, even if it only involves a blunt object.  

Home Life

Now that we're in a proper apartment, I can perhaps go into a bit more detail about what might eventually be my routine.  (I don't want to commit myself or anything...)

We found a filter for Leonard Yusef (our fish - the Chinese word for fish is yu), and he is swimming around rather more now than he was a day ago.  Granted, the filter is probably for a much smaller tank, but we only have one fish for now, and he's a bottom feeder, so between the little filter and Leonard Yusef, I think we'll be OK.  We would like to get him a friend and call her Betty, in honor of Paul Williams (The Wife's brother).  I think even with Betty in the mix Leonard should be able to keep up.

We've also gotten a clothes rack which Katy skillfully put up, a clock for our kitchen which extolls the virtues of citrus and affection, some laundry soap which looks like Tide but isn't (it calls itself "Sopp"), and a lot of hangers for drying and hanging our clothes.  Seriously, like 90.

I've more or less begun to figure out how to get to the two different schools at which I will be teaching.  We live quite close to the Minquan W. Road station on the Red Line of the MRT, so Katy takes the Red Line up to Shilin where she teaches.  I take a bus from the Minquan W. Road station to Sanchung, which is across the river and where I will probably be most days.  It's a new school, and the AD described it as the "experimental branch" of Kojen.  The other 20% or so of the time I will be at School #8, which is on the Brown Line near the Da'an station.  Next Friday I'll be substituting for another teacher's A-8 class at School #8.  It's a three hour class, and will be my second experience teaching for Kojen.  My first is on Wednesday, at Sanchung, and is the very first day of a Y1 class.  The lesson includes letters A-D in both upper and lower case, and four example words each.  I fully expect to be gravely wounded by cuteness.

If I walk north from our apartment, I reach Minquan W. Road, which intersects with our Linsen N. Road.  There is a set of walkways over Minquan and Linsen so that pedestrians don't have to wait for the light if they're so inclined, although it seems that people rarely use them.  I walked up to them the other day and took pictures of the surroundings to the north, east, south, and west.  What you see in the north is a mountain (probably Zhishan), and a temple (probably the National Peace Museum).  Walking east leads to a street that appears to be a funeral street - a lot of coffin shops and urn shops.  I saw a lot of people burning paper for Ghost Month on that street a couple of days ago.  Our apartment is to the south a few blocks.  To the west is the MRT station which is the center of our working universe.  On the southeastern corner of Minquan and Linsen is a pet store that does not carry aquarium filters, but does have bunnies (Hilary, that's for you) and puppies in its windows.

There are little things (there are always little things) that are different that strike me suddenly, like the fact that almost all the doors open inward.  In the United States, most of our doors open outward, presumably because it's theoretically easier to open a door outward from inside should the building be burning or something.

Which reminds me: the day we closed the deal on the apartment I went to the bank to change some money and a wonderfully kind gentleman next to me spoke up in halting English.  "In thirty minutes you cannot go outside.  There will be a ... I don't know how to say it ... we will pretend there are airplanes..."  And I said "An air raid drill?"  He nodded, and repeated "At two thirty.  You cannot go outside.  You must stay indoors."  The bank teller corroborated his advice, so Katy and I spent the air raid drill inside the realty while sirens went off and the streets were empty of everyone but a few bored looking police officers.  It lasted for a half an hour.  No one seemed particularly fazed.

Settling In

We sort of wandered around on Sunday towards the area where we think we might want to live.  We found a charming little park with rock doves or pigeons much more skittish than those in Chicago, and more evident than those in Madison.  We approached a woman getting out of her taxi to visit a friend in one of the apartment buildings and asked what we should do if we wanted to live there.  I can't imagine how this would be going if I didn't know some Mandarin.  She was very friendly, but didn't speak any English.  She actually led us around to look at bulletin boards for rental signs, leaving the apartment door open.  Unfortunately, she didn't find any.  Still, we got an idea of the kind of place we'd like to be.

On Monday I had my first day of training with Kojen.  I was desperately nervous until I remembered that they didn't want me to speak Chinese, and that I was in fact there to simply be a native English speaker with some idea of how to pass the language on.  That first day went quite well.  I observed two classes: Y6 and A2.  The letter refers to the overall level, and the number to the microlevel - much like the streets here.  Y is the most basic level, and the microlevels are 1-6.  M is the next, and goes from 1-12.  M goes at half the speed of the next level, K, so that M12 is the same as K6.  K also goes up to 12, and then the students go on to A level.  My AD (Academic Director) said that usually kids get to about level 10 before passing the age acceptable for the next letter level, so the 12 classes are sometimes pretty small.  There are four kinds of teaching positions: FT (foreign teacher), CT (Chinese teacher), TA (teaching assistant), and TT (telephone teacher).  Each class is twice a week (M/R, T/F, W/S), with once per week as the FT's class and once as the CT's.  The TA and the CT are often the same person, which helps with continuity.  The TT (again, often the same as the CT and TA) calls the students once a week for 5 minutes to give them a pop oral quiz.  

The first class I watched was a Y level class - Y6, which is the highest of the most basic, youngest class.  They were dangerously cute, the five of them.  The teacher said, "Who's being good?" and they all ran shrieking and giggling to their seats, where they sat up impossibly straight and shoved their tiny left hands (fists closed) into the air, waiting to be called upon.  They were covering initial clusters CL, GL, and BL when I was observing, and they played games for the privilege of answering the teacher's questions.  When they answered correctly they had to participate in a game of skill (ball throwing or some kind of race) before getting a tiny little prize called a "jian ka," which means "reward card."  The jian kas come in different denominations, and when the students have collected enough of them they can trade them in for little notebooks or pens or erasers, etc.  "Teaching by stealth," the teacher called it.

Class 2 was an advanced class, quieter, although they still played games.  The teacher made lots of eye contact used vocal variation to good effect.  When a student or two got out of line, he looked at them all and jovially said "I can stay after class."  Everyone immediately shut up.  The room was pretty evenly divided between girls and boys, and by divided I mean that all the girls were sitting against one wall and the boys against the other.  In spite of their quietness, they seemed to have a pretty good rapport with the teacher.  He introduced us (Robin was watching the same class) as "very smart," and one of the girls looked determinedly at her desk and muttered quite audibly, "Smarter than you!"  He laughed and agreed, and the class went on smoothly.

The third class I watched was a K class at a different branch of Kojen.  They seemed restless at the beginning, but settled down eventually.  The teacher used flash cards and a game he'd made up.  There were more kids in this class, and the integration between girls and boys was more complete.  Once the kids got used to the game, they got into it and started wanting to play a little more.

The fourth class was also at the second school, which is where I'll be doing most of my teaching.  It was another K class, and was even quieter than the third.  Even when the teacher played games with them they were quiet.  They livened up once, when one of them wrote "The doctor told him to eat the flu" on the whiteboard.  I flinched in a possibly dramatic kind of way, stuck my tongue out, screwed my face up, and shook my head violently back and forth from the back of the room.  They laughed at me.  I consider it a complete success.

Back at our temporary apartment, we lost water completely for a day, and the pressure's been very low ever since.  It's really hard to take a shower with water that has all the flowing power of a mud puddle.  

Yesterday's training session didn't really give me any new information, but it was good to go over the old stuff.  Yesterday morning, however, I walked into a realty, said "Nǐ huì shuō yīngyǔ ma?"  The lady said "Bú huì," and I sighed and said "Wǒ gēn wǒde hǎo péngyou zhǎo yīge fángzi..."  After a lot of discussion and drawing of pictures, she took us to look at one which we immediately liked.  Furnished, half-way between our two schools, and in the same area I referred to at the beginning of this post.  We told her we'd come back the next day and hoped very hard all the way home that we could make it work.  Today we clinched the deal after much finagling of finances, and we now have a lovely two-bedroom apartment with a fish tank and room for plants.  We're going to have to buy pillows, though.

When I signed onto the internet today, I found that one of my friends from Madison is planning on showing up in Taipei in a week to work for Kojen also.  Taipei is apparently The Place To Be.

Something Different, Something Familiar

The first rains came yesterday, hard and reminiscent of some pulp novel as penned by Raymond Chandler circa 1955.  There was a little thunder, but mostly it was just water dumping out of the sky.  I was stuck inside for most of it, without an umbrella or rain slicker (both in Katy's room), with the threat "Taiwan has acid rain - it will make your hair fall out" echoing through my thoughts.  I made myself some terribly unsatisfying noodles and waited for The Wife to get home from her first day.  My first day is tomorrow.  When she returned, we and Robin took the MRT (and also our feet. ...Mostly our feet) to the Reach to Teach gathering at Citizen Cain, a bar somewhere to the southeast of our temporary apartment.  I'm not sure how they felt, but for me it was almost more intimidating to walk into a bar full of waiguoren than it was to go to the Aboriginal Bar.  Richard, once approached, was very nice and good about introducing us to a few people.  We met two Andrews from Colorado, a Daniel from Missouri, a Dave and Jill from Nova Scotia, a Bash from Manchester, and Mitch - one of the Reach to Teach staff.  All of them were very charming people, and I am glad to know there are familiar faces in the area.

Speaking of familiarity... Unlike China or Ghana or Scotland or Ireland, Taipei does not feel foreign to me.  We bought handkerchiefs today, like in Ghana, and everything seems familiar, like traveling to another state rather than another country.  Traverse City was more foreign than this.

Adventures Out and About

We have (clearly) found a coffee shop with wifi, purchased some funny little squares of what could, with some ingenuity, be toilet paper, procured a towel and Taiwan money, and we wandered around hot and cranky yesterday until we found food - first a sandwich (pre-monies, with a xìnyòngkǎ) and then some very tasty soup in a hole-in-the-wall just around the corner from our apartment.  Post-soup we came home and passed out for four hours before heading out with our two apartment-mates to find a bar and some Taiwan Pijiu.  

The bar was small, and I knew the minute we walked in that it was not frequented by wàiguórén.  We were taken to the largest table and seated and fawned over.  There was a gentleman who sat with us and made much of us, talking in English when he could.  Another wore paint on his face to imitate the aboriginal culture of Taiwan - I'm not sure what, Haka, perhaps - and another wore a dress and a wig and false anatomy.  They danced and sang, as did the other patrons, and even we got up and sang karaoke at one point.  The patrons and staff sat with us by turns - it was a little hard to tell who was which - and food kept appearing on the table.  Greens ("not typical Taiwan food," we were assured, but "like the food of your Native Americans." Kudos to those who warned about this.) and fish and an omelet thing.  The English-speaking man repeatedly offered to hook us up with "muscle men," the cue for Painted Face to start flexing and pouting at us.  We declined.  At the end of the evening, while I was trying to settle our bill, the lady of the establishment proclaimed her love for me and presented each of us with a bouquet of 9 roses.  We walked back to our apartment waving our tourist banners and trying to process.  Katy found a pitcher in the cabinet in the kitchen, and we stuck 3 of the bouquets in it and set it out on the living room table.

Today we met with a lovely lady from Kojen, who will be meeting us again shortly to take us to the hospital so that we can have our exams for our work permits.  We had lunch at a small buffet with a bunch of vegetarian food that I mostly did not recognize, but all of it was pretty tasty.

Arrival, Etc.

The first leg of the trip was predictably raucous.  There was a crowd of eight or nine drunk men sitting right in front of The Wife and I, but we sat next to a very sweet girl from Hong Kong who was on her way to a pool tournament.  They've started charging $2 for water and juice now, so I didn't get my habitual tomato juice.  Instead we watched parts of "Catch Me If You Can," which seemed to me a rather ironic movie to show on an airplane.

Having made the requisite trip through the world's most bizarre airport (Las Vegas - slot machines, bling, more bling, more machines), we had an uneventful flight to Las Angeles next to a very chatty Swedish woman who was subsequently very helpful in pointing us toward our gate at the end of the flight.  Once at the gate, we made friends with a Taiwanese gentleman traveling with his young son.  The son spoke some English, but was quite shy, and the gentleman was friendly and forthcoming and gave us his business card - he runs a women's clothing boutique in Taipei - and told us to call him sometime if we were in the area.

And then we started our long flight.  At some point my brain lost all contact with things like rational time and day and merely started operating on "We're going to Taiwan!!!"  The flight itself was the kind of convenient that Wilbur and Orville only ever dreamed of in their most secret hearts.  I read Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and watched a couple of inflight movies.  The food was not horrible.  The stewards and stewardesses were friendly and helpful.  The sun rose just as we landed in Taipei, over a landscape that reminded me somehow of Scotland.  The airport was almost deserted.  Customs was a gentleman who spoke nary a word, merely stamped us "approved" and waved us through.  There was no line at the Nothing-to-Declare aisle.  A man manifested out of nowhere with our names handwritten on a sign.  He turned out to be a taxi driver employed by Kojen.  Here's The Wife being excited in the taxi.  Another gentleman met us at our temporary apartment, let us in, gave us our keys, and fled, leaving us with instructions to show up at the office tomorrow morning at 10, and very little idea of anything else.

We are housed (for now) with two other women, both of whom will be teaching in Kaohsiung.  One is leaving tomorrow, and the other arrived last night.  The Wife and I are well, and will shortly go shopping for such necessities as toilet paper, food, bugspray, and towels.  It is delightful to be here at last.

Three Days Out

I'm having a little bit of a hard time believing that I'll be leaving the country the day after the day after tomorrow.  The Wife is going to come in and then we'll be taking separate vehicles to the airport, because we're ecologically conscious like that.  Also because we wish to remain Living Breathing Parts of our Respective Families, who are also traveling in those aforementioned vehicles.

I've come into possession of a camera (courtesy of Aunts Kathy and Michelle, and my paternal grandparents - thanks, guys), so I'll be able to record parts of the upcoming trip in an amateurish kind of way.  My heart goes out to the artistic among you - I've never claimed to be a photographer (at least I do not follow the family tradition of beheading my photographic subjects!).

The photos will probably be posted to Picasa, but I'll be making a note here to explain the photos I post most times.

What I'm Packing

Checked

• 2 weeks clothing

• 1 "fancy" outfit

• PJs

• Flip-flops

• Tennis shoes

• Towel

• Toiletries

• Pillow

• Drawing pens and pencils, eraser

• 2 sketchpads

• Blank book

• 10 year box, which I will get to open in May of 2009 (I hope the customs people put everything back in it when they're done...)

• The Dispossessed

Carry On

• Laptop

• Tablet

• Scanner (My friend says this is a bad idea -- I'll let you know)

• Toothbrush, etc.

• Chinese/English dictionary - pocket size

• Blank book

• Comb

• Small bag

• Change of clothes

• Crossword and/or Sudoku book

FAQ

• Where are you going and what are you doing?

I'm going to Taiwan to teach English.

• That's awesome! I have a friend/sister/cousin/former adversary who went to Thailand and loved it!

Taiwan. We'll be living in Taipei.

• Totally what I meant.  Who's "we"?  Are you going with a program?

"We" is The Wife (see Definitions - Post 1) and I.  We're working through a program called Reach to Teach, which set us up at the Kojen School of English.

• Do they provide you with housing?

No.

• Where will you be living?

The Wife and I will be sharing an apartment in an as yet undisclosed location.  Kojen will be housing us briefly while they help us find one.

• What ages will you be teaching?

Ages 8-15.

• So do you speak... What do they speak there?

Taiwanese and Mandarin, mainly. I speak some Mandarin, yes.

• You'll get to practice with the kids, that'll be awesome!

No.  We're only allowed to speak English with the kids.  Full immersion and all.

• Are you excited?

Ridiculously.

• Do you know anyone there?

Your friend/sister/cousin/former adversary.

• How long are you planning on staying?

Two years.  The contract is for one year, but I'd like to renew it once.

• Tell me about English Schools in Taiwan.

As far as I know, kids in Taiwan go to regular school during the day.  Parents can choose to send their children to English schools after their regular school, which means that a lot of kids end up going to school all day.  We'll be teaching at one of these English schools.

• What's the time difference in Taiwan?

If it is 9:00 at night on Tuesday in Wisconsin or Illinois, it's 10:00 in the morning on Wednesday in Taipei.

Definitions - To Be Updated As Necessary

Key:

c indicates that a word is Chinese.

e indicates that a word is in English. It's inclusion in Definitions means it's probably entirely or nearly obsolete.

r indicates that a word is made up by me.

Some words or phrases will not be preceded by an initial. They'll be pretty self-evident.

10 Year Box: A small time capsule containing artifacts from May 1999, which I will open in May 2009

Bù: (c) 不 No, negation.

Bù hǎoyìsi: (c) 不好意思 To feel bashful, uncomfortable, or embarrassed.

Facebrial: (r) Of or pertaining to Facebook. (pronounced "fah SEE bree ul")

Famigerate: (e) To carry news from abroad.

Fángzi: (c) 房子 House, room.

Gēn: (c) 跟 With, and, following.

Hǎo: (c) 好 Good, OK, well.

Hǎo tīng de gē: (c) 好聽的歌 Good songs. Literally, songs that are good to listen to.

Huì: (c) 会 To be able to.

Mìmì: (c) 秘密 Secret.

Malefactress: (e) Female evil-doer.

MRT: (c - kind of) Taipei's Metropolitan Rapid Transit.
Nǎiyóu: (c) 奶油 Butter.

Nǐ: (c) 你 You (familiar).

Péngyou: (c) 朋友 Friend.

Predilection: (e) A bias in favor of something.

Shuō: (c) 说 To speak.

Sǐ: (c) 死 Death.

Sì: (c) 四 Four.

The Wife: My Facebrial Spouse.

Wàiguórén: (c) 外国人 Foreigner.

Warrenous: (r) Having characteristics similar to those of a rabbit warren.

Wǒ: (c) 我 I, me.

Wǒde: (c) 我的 My, mine.

Xuéxiào: (c) 学校 School

Xìnyòngkǎ: (c) 信用卡 Credit card.

Xǐhuan: (c) 喜歡 To like, to be fond of.

Xie Yu-Cheng: (c) 謝宇程 Taiwanese friend. First appearance.
Xiǎo: (c) 小 Small.

Yīge: (c) 一个 One of, a; "one" with a generic measure word.

Yīngyǔ: (c) 英语 English language.

Zhǎo: (c) 找 To look for, to search for.

Zhōngwén: (c) 中文 Chinese language.