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.