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.