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.