You win some, you lose some

Since my last post, things have been mostly good. I taught on Friday and Saturday, working with my adorable and rambunctious littles, which is a rewarding but sometimes frustrating experience. There are three of them, and them have the mutual attention span of a hummingbird. One of the bigger problems with them, as it is with all of my students, is that the other students speak almost exclusively Chinese in class, so anything that isn't in the book, they tend to not understand. I learned to play Simon Says with some of my young classes, which is great fun, and I administered my first test. All in all, those classes went well.

Saturday afternoon, after school, Cleo and I took the train up one stop to Hsinchu. It is amazing how much of a difference one stop can make. Hsinchu, a 15 minute ride away, is a completely different world. It's a huge, bustling city with an an ancient city center beautifully preserved as a large park. The city itself is amazing. Much like Jhunan, the streets are lined with shops and there are armies of scooters zipping around town, ready to run over an unassuming pedestrian. In most places, prices are very good and Cleo and I managed to loot pretty well for not a lot of money. Though, we did a LOT of walking and bargain shopping before we actually bought anything.

While wandering, we found two things that were amazing: The old town gate and the moat surrounding the ancient city, and a temple to the Ghost God (for more information about the Pudu rites regarding the role of ghosts in Taiwanese religion, go here). The architecture in this place is astonishing and really, no matter how many of these temples and monuments I see, I don't think I am ever going to get used to the sheer splendor of the vistas you can literally just stumble upon without even leaving the towns or cities. The area of town around the old gate has a beautiful moat that is the center of a large park, salvia and other flowers everywhere. It's breathtakingly beautiful.

After returning to Jhunan, I did a bit more shopping, and curled up with a better than average pizza for my first cheese consumption since arriving. Saturday was a very good day.

Sunday was homesick and mostly uneventful, though I did have another instance with shrimp that have heads. You know, I don't think it's all fish with heads that gross me out endlessly. I think it's just the fact that whole cooked shrimp look like evil little aliens from Europa out to eat my brains from the inside. So bad. *shudders*

Today was another good day, for the most part. I forgot that, in addition to being a beast to learn in a literal sense, there are a many millions of bizarre vaguaries and shades of gray in usage that can really never be taught. Today, I complemented my coworker, Emily, on her very attractive leopard print shoes, saying "Emily, you always wear the cutest shoes. I love that pair." She looked at me, confused, and said "Cute? I think these are more lady." And I remembered, right, cute has the denotation of young, adorable, and childing. Connotation being the evil beastie that it is, I had the fun job of explaining the different uses of "cute" in slang.

Beyond that, I taught seven classes today, including the ruffians and the miscreants. While the miscreant teenagers lapsed backward a bit today - they were pretty rough on me - the material we were studying was dead dull and there wasn't a lot I could do with it. That said, though, the ruffians, my level 3 9-11 year olds were a dream. I won!!! I had this idea that they totally bought into. One of the things they were doing that was driving me crazy was to get out of their seats and try to "help" me with stuff, so I just played off that. Today, I started keeping score, on the board, for each kid in the class. If you were good, sat in your seat, and answered questions, you got plus signs next to your name. If you were bad, you either got minus or lost a plus (depending on how many pluses you had). The point of the game was that, whoever had the most pluses for good behavior, next class gets to be the President and will have a special seat as my helper. They get reward cards or candy and they get to help me chose the President for the next class. It worked like a dream. I was SO excited.

My last class of the day was funny. It is a really small class and they're the highest level class that the school teaches. Anne, the other teacher that I really like, was in the room with me, and we were working on topic sentences and writing paragraphs. As an example of a topic, Anne suggests foods eaten in different places around the world. This turns into a 20 minute discussion of weird foods, the weirdest foods we've ever eaten, and the very weirdest foods we've ever even heard of. Apparently, it is a delicacy in mainland China to eat a bear's paw. In southern Taiwan, you are supposed to eat monkey's brains for good luck, and salamanders are another commodity eaten regularly in the south. I talked about escargot, alligator, and crawfish. The girls in my class were pretty grossed out by the idea of crawfish, but people here eat grasshoppers, so I don't want to hear it.

So, things are going well. All of my love, and thanks for reading.