Saturday, January 7, 2012

America meets Taiwan

The first part of today involved teaching American traditions to the kiddos; the second part involved whole-heartedly embracing Taiwanese traditions and injecting them with a bit of playful Americanness.

Our lesson today (and yesterday) was pretty simple and fun: an introduction to sports around the world. The book included bowling, badminton and dodgeball, but neglected to add soccer or American football. I quickly remedied that, and re-discovered that, no matter where they're from, boys love the idea of a sport that involves hitting each other and making the other person fall over.

Seriously. I played about a minute from this clip of the last Super Bowl, and at the end of many classes, both yesterday and today, I had boys trying to figure out where they could find more of this "football" craziness. To which all I can add is a Scott-themed "aMERica!"

After school, our apartment got together with Katy (an American teacher at Sanmin), Fonda, and Chialing to celebrate Rachel's birthday today in the most Taiwanese fashion ever: KTV.

And this was, hands down, the most fun I've ever had at KTV. The English songs available at this particular place were not particularly plentiful, and consisted primarily in popular songs from the 90s or earlier, but that led to fantastic, no-holds-barred singing contests of the Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Avril Lavigne etc, plus songs like "Barbie Girl," amongst others.

Because, really, when you're doing KTV, you've already kissed your dignity goodbye; it's more fun if you take it all the way and go for flat-out ridiculous! Once Chialing and Fonda arrived, we incorporated some Taiwanese songs too, of course, leading to several rousing rounds of our old favorite 我的寶貝,

as well as several songs by 五月天(Mayday) and others that I recognized but can't yet sing. (To do list: learn to sing more Taiwanese songs for KTV purposes.)

It was a lovely way to spend the evening, and a lovely way to wish a happy birthday to the wonderful Rachel! By the time we ended, the whole group was belting out "My Heart Will Go On," confirming American stereotypes and thoroughly celebrating our past four hours in the best way possible.

So, in light of such a bi-cultural day, there's really only one way to end this post: to say Happy Birthday, Rachel, and 生日快樂,池蕊!

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