Full

Living in Taiwan, "full" is a regular part of my daily vocabulary. In a culture whose local language, Taiwanese, says "have you eaten?" for "hello," eating and over-eating are regular occurrences. Today, however, my title doesn't refer to food--or, at least, not principally. No, I mean the day as a whole: SO SO full!

It's 1am now. I woke up this morning at 7am. In the intervening 18 hours, I...

Went to school, where I dyed eggs with the 5th graders at Qingshan amidst what began as chaos and ended in gorgeous colors and very few messes;

Explained to countless students, teachers, and administrators who Alex and Melanie were, and that Melanie was, in fact, American;

Lost the race against Alex and Melanie's taxi driver home;

Revealed the wonderfulness of Ali's burritos and the corner shop's milk tea to Alex and Melanie;

Took advantage of a few hours break from today's drizzle to eat shave ice at Siziwan, take the ferry to Cijin, rent bikes, glimpse the lighthouse, explore the fort, ride bikes, and discover that basically the entire seashore at Cijin is under construction;

Helped Chialing cook some fantastic noodles which Alex and Melanie obviously ADORED;

Took a window-shopping stroll with Melanie that resulted in some cute stationary for her and a nice little conversation with the adorable owner of the adorable Nini store down the street, together with some delicious cake despite my protestations that we were full;

Walked along the Love River with Alex and Melanie;

Found Alex some cold medicine;

Made a brief stopover at Ruifeng Night Market, where we saw some hilarious Angry Bird and "Angry Sponge" shirts, as well as some gorgeous leather bags;

Made plans to hang out with my host family tomorrow, after a stop at another stationary store and Dream Mall, and made tentative plans to KTV afterwards.

So "full" is not an understatement--this is just the outline! In other news, my plans for tomorrow begin at 10am, and I am therefore going to sleep.

Three Continents, Still Running

Clothes fly about, flung from arm to arm to table to floor. A hat catches a gust of wind and flies off, and the air erupts in screaming.

"快點, 快點!"
"女生, 加油, 男生, 加油!"
"Hurry, hurry! What do you say?"

"Jack."
"What?"
"Jack."
"It's my jacket?"
"It's my jacket."
"Good! Now go back!"

The boy ran back towards the back of the classroom to disrobe so his next teammate could take his place. And so it went, cheering, changing, speaking, running.

It's a classic, really, the clothes relay race, and I've now played it on three continents: North America, obviously, South America (I led a VBS featuring this game at my aunt and uncle's orphanage in Bolivia when I was 16), and, now, Asia. I would have to say this game is one of the Great Universal Truths in the world, except, to make it more accurate, one of the Great Universal Funs. (Maybe less catchy, though.)

And, since our 5th graders at Qingshan are learning articles of clothing and personal pronouns, it was the perfect game to reinforce sentences like "It's my hat," or "It's my jacket"--which they had to say before running back to change.

As a bonus, it gave way to pictures like these:

And also videos like this (our first, leisurely attempt, including a hilariously showboat-y participant, Willy):

And this (a later version, more hectic and more fun--sorry for my poor videography, though):

There are more installments to this game I could show you, were it not for Youtube's notoriously slow uploads tonight--hour and a half for that second clip--which show Patty blocking the boys' path and some of my most vocal girls complaining (as they always do) that the game was somehow unfair. But you get the adorable point, don't you?

And now, I give you take 2 on yesterday's mystery, which I've decided probably deserves its own label. So here they are, today's T-sihtrs from Taiwan! (Yes, the spelling is intentional. Come on, people!)

If you can't read it, this says "Denim & Bump Monstar." I have no idea why.

This is Jesse. He is adorable. He also happens to be wearing a second Grany Bigrs shirt. No, he is not the student I wrote about yesterday, and no, he does not have the same shirt as the other boy--this is an entirely different shirt with an entirely different image, which is still labeled, quite clearly, "Grany Bigrs."