Thanksgiving in Kaohsiung

Today wasn't Thanksgiving. It couldn't have been. I got up early, put on a t-shirt, skirt and sandals, bought an iced coffee, went to an RT competition (in which both of my schools competed), came home, took a nap, went to school again--oh, and then taught Thanksgiving, so I guess it must have been--but then I came home, went searching for turkey, and ended up eating steak at a Canadian restaurant.

And this is Thanksgiving? Really? You're serious? Huh. I didn't even consume any turkey.

I've already detailed many of my Thanksgiving teaching tactics; what I didn't mention is that, on Monday, after I finished my spiel about how the most important traditions of Thanksgiving are to eat a feast, spend time with family, and say what you are thankful for (spot the vocab words!), a student asked, through my co-teacher, "But, Teacher Bekah, why aren't YOU going home for Thanksgiving?"

...

It's times like these that I really wish someone had invented a teleportation device, already!

But they haven't and so my Thanksgiving was spent here, cheering on my students and taking a prohibited (and, as a result of its secrecy, terrible quality-ed) video of them, then describing what stuffing was to a class full of 6th graders, whose wrinkled faces at the idea of it cooking inside the turkey were priceless, not least of which because they closely mirrored my own face whenever I come into close contact with stinky tofu or pig intestines.

On my way into school today, I saw my commute friend Rob (he's an English teacher from New York who works across the street from my school; we met en route one day and we're perfecting the art of 40 second stoplight conversations), who was driving another English teacher, Debbie, and they informed me that they were spending Thanksgiving with a friend who had had the foresight to special order a turkey and plan a Thanksgiving dinner. They also told me that last year they had eaten turkey at a local American restaurant. They gave me the name, but I was on a scooter at a stop light--not exactly the time to write it down.

The search was on. A quick Google search for Western/American restaurants in Kaohsiung provided a decently long list--I'm going to need to keep exploring, I think--but only one which looked remotely like the name I thought they told me. I remembered that it was a pub & grill type place, and that it sounded like a last name.

My hypothesis? Foster Hewitt's.

I looked up directions, grabbed Analicia, who also didn't have dinner plans, and set off down one of Kaohsiung's busiest roads, down which apparently Foster Hewitt's lay. When we got there, one thing immediately struck me: a Canadian flag. Yep, it was Western all right, but decidedly Canadian; posters, hockey jerseys and other memorabilia from Ontario crowded the walls.

It was still a very nice place, but not exactly somewhere that would be serving turkey on American Thanksgiving.

Reconciled, I ordered a steak and fresh lime soda. Nothing even remotely related to Thanksgiving food, but at least it was high-quality Western food; in a lot of ways, it beat my back-up plan of a Subway turkey sandwich. And the bartender was Western, and it was oddly comforting to be able to be served by a native speaker of English, as weird as that sounds. At least a little something of home in a native accent.

Ah, Thanksgiving dinner.

My mom complained last week when I described how great the Thanksgiving dinner in Taipei was rather than talk about how much I miss her cooking. Well, last week wasn't Thanksgiving. Today was. And I do miss her cooking--hers, and Aunt Linda's, and Uncle Pat and Aunt Christy's, and Karen's, and Jillian's, and Diana's, and Rosa's, and Joshua's, and Heather's, and everyone else in my family who cooks's. I wish I were home, eating moist turkey and flavorful party potatoes and oddly delicious stuffing and the many, many pies. I wish I were hanging out with my family and watching the parade right now, feeling guilty about not being able to do more to help.

Because, as I told my kids, that's what Thanksgiving is about: eating a feast and spending time with family.

But there was a third thing: being thankful. And I am, of course, thankful first and foremost for my family. But I'm also thankful that I'm here. I love all my wonderful students, co-teachers, host family, fellow ETAs, and other friends here, and I am so thankful they're in my life, and that I have the opportunity to be in theirs. I'm thankful that I have been blessed with a Fulbright grant to Taiwan, which is itself the chance of a lifetime. I'm thankful that I even have this dilemma, that I have to want to be in two places at once, that I have two potential places to spend the holiday.

Because today was Thanksgiving, no matter how I spent it. And turkey, as it turns out, is optional.

Technical difficulties

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. The food, the family, the contemplative mood--and, in my family at least, the desserts--are all great reminders of what makes life so special.

Which is why I was overjoyed that all of my LETs wanted me to teach the holiday at their schools. This is, according to other ETAs, a bit of a rarity; Thanksgiving is, after all, a uniquely American holiday (when celebrated at this time and for these reasons, anyway) with few real-world applications outside of the US. But then again, I am the resident American teacher, so it's my job to teach my culture, right?

So that's what I set out to do. I had had some ideas about how to do it last week while lesson-planning, which I enthusiastically shared with my LETs, and which they agreed to with few issues. It wasn't until Friday, as I sat on the train headed for Taipei, that I realized I had volunteered myself to create and teach the entire lesson by myself.

I went to work, and crafted a PowerPoint presentation in pretty Fall (well, American Fall, anyway) colors, including a brief account of the first Thanksgiving, discussion about when it is, and, most importantly, a description of Thanksgiving traditions and foods. I made myself drool as I uploaded photos of turkeys and stuffing and cranberry sauce and picked out our vocabulary words for the day--thankful, feast, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie--wrote out instructions for hand turkeys, complete with a sentence pattern they were to write in the palm area ("I am thankful for______"), and found and linked to several YouTube videos.

But when I arrived at school today, I discovered that we had a problem. Several, in fact.

At Hanmin, we don't have an English classroom, and so go from home room to home room teaching English; only one or maybe two of these is equipped with a computer-overhead set-up. We knew this ahead of time, of course, and Alison had booked us for the audio-lingual room upstairs. But when I got to school, I discovered that my beautiful PowerPoint's formatting had been severely mangled in the transition from .pptx to .ppt and, what was worse, that the "audio-lingual room" was entirely lacking in the audio, thanks to a blown amplifier.

What followed was several periods of awkwardly silent YouTube clips drawn from disordered PowerPoints (I did my best to fix them over breaks), as I tried to explain what was going on:

"See, that's Squanto, and he's helping the children plant corn with fish to make it grow better...See, Lucy is telling Charlie Brown that football is a Thanksgiving tradition, so this time she won't yank the ball away...See, the Thanksgiving Day parade..."

To make matters worse, the large, echoey room's microphones were also not working, and I quickly discovered that, out from under the eyes of their home room teachers, the kids at Hanmin are much MUCH more prone to talking. By lunch time, my throat was beginning to ache.

Fortunately, though, just before lunchtime we scored another room with a projector, and this time one with functioning audio--but still no microphone, and this room was larger than the last. We finally rigged a mic to work for the last period of the day, but by that time there was no going back. My throat was irrevocably sore.

On the plus side, though, I think the kids enjoyed the presentation, for the most part, and I was able to teach them many things about Thanksgiving that even my LETs had not heard about, foods like candied yams and stuffing, and activities like Black Friday and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

I'm pretty sure that this clip was their favorite part of the whole day, though, so here it is for your enjoyment:

Snoopy is a big hit here; he was also their favorite part of the Macy's parade clip I showed them.

After classes, I took my malfunctioning throat home with me, a persistent technical difficulty from a day strewn with them. But it didn't matter much as I got to enjoy the wonderful company of Emily, Lydia, Fonda and Chialing on Chialing's birthday, sitting outside her shop, drinking tasty drinks and eating delicious food and ice cream with her homemade mulberry-cranberry-strawberry jam on top.

I can't think of a better way to end a day that was all about Thanksgiving than that: eating great food with great friends and reflecting on how great life is.

Thanksgiving in Taipei

Well, thanks to the unfortunate paradigm that interesting days leave no time to write about them--(I should really name that situation; any suggestions?)--this is going to have to be short.

Tonight, the Fulbrighters attended a Thanksgiving meal in Taipei hosted by the Director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT--basically the US embassy, except that we don't have diplomatic relations with ROC, so they can't call it that). It was a much smaller gathering than, for instance, our 10/10 celebration, but it was still located in a swanky, marble-and-grand-staircase loaded suite on the 10th floor of a magnificent building not far from Taipei 101. (Also, as I noticed, just down the road from the Taipei offices of such companies as Microsoft an 7-11--it's kind of a big deal!)

The food was AMAZING. They went all out to make us "feel like you're back home for Thanksgiving" (though I don't know about that, since I, for one, don't have massive glass chandeliers and cast-iron-and-marble staircases at home--or, for that matter, one of the best chefs in Taipei cooking and serving the turkey), and the food was stupendous: moist turkey topped with warm whole cranberry sauce and gravy, real Italian-style rolls (not sweetened or air-filled like much of the bread here), mashed potatoes which were more butter than potato (yumm!), and a whole menagerie of scrumptious side dishes which I won't go into here lest you drool on your keyboard.

And, to top it all off, they had real pumpkin pie--a dish absolutely unheard of here--as well as cheesecake, apple torte, and bread pudding. Given that my family always celebrates Thanksgiving (and every other holiday) with more desserts than we have people, this was the one portion of the buffet that felt just about right--if anything, they had not enough choices to match home.

But of course, the main thing that was missing was family, the true cornerstone of the holiday.

After dinner, our "Kaohsiung family" went to a hot pot restaurant to have a few drinks and chat with Alex, who won't be our boss for too much longer, much to our chagrin. Though the weather here has been much warmer than we were led to believe, I decided that, warmth or no warmth, I was going to break out my Seattle-weather clothes. It felt great to be in a trench coat and hat again, whether or not they were truly necessary. Anyway, we shared some good laughs at the restaurant, then headed back to our hotel, where I decided to take advantage of the marvelous jacuzzi bathtub (banishing all thoughts of the negative possibilities of actually using a hotel bathtub from my mind for the sheer pleasure of taking a bath in a cool room).

And that brings us up to now! All in all, it was a stupendous day--but one about which I can't write any more tonight.