7 Months Sans Car...and Fun with T-shirts!

On my drive home from school today, I realized something: I haven't driven a car in 7 months now. I've ridden in them, sure, but never driven. All my driving has been done on a scooter, and the two could not be more night-and-day. And it's led to a few unexpected changes, both in me and in my mindset:

1.) My auto-brake-foot reflex has gone away--even riding with crazy taxi drivers, I never sense myself pointlessly pressing my foot against the carpeted floor, trying to slow the vehicle. It never did much good, of course, but it was nonetheless firmly ingrained in my psyche from 6 years of car driving. And it's gone now, my feet resting quietly now on my scooter footrest as my hands do the braking.

2.) I steer by leaning and pulling, rather than twisting. This probably seems pretty obvious, given the nature of scooters, but it was not until today when I realized that the now-natural motion of changing direction on my scooter is drastically different from the way I learned to steer a car, or even, to some extent, a bicycle. No matter how good a driver you are, a car always remains still pretty much just a car, a mechanized vehicle which you make do your bidding: it's a tool that you manipulate from the remove of a seat and steering wheel. The same cannot be said of a scooter; it's more like riding a horse, to the extent that you steer using tiny shifts in weight and pressure: a scooter becomes, in a sense, an extension of you and your natural motions. And they have to be pretty subtle, because...

3.) I accelerate with my hands, too. This was one of the hardest things for me to learn on the scooter: how to simultaneously keep a steady speed and turn, for instance, right. To turn right on a scooter you have to pull on your right handlebar; simultaneously, though, that hand is controlling the speed by pulling it towards you. Pull the wrong way, and you may go right, but you'll also suddenly find yourself going much faster than you'd planned. Quite the change from the oh-so-lovely-and-isolated actions of pressing an accelerator and turning the steering wheel of a car. But now, not having touched a 4-wheeled vehicle in 7 months, it seems perfectly normal and easy to do this right-handed multitasking.

So yeah, I haven't driven a car in a while. I've said it before, but I am truly fascinated and slightly terrified to see what my time driving a scooter in Taiwan, to the exclusion of both cars and consistent traffic laws, will do to my driving back in America. We'll just have to wait and see, though.

And now, I give you, another Unsolved Mystery of Taiwan!

This one is, perhaps, not entirely unsolved, but nonetheless, it never ceases to make me chuckle and/or cringe: "English" T-shirts. This phenomenon seems to be not exclusive to Taiwan, T-shirts emblazoned with either blatantly wrong or just plain awkward phrases, but I do till see a pretty high number of them on a daily basis. Today brought a couple especially wonderful ones which made me wish I'd brought my camera to school, but alas, I did not. I did, however, bring my notebook, so I quickly jotted down these beauties:

(spread across the entire front of a T-shirt in various sizes and fonts, reminiscent of a truck commercial):
"Variations in Color and Design MAY EXIST as a result of Environmental Factors"

(complete with more wrong labels and exclamations that I didn't have time to jot down):
"Grany Bigrs!"

...yes, that's supposed to be "Angry Birds."

"Grany Bigrs!!!!"

(with a picture of a friendly-looking cartoon man, on a shirt being worn by a sweet 6th grade girl):
"My Dick would like to buy you a drink"

"Hello, my name is Dick, and I would like to buy you a drink. Wait, why are you running away?"

Cockroaches and Chicken Soup

My name drifts out of the conversation in the corner, once, twice, three times: "Bekah 老師...Bekah 老師..."

I look over to see that a group of my 5th graders from last semester in excited conversation with Maggie, who is shaking her head.

"What's going on?"

As it turns out, she explains, this particular class has just finished a group competition on different foods, and as part of the competition, each group has to get as many teachers' votes as possible. Each teacher is allowed to vote twice; there are four groups in the class, and so far, both include one of my favorite students. Ohhh dear.

Maggie tells me she's already abstained from the vote--too hard to choose--and told the kids I won't vote either; I reaffirm what she's said but feel a twinge of desire to help this wonderful group of kids toward their goal.

But not to worry, they're not done yet. Five minutes later, a group swoops into my office, now bearing their project poster on various Korean foods, and while I protest that I "看不懂" what they're showing me, a mixture of pictures and Fiona's translation assures me that they're presenting on tea, chicken soup, and a few other yummy-and-innocuous-sounding things. And these are some of my favorite kids, some of the sweet girls who bring me my lunch everyday...I finally agree to sign it.

No sooner is their poster off my desk, though, than another one lands there, this one lauding the culinary properties of cockroaches and spiders. (Yes, it was a group of boys.) "It's good!" They tell me, pointing repeatedly to the drawn pictures of sauteed spiders and fried-up cockroaches. I know these boys, too, and they are absolutely wonderful, but, spiders and cockroaches? No can do.

"Sorry, boys, I don't like eating insects!"

They don't go down without a fight, though, pointing furiously and giving me their very best puppy dog eyes, but to no avail. They came back several times, and I almost relented--but really? Insects?

I spent the rest of my lunch break chatting with my colleagues and finishing my Chinese writing homework--which, incidentally, the boys said was "好漂亮," though it was clearly anything but beautiful. Nonetheless, I left Hanmin with a smile on my face, as I always do when I get to spend quality time with my students truly feel myself to be "Bekah 老師."