A Few Firsts

The first first to which the title refers is my delaying a day and then actually following through on my promise to recount events from the day before. I'm well aware that I am horrible about this--my posts are riddled with promises for "more later," only to be followed with nothing, or perhaps a sentence or so summarizing the day before.

Not today! Today, due in part to the fact that I spent the first three quarters of the day doing absolutely nothing and in part to the fact that yesterday was absolutely amazing, I will actually give details where I promised details. So, there's that.

And now, firsts from yesterday and today!

As I mentioned yesterday, in the morning, I met up with my co-worker Fiona and co-teacher Maggie for a trip to the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art, where we attended the Alphonse Mucha exhibit. Now I'll be honest, before Maggie and Fiona invited me to go see the exhibit with them, I had never heard of Alphonse Mucha. After a bit of online researching, though, I discovered that I had seen his work--and loved it.


One of my favorites of the pieces we saw yesterday

 Alphonse Mucha was a Czech artist in the Art Nouveau movement, and his works feature plenty of rich colors and patterns. They were often commissioned for advertising, either for plays or for products. Yet today, all these posters and ad placements are considered art--and with good reason. Many of his commissioned works (like the one above, which is technically an ad for a railway which ran to Monaco) stand alongside his bonafide art in beauty and craftsmanship.

I loved Alphonse Mucha; his work is beautiful and oddly intuitive. When I saw his precious stones series, for instance, I knew from looking at the first, unlabeled work that it was topaz, and that the next was ruby, then sapphire, then emerald. The placard came at the end, but it seemed redundant at that point--Mucha had so thoroughly and subtly  revealed his subject (without depicting the actual stones, I might add) that any further explanation was unnecesary. I was also deeply gratified by the fact that, in each of his series, I was instantly drawn to the painting which most closely reflected myself in title--emerald (my birth stone) in the above series, for instance, and poetry (ie, writing) in his series on the four art forms.

Where is the first in all this, you may be asking? Well, my first time seeing many of Alphonse Mucha's works. Also my first time doing something outside of school with Maggie and Fiona, my first time scootering as far as Zuoying, my first time at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (which was GORGEOUS!) and, afterwards, my first time trying the lemon-and-sugar gel-and-bubble beverage Fiona bought me on the way home. Lots of great firsts!

Then, last night, my host family picked me up to take me to Japanese food. And it was fabulous! Lots of firsts there, too.

First time I ate sashimi (aka raw fish), and I greatly enjoyed the raw bits of tuna and salmon, dipped in soy sauce and wasabi. First time trying plum juice, which was interesting, slightly salty and anice-y, unlike any juice I'd ever had. Another first, but not for me: first time my host sister, Emily, tried sake. (She was not a fan.)

You can see the sashimi here, ready to be tasted, center stage!

After dinner, my host family took me to their house for the first time--its a very pretty, five story townhouse not far from my daily commute, and we had a nice chat there, and discovered that Margaret, Emily and I all love Pride & Prejudice. :)

And then more firsts: we went to the Young Peoples' Shopping Center, where Emily showed me the photobooth phenomenon, which I participated in for the first time ever. It's great, by the way, and really brought me back a few years: you go into a photo booth, then have a time limit to choose different backgrounds and pose for pictures with a friend. Then, you go around the corner to another booth, this one with a touch screen and editing software, where you are once again timed as you and your friend add nice little finishing touches to your pictures. The end result is a bunch of little photo stickers, which I promptly attached to the front cover of my teaching notebook. Here are the (admittedly poor quality) pictures-of-pictures I took to show the world:

So that was my Saturday. What about the remaining one quarter of my day today which did not consist in doing nothing, you ask? That would be dedicated to the Halloween party thrown by Samia, Emily, and Lydia over in Apartment C. We had a nice little night of chili, bruschetta, green salad (my belated contribution, as I was unable to get the ingredients for my planned pasta salad due to my scooter's sudden decision that it needs oil NOW), and tamarind juice.

Plus, you know, another time to wear my pirate costume, bringing my tally thus far to five days; tomorrow, which actually IS Halloween, will make six out of the past seven days in which I was dressed as a pirate. I have to say, though, I think Lydia took the cake tonight for best costume: she came as "culture shock":

Her shirt reads "文化," (culture), and she's wearing an American flag sweater, Taiwanese acid-wash jeans, a bandana, and a cloth surgical mask...and lightning bolts. You know, for the "shock" part. :) Fonda's costume was fantastic too; you can't see the NY symbol on her shirt, though, since it's behind her cup...appropriate pair!

Now, in the spirit of this being a post of "firsts," I should notice that I am writing it in an Internet Explorer window, since my Firefox is currently moving at the speed of slime, due likely to the amount of videos I've watched on it lately. But now, IE is starting to slow down, too. So that's all the firsts for today!

Which is a good thing anyway, since tomorrow brings yet another first: the first time in over a month I'll be taking the MRT to work, thanks to my scooter issues. So hopefully, tomorrow will also bring my first Taiwanese oil change.

Busy

*We're sorry. The number you've called is currently not available. If you believe you have reached this message in error...*

I had a fantastic day today! Went with Maggie and Fiona to the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, where we viewed the stunningly beautiful works of Alphonse Mucha and had a wonderful Chinese-style lunch, then delicious lemon-and-jellies traditional Taiwanese beverage with Fiona before heading home. Went with my host family to a wonderful Japanese restaurant, where I sampled my first-ever sashimi (raw fish, and quite tasty), then headed back to their house to chat, then on to the Young People Shopping Area to get photobooth stickers made with my host sister (so much fun!!!).

So why, you may ask, the "phone recording" beginning this post? Because I'm exhausted; for once, I used up my energy living the day, and have none left to write about it, for now, at least. More details and pictures will follow, I promise!

So... "If you believe you have reached this message in error, please hang up and try again."

Tomorrow, that is.

Friday night

...is not all that exciting. After a week of Halloween festivities and teaching, when Friday rolls around all I really want to do is sit around, and read, and watch TV, and sleep.

This was called to my attention today with the arrival of Nick, a former Fulbrighter in China whom we met in Taipei, arriving at our apartment for the night. His arrival was the most eventful part of the day (closely rivaled by Skyping with my parents and brother, whom I hadn't seen in months); sitting around our kitchen table and chatting with him, Brittany and Rachel was the biggest social event I've experienced for a while.

Is that weird? Maybe. Is it the truth of my existence here? Yes.

I've mentioned it before, but my social life here is essentially nonexistent. My phone contains 22 names and phone numbers, 11 of whom are my fellow ETAs, 3 of whom are my LETs, 2 of whom are other Fulbright people, and 3 of whom are my host family. When you boil it down, that right there is my social circle: pretty tiny. And teaching is great, but it's tiring, and by the time I get home, I don't really feel like going out again.

It's times like these that I wish there weren't a time difference, so I could at least get in touch with my friends back home; Facebook and email only work up to a certain point, and then only if the friends check as often as I do, which is all but impossible. In truth, most of my friends have never been big Facebook users, a fact I simply forgot when there were other ways to get a hold of them, such as walking down the hallway or calling their cell.

The irony of my writing this post on this particular Friday night is that I do actually have plans tomorrow--an art exhibit with Maggie and another colleague, Fiona, in the morning, and dinner with my host family in the evening.

But right now it's Friday night, and all I want to do is sleep.

Controlled Chaos

Annnd Halloween marathon continues!

I arrived at Qingshan today to find the classroom already bustling, though technically the kids should still be in their previous class. I double-checked my watch several times before I went in: was I late?

Nope! Just class 6-1 getting ready for the main event of our lesson today: a student-run haunted house. This, predictably, devolved quickly into chaos. But fun chaos! I was stationed inside the darkened room, together with the designated scare-ers, who hid themselves around the room to scare the small groups of students who Patty let in the front door. Basically, my job consisted in tearing kids apart who mistook "scare" for "brutally attack," and keep them from walking on the desks, which they attempted more than once. I also patrolled the back door, shooing kids out at the end and trying to prevent some of the rowdier boys from trying to reenter from that side.

But they loved it! The scare-ers had a fabulous time, and from the terrified-but-thrilled shrieks uttered by their classmates, and the huge grins they wore as they left, I'd say the feeling was mutual. I also loved watching the getting ready process which happened during all the breaks:

On the left is the notorious Jack--kindly helping his classmate!

The girls were pro face painters

Also fun, and a nice break from Sleepy Hollow, was the Bugs Bunny video we watched, which is linked in my most recent post. Of course, getting kids from the blackboard to the video screen while offering them candy and making them say "trick or treat" was a trick in itself, but I'm too tired now to go into too much detail.

And tomorrow, the chaos continues!

Overheating

No, Kaohsiung hasn't been hit by a recent heat wave. This is overheating of a different sort. Or, rather, several different sorts (do you see a list coming? 'Cause I do!):

1.) My computer, Petey. (Yes, I named him. Moving on.) Being a laptop, and so quite logically resting on my lap, I'm heatedly regretting all the work I've asked him to do lately. I mean, really, emptying my several-hundred-photos full camera chip, sorting through and editing said photos, and finally, uploading them to Facebook...it's a lot to do, especially when I force him to simultaneously provide me with fantastic Seattleite music via Click 98.9 live streaming (,a favorite memory of home I can revive at will).

"Be kind to me," my computer screams, "what do you have to gain if I overheat and die?"

The answer is, of course, nothing. But sometimes, you've just gotta battle through, even though you're hopelessly behind in uploading so that, next time, you won't be so hopelessly behind as to make it seem utterly impossible. So, I'm sorry, Petey, but you're overheating days are far from over.

On the upside (for human friends, that is), here's the public link to pictures of all my in-class Halloween festivities!

And also this.

2.) My brain. I had Chinese class today, so this entry pretty much writes itself. But, in addition to the typical strain put on it by our biweekly marathon Chinese lessons, after class today, I went to the gym. And at the gym, Phoebe, who happens to be one of my favorite people here in Kaohsiung and who works at the gym, asked me to show her what I had learned.

On the plus side, my brain didn't completely empty out, as it did last month  when Chialing asked me the same thing. I remembered that we had learned about making phone calls and arranging plans, and I told her this. So she 'called' me to test it out. And then my brain went blank. We made it about 3 sentences into the 'conversation,' which consisted of me fumbling through a few ways of saying "It's me, Bekah," and then combining two ways of saying "Do you have free time Monday?" into some weird amalgamation which promptly made Phoebe and the other employees standing nearby burst out laughing.

"It's cute!" Phoebe said when I asked how terribly I had done, then ran up the stairs for the comparatively less embarrassing feat of actually working out. Maybe one of these days my brain will accept the need to actually use the patterns I learn in class on an immediate basis, but that's just something I'll have to work on, for now.

3.) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Yes, I know that it makes little to no sense to say that a story is overheating; in this case the more accurate word would be "fried," and even then, it would once again apply to my perception of the story, but who cares. The point is, over the past two days, I've read a shortened version of this story 6 times. Monday, I'll get to read it another 5 times. And that, my friends, is far too many times.

It's my own fault, of course: I suggested we read a Halloween story as part of our lesson, and of course whenever I make a suggestion like that for "us" to do, I'm fully cognizant that it means me. Actually, in this case, that's not even true--poor Maggie and Alison are stuck translating the whole story after me, line by line, because the kids' version of the story that I found online, cut by about half, and then simplified, still needs to be translated for most of the kids to catch the nuances of the story. It's pretty complicated, when you think about it!

I am very grateful that tomorrow and Friday, though still Halloween-themed and still requiring my massive bags of candy and my pirate costume, will be Sleepy Hollow-free. Another inherent advantage of having an actual, fully-equipped English classroom at Qingshan is that we can show video clips for this sort of thing!

Anyway, with all that said and done, I'm off now to give my computer, brain, and story-telling abilities a rest. Time to sleep, before the rest of me starts overheating, too.

Halloween, part 1 and ZUMBA!

It's never a good sign when the most creative thing I can think of for a blog post title is just a summary of the posts' parts. So we'll see what happens here.

This morning, I got up and put on a white shirt, khaki shorts, black shoes, brown hat, turquoise scarf (worn as a belt), wooden sword, and black eye patch. This will, I realized, be my costume de rigueur for the next week.

Why, you ask? Well, it's simple. I am an elementary school teacher. More specifically, I am an American English elementary school teacher living in Taiwan, and I teach 19 classes a week, with no repeats, at two different schools. And next Monday is Halloween. Therefore, from now until the actual holiday rolls around next Monday, I'm a pirate!

You know, just in case the kids at Hanmin had gotten used to a foreigner walking around, I thought I'd give them something new to gawk at. (Pictures forthcoming, but I seem to have forgotten my camera at school.)

This morning, Maggie and my first fifth grade class of the week (incidentally, I always feel bad for the first class--they are essentially a test group with whom to work out any kinks of the lesson plan) had a lot of fun, learning "trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat," making paper jack-o-lanterns, hearing the story of "The Headless Horseman" (abridged and in dual language to make it comprehensible), and then got to go trick or treat at the Principal's office! And here's the test of whether you read my parentheticals: I'm glad the first class of the day was the one picked for this honor.

So after a day of adorableness (lots of kids dressed up, by which I mean donned a witch hat or vampire cape or glittery mask--the costumes of choice here, apparently), I headed home. More on Halloween-y stuff later--but as I already said, this will be my week, so I've got plenty of time to extrapolate.

Tonight I went to my first Zumba class! Because, you know, there's nothing to make getting in shape easier than a fast-beat dance you've never learned that is being taught, when it's being taught at all, in Chinese. But it was fun, in a grueling, sweat-and-exhaustion inducing way! I definitely want to go back on a regular basis; maybe learn the basics so I'm no longer the awkward foreigner flailing about in some sort of misguided attempt to follow the instructor.

What made matters worse was that the other gym employees decided to come watch us, and bring people who happened to be touring the gym at the time. This didn't just happen once, either--I counted at least three separate instances when I looked over and suddenly saw Phoebe, or Cody, or Jackie, or some other Fitness Factory guru, laughing behind the glass at us, either alone or with strangers in street clothes in tow. Oh, and did I mention that I happened to be right next to said glass? Just go ahead and combine my dislike of being watched while I work out, my insecurities about my dance abilities, and my COMPLETE NEWBIE status together, and you get a real pleasant cocktail of stress.

Seriously, though, Zumba was a good idea, and I'll be back. I can already tell I'm going to be sore all over, including muscles I never think to work on the machines when I work out on my own, which is great. And of course it's a phenomenal cardio workout with great music and moves which may actually help improve my dancing at some point? We'll just have to hope and pray on that one. (And hope and pray that the new class schedule next week will still work--they change it all around every month!)

There's no real way to tie together Halloween and Zumba. Unless you imagine me dancing to Latin music in my pirate costume, which is just not a pretty picture.

Review

Today, in our 6th grade classes at Hanmin, we did a review of the first three units of our textbook, in preparation for the students' upcoming test later this week. I went all in on this lesson and created a Jeopardy-style game for them to practice on during class, complete with six subject categories (2 for each unit; one word- and sentence-based, one phonics-based), and 5 difficulty levels.

The kids were nervous at first, but within a few turns, they had the game figured out and were working the system; whenever lower-level English students were called to the board, their classmates would tell them to pick the hardest question still available, since they probably wouldn't be able to answer the easier ones either, and, with our ask-a-friend-for-half-points system, picking a hard question was actually their best bet.

As a result, a huge number of the harder questions, such as reading a sentence with brand-new words in it (eg, Read this sentence: "The caged canary is scared of the calico cat." -- 500 points) actually went like this:

Student 1: Uhhhhhhh
Bekah: You can ask a friend for half points!
*Student 1 runs into the sea of waving hands and picks someone*
Student 2: The cage-eh cannery (common mispronunciation on this one) is scare-eyd of the ca-li-co cat.
Bekah: Okay, you can read it first, but he still has to tell me.
Student 2: The cage-eh
Student 1: The cage-eh
Student 2: cannery
Student 1: cannery
Student 2: is scare-eyd
Student 1: is scare-eyd
Student 2: of the
Student 1: of the
Student 2: ca-li-co cat
Student 1: ca-li-co cat
Bekah: Good job! 250 points for the boys' team...

It took a little longer than I might have expected, but I'm actually glad it worked out this way: it enabled lower-level learners to attempt hard questions, assisted by their peers, and to succeed! In the five classes we taught today, not a single student couldn't, in the end, get the answer right. And that was the point of the review, after all: remind everyone of what they'd learned, and remind them that if they continue to study, they will get even better.

The concept of doing review got me thinking. Especially with this whole write-a-blog-post-a-day thing, my entire life has essentially turned into a constant review. I don't mean to say I'm not learning new things, because I am--living in another culture will do that to you--but at the end of every day I come to review what I've done during the day, and come to the realization that the vast majority of it is exactly like what I've done on any other day. (And that's when you get blog posts like this one.)

In college, we did a lot of reflecting and purposeful thinking-about-thinking. I had one professor who was obsessed with the concept of metacognition (being aware of and being able to express what you're learning), and how it actually helps you to learn better. By the time I graduated, I was absolutely sick of metacognition and reflection papers--those two often go hand-in-hand--and I was all but ready to swear off the whole concept.

Not quite ready, though, it would seem. Because in my daily reviews, metacognition is exactly what I'm practicing.

And I learn a lot, much like my students did today. In their review, they learned words like "guzzle" and "calico," and had to stretch their memories to recover old information so that they could apply it in new ways. In my reviews, I discover patterns in my daily life, analyze them, and have the opportunity to either change them or improve on them, applying old experience to new situations and finding a fresh perspective in the mix.

It's not Jeopardy, but it's a useful brain exercise nonetheless. And, as a bonus, it does not feature the annoying theme music.

New Levels

As has been my MO for Sundays in Taiwan not spent traveling, today I did absolutely nothing for the majority of the day, then set out in the late afternoon to try out a new church.

The new church, New Life Bilingual Church, was pretty good--different from any I'd been to, since it was fully bilingual (every song and sentence and verse went between English and Mandarin). Most of the service, though, I was just trying to come to terms with the fact that I will probably not find a church here that in any way parallels the amazingness of my home church in Seattle. This is not to disparage any churches here, New Life included--the City Church is just hard to compete with. Not, of course that church-building is a competition...maybe I'll just try to throw down the shovel here and stop writing.

Also during church, I saw my banker from Seattle, a lady from my parents' church in Eugene, someone who was at the AIT reading I did, the friend of a friend in Seattle, and one of the heads of the State Department who I met in Washington, DC. The thing is, none of these people were actually there. And no, I'm not hallucinating: I've simply somehow arrived at the point where all Westerners look the same to me.

In high school, my dear friend Emma, who was from South Korea, told me that we (and by we she meant us Americans) all look alike to her. I was dumbfounded, and quizzed her on this statement: what about our different hair colors? What about our different eye colors? What about our different skin tones? I could not imagine how it was possible that such a homogenous group as Americans are could all look the same.

Yet, here I am, just a few months into living in Taiwan, and everyone I see looks like someone else I know. I've always had a tendency to find resemblances where no one else could (you'll note that I *did not say* this means the similarities don't exist, BY THE WAY, just that I see them easier than others do), and now, apparently, as the Western population shrinks, this tendency grows. After all, there aren't THAT many Westerners in Kaohsiung, so there is usually a pretty good chance that anyone I meet at least has a mutual friend with me.

Still, when I told Karina (who was sitting next to me), she burst out laughing. "Maybe they ALL came to your AIT reading!" she said.

Maybe it was bad that we were sitting in church making jokes. But this was an unusual and unexpectedly monumental shift in perspective--a new level of acclimatization, if you will--and thus well worth noting.

Stinky Tofu

I tried stinky tofu today! Actually, Rachel, Karina and I all tried it, and by 'it' in this case I mean we each had a tiny little piece about the size of a fingernail.

It was an interesting experience, but one that I knew was going to have to happen at some point this year. You see, stinky tofu (臭 豆腐) is a signature dish around here. Because, you know, what could be more appetizing than a dish for which, according to Wikipedia,  "The traditional method for producing stinky tofu is to prepare a brine made from fermented milk, vegetables, and meat; the brine can also include dried shrimp, amaranth greens, mustard greens, bamboo shoots, and Chinese herbs," which is then fermented with the tofu. Apparently, the shrimp variation is particularly popular around here.

First Google hit for "stinky tofu." Love it.

In any case, stinky tofu has been on my to-do list to eat since I got here. Every time I walked past a stand, though (and believe me, you can't avoid them here), the in-your-face-terrible smell would come wafting out and I would think "eh, maybe next time."

So what, you may ask, prompted me to go for it today?

Hard to say. Rachel, Karina, Brittany and I were at Rachel's host family's house for dinner, and they were asking if we'd tried it, or wanted to try it. Rachel said she might. I said I would if she would. So...we did.

And here's what I learned: eating it is fine. The chewing, you can hardly taste a thing, and it's by no means horrible. Then you swallow, and it's still okay. Give it a few seconds. And then...you realize that the smell, not the taste, has become lodged in your mouth. So, rather than having the actual, innocuous taste stuck in your mouth, you're stuck with the taste of the horrific smell, and it won't go away. Trust me, I tried: grape juice, then broth, then Asian pears. The only cure I found was concentrated sugar, which eventually came my way via the mango creamsicle they gave us for dessert and, later, the Hi-Chews I had at home. Still, it's a recurring kind of smell...

In other news, we ended up being at Rachel's host family's house for almost 5 hours, which was fun--their house reminded me, somehow, of Seattle (maybe because they have 3 kids so I felt like I should be nannying?). Our visit turned into an impromptu hours-long Chinese-and-Taiwanese lesson in which Brittany featured prominently, and which I lost entirely somewhere around hour 4. But I can now remember the tones on pineapple (鳳梨; 4th-2nd), and I learned the word for curious (好奇).

At one point the dad's dad came in (this was the beginning of the switch to Taiwanese), and he reminded me a lot of my own grandpa, which was great. There was also a strong family resemblance between him, his son, his daughter (who came to visit partway through), and his grandkids; being so far from my own family, it was great to see a complete and obvious family.

So it was a good evening, complete with memories of old experiences and the making of the new--memories which, like 臭豆腐, will stick around for a while.