Saturday school: it's not just for screw-offs anymore

Quite the contrary, really. See, as I noted earlier, Tuesday was a national holiday in Taiwan; to avoid the awkwardness of a single day separating the holiday from the weekend, many schools, mine included, took Monday off. The only problem with that, though, is that unlike in the US, that meant a make-up day--on Saturday.

So, today included a full 5-class schedule for me, during which I attempted, with limited success, to teach my kids the game "4 on the couch." In retrospect, I think it will work better as a review game; maybe I'll try it again later.

Other highlights of the day (because I'm too tired for real organization tonight):

• We received a package of pen pal letters from my mom's school in America! The kids were getting anxious and will be overjoyed once we hand them out, and in the mean time I had a great time skim-reading the paper-clipped letters the new participants sent to their unknown pen pals--some hilarious moments like a page-long description of a failed wrestling career, "What's your hamster's name? My hamster died. It was sad." and "I'm very popular and have lots of friends." (Different letters.)
• A teacher at Hanmin asked me to tutor his college-aged son in English. That's about as far as we've gotten in discussions, but I'm excited to maybe get to do it.
• Rachel, Karina, Amanda (a friend studying Chinese in Taipei) and I went to Dream Mall and rode the Ferris wheel there for the first time, conquering Karina's childhood trauma and marking the first time Rachel had been on one since the London Eye and the first time I'd been on one since I was 16. This one, as we discovered, goes terrifyingly slow and features chirpy music and Hello Kitty-bedecked gondolas, and sits in the middle of a child's fantasy world.

And that's it for tonight. A Saturday school day followed by shenanigans leads to all sorts of exhaustion...