Hope you like rats!

This morning, I arrived at Hanmin to find some little treasures awaiting me in my desk. The first was a set of pictures the school photographer took of Alison and I for the yearbook which finally got printed; the second was even better. A big manila envelope containing dozens of postcards from Oregon.

I've mentioned before that Hanmin has a pen pal exchange going with the school my mom teaches at back home. What we've learned, however, is that, slow mail speeds aside, it takes a VERY long time to get dozens of individual students to write and turn in their letters. As a result of that, compounded with schedule irregularities and tests, it took us nearly 3 months this time to send the American kids the responses to their letters.

In the mean time, apparently, some of them got anxious (and/or were prompted by their teachers) and sent a bunch of post cards! So, though our latest responses should be in their hands soon (if they're not there already), we also have a good number of gorgeous pictures of Oregon addressed to about half of the Taiwanese pen pals. And, today, Ingrid and I amused ourselves by reading through them.

They were hilarious. My personal favorite was the one that focused on the student's new-purchased pet rats. To sign off, she wrote, "Hope you like rats!" Indeed--if her pen pal doesn't, she'll be awfully disappointed by her letter!

Ingrid's favorite also followed the animal theme: the student told his pen pal that his family had just bought some chickens--"not to eat, but as pets." He then proceeded to tell the chickens' names: Omelet, Scrambled, and Poached. But hey, at least it wasn't "Fried!"

Other joys were the homemade postcards. One was of a pink illustrated dragon (no, not one from pop culture, just a random drawing); another was an amazingly drawn picture of a deer leaping next to a stream, all surrounded with what looked like a gilt frame. Astounding creativity.

I spent several of my breaks today sorting the post cards out between the 5th and 6th grade students here. They'll be overjoyed to receive them, I know--so much so that maybe this time we'll manage a faster response time than 3 months. But how could we not, with such lovely messages as "Hope you like rats!"