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!"

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...