Parents Day 2011

Last year for Parent's Day, I was freaking out a little bit. I had never had conferences with real parents before and I was only a first year teacher! What was also intimidating is that the parents of our students put their full trust in us to not only educate their children but to basically raise them too since we are a boarding school. I thought I was going to get yelled at when I told a parent their child was failing and I didn't know how to act around them!

This year, I was much more relaxed about parent's day at our school. If it was going to be anything like last year, it was going to be very easy. Thank god it lived up to my expectations! For two hours in the morning and another hour after lunch I sat in my room while parents filtered in with their kids. I told them exactly what was happening in class for their child and they normally said "Ok, thank you." No further questioning, no accusations like what I hear of some conferences in the States, just a simple check in on how their son/daughter is doing in math class.

On top of having easy conferences, the parents of my students this year came with gifts! One of my 9th grade students gave me chocolate and another student from that class came with a beautifully painted Taiwanese clay god to hang on my door for good luck. I also made one mom cry not because she was so upset, but because she was so happy: I apparently gave her daughter more confidence. How? I don't know, but then they took a family picture with me.

All in all it was a very good parent's day, but it has left me exhausted for the start of this week. It was an all day Sunday affair and if you read my frantic blog post from Saturday morning, you know that I was getting sick. Well luckily I think the Taoist god responded to my plea because I do not have strep. However, it is still your average common cold which means I'm just run-down a little.

Lack of energy from the cold and spending all weekend at work with students and parents have left me with little energy on this Monday. Luckily my lesson plans are all easy today so as long as no student is too loud, we shouldn't have any problems. Then it's bedtime for me at 8:45 tonight (I wish I was joking about that!).

Please God, Please Buddha, Please Taoist God, Please Don't Let Me Be Sick This Weekend!

Nobody likes to get sick. You feel crappy, you have no energy, and then there are the unsavory symptoms like sneezing and coughing and sometimes (gasp) a trip to the doctor for antibiotics if it's bad enough. I'm right there with you on that one, I hate being sick.

What I hate more than being sick though, is being sick at a time when you are too busy to get sick. This weekend is one of those times. I am on duty this weekend which means that after class today (Saturday) I will go with the kids to bowling activity, watch them bowl for a while, throw a couple of gutter balls perhaps, and then usher them all back onto the bus back to school. Rest for a few hours and then get them back on a bus to go to the night market from 6-10 tonight. Not too bad, just a long day.

The bad part is that tomorrow is not a normal Sunday: tomorrow is Parent's Day. A normal duty weekend I would have to show up at 1 and be in charge of children for a few hours. Tomorrow however, I need to be at school in nice formal dress at 9:30 and we are not going to leave until 4:30 or 5. Not to mention I need to have countless conferences with parents and be the face of the math department since I'm chair this year. And then I teach again on Monday.

This weekend is going to be a marathon to say the least. A marathon without the added evil of a soar throat which is exactly what I woke up with this morning. I am praying to whatever deity will listen to me right now to just make this a common cold or even better, maybe just a soar throat from over-use (I was yelling a lot last night because we played Cranium at the Family Mart).

What I'm most nervous about though, is strep. I got strep throat at exactly this time last year and I am having a mini panic attack as I type this that it is a creepy deja vu thing going on this year. This weekend is just not the time to get strep throat! I have no time to rest and I need to be presentable and personable tomorrow!

Ugh, please God, please Buddha, please Taoist god, please don't let this be strep!!! :( I'll keep you posted...

Milk Tea = Best Invention Ever

Asia is well known for their tea. The Western world gulps down coffee like the caffeine-shakes are going out of style but us Asians prefer the milder caffeinated beverage. I personally enjoy almost any type of tea: green, black (which the Taiwanese call "red" tea), Jasmine, you name it. What I enjoy more though, is combining tea with milk. Who ever did this first was a genius.

In Taiwan there is a surplus of two things: 7-11 convenience stores and tea shops. You can walk down any block in any city in Taiwan and run into both of these things (or if not a 7-11, at least a Family Mart or Hi Life which are basically the same thing- what you think of as gas station convenience stores in the U.S. minus the gas). Now these tea shops are not the dimly lit, smokey rooms you are probably imagining. They are like the Starbucks of Asia. They are awesome and that is a fact.

The Taiwanese have combined all sorts of teas with all sorts of delicious flavors and put them on ice. You can get Passion Fruit Tea, Ice Cream Milk Tea, Bubble Milk Tea (the topic of many raving blog posts of mine last year, it is like pure crack cocaine), Kumquat Juice and Green Tea, Green Tea with Lemon, Green Tea with Honey, ANYTHING! And funny enough, they are all amazing!

I have become recently obsessed with two new types of teas: Green Tea #8 and Green Milk Tea. The #8 Green Tea is exclusive to one particular tea shop named 50 Tea (they really like numbers apparently) and it is a mix of green tea with kumquat juice and sweet plum juice. Very refreshing and delicious.

Milk Green Tea is a mixture of milk (shocking I know) and Jasmine Green Tea. If you've never had Jasmine tea before, it sort of tastes like potpourri. It is an acquired taste I'm pretty sure and I have been busy acquiring it. Something about putting the flowery taste of the Jasmine and milk together and shaking it over ice is the most satisfying drinking experience I have had for a while. I crave it at odd hours of the day and I fear the day that I leave Taiwan for good because I think I may go through withdrawals!

For now, I shall enjoy my amazing iced tea concoctions and do so often :)

Grocery Store Run-In

When you are surrounded by Chinese all day, it is difficult to comprehend English when caught off-guard. This is the lesson Nichole and I learned today.

After teaching and attending the faculty meeting after school today, we traveled home via scooter and dropped off our bags at home. After a quick costume change, we were back out the door again to hit the grocery store for dinner supplies. We generally always walk to the closest grocery store which is about 3 short blocks down the street from us. I think thus far we have been the only white people in there on each visit.

Tonight I was standing next to Nichole seriously pondering which type of odd, leafy green to buy for our salad (we never can find spinach here), when there was gibberish coming from our left. We're pretty used to locals trying to talk to us in Chinese, and we've gotten pretty good at smiling and nodding and then saying "I don't know! Sorry!" in Chinese. But this woman wasn't speaking normal Chinese.

I looked over and literally blinked a few times before I realized it was a white woman talking to us. And that wasn't gibberish she was speaking, it was English! I think she had to repeat her initial greeting four or five times because we both just looked at her like a couple of deer in headlights.

I guess that when you aren't expecting to understand something, you simply won't. Even your own language can seem foreign when you are out of place somewhere.

Taiwanese Saturday

There are just some of those days when you are living abroad when you stop and think, "wow, I really DO live in a foreign country, huh?" Yesterday, Saturday, was one of those days. It started normal enough; taught my kiddos SAT Math Prep and had a pretty good time doing so. Then went to lunch in the dining hall and sat with my advisees. Standard Saturday for me.

The "Real Taiwanese Experience" started after that. I chose to go with the 11th grade students on their afternoon trip even though I wasn't on duty this weekend. Why, you ask? Well, my friend Kate was on duty and assigned to that trip so I would be with her. Also, all my other friends were required to work with seniors on college applications that afternoon so I had no one else to hang out with. AND the 11th graders were going to Lukang, the coolest Saturday trip we do!

Lukang is a small fishing village about an hour and a half from Taichung. I guess it is sort of a tourist trap but it's actually pretty nice for foreigners because it has some historical buildings lining the main streets and great little shops that you don't really find in Taiwan too ofton. So all in all, a pretty nice place to experience some of the charm of Taiwan.

Last year I had been to Lukang once while on duty but I was pretty excited to go again because you can also buy some delicious food there! So Kate and I walked around the narrow, winding streets of Lukang on Saturday afternoon and had some of our favorite 11th grade students guiding us around. I really like to take advantage of opportunities like this because it completely turns the tables on my usual teacher-student relationships; it's a really cool way to let the students teach us something about their country and culture.

After a fried oyster pancake, traditional peanut "candy" (not like candy really, it was like a weird wispy almost cotton-candy-esk wrapping around a pocket of peanut powder/paste....sounds weird, but it was pretty delicious), and a cup of the self-proclaimed best iced jasmine milk tea in Taiwan, we boarded the bus again. Kate and I got a good chance to catch up on the bus ride, so all around it was a very nice afternoon.

That evening a group of us teachers decided to go out to dinner then. There were quite a few of us which I always enjoy because then we really have a great gang of Americans on scooters driving around the city! When this happens, we both intrigue and terrify the locals. It is awesome.

Last night we weren't heading into Taichung though, we were heading out and up. With one of the new teachers riding on the back of my scooter, our gang traveled up the mountains surrounding Taichung for about 45 minutes to a restaurant on top of a super high ridge overlooking the city lights. There we had dinner at the Mushroom Palace. Now we're not really sure what the name of this place actually is, but since they serve any and all kinds of mushrooms that are grown on that mountainside, we thought that would be an appropriate name for the place.

After a wonderful dinner of traditional mushroom hotpot, we decided to check out a pseudo-underground bar that we had been hearing about for a while. In the same area of the city, out in the foothills of the mountains around Taichung, there is an abandoned amusement park. This is the site that a few crazy foreigners have created some sort of hippy cooperative including a bar called The Refuge. This is were we went.

To say it was bizarre is probably the understatement of the year. The actual bar is pretty normal, big on the inside with your standard bar stools and pool tables. I mean, its pretty weird to be in a room with almost all foreigners and be able to understand the conversations around you, but you get used to that. It really gets odd when you start exploring the grounds because you can walk in the dried out lazy river, check out the old zip lines (not go on them, I'm pretty sure that would be certain death), or go explore in the odd African safari themed statues. It has a creepy, scene-from-a-horror-film feel to it, and all the while I was concerned that I would run into one of the seven poisonous snakes in Taiwan. Have no fear, we didn't see any wildlife besides the bugs out there!

It's weekends like this one that really reinvigorates my love of Taiwan. It is easy to forget you are living in a foreign country when you teach all day and come home at night only to grade more, plan more, and go to bed. It's the weekends that remind me how cool of an experience this is, and I still love it!

I Love Living Off Campus

Last year I had 160 roommates, most of them under the age of 17. This year has been a big upgrade since I only have 1 now and she is not in high school. It is so incredibly nice to live off campus in my own apartment this year it is almost indescribable. But let me try anyway! Take Monday for example, just your average day but living off campus made it a great day.

Monday I taught all day and left school at about 4:30 in the afternoon. That's right, I got to actually leave and not come back until the next morning! Nichole (my roommate) and I stopped at a grocery store on the way home and then proceeded to cook dinner. We made a honey-dijon chicken bake with stir-fried veggies as a side. I had only a hotplate last year, food like that didn't exist in my world!

Then at 7 p.m. when we were well fed and ready to relax a little, I was actually able to surf the web. You see, last year once 7 rolled around and all the kids were on their computers, there was no way I could even get online because the wifi was so slow. This is a big improvement.

Not only could I surf the web but I was actually able to Skype with my friend Abbey at 8. Conversations during my evening time were clearly out of the question for me last year (for the same slow wifi reasons as I previously mentioned) so it is a real treat for me this year to talk as long as I want with people at night. Last year I was forced to wake up at 5 a.m. or so just to talk to people. I sleep much more now!

That night I was able to relax, unwind, get a little planning done, and most importantly regain my sanity for the next school day. Living off campus is awesome. I knew it would be great, but I couldn't even comprehend just how amazing it would be this year. I feel like a real adult now!

Sunday Walks

This year I have been making it a personal goal of mine to get to know Taichung better. I figure that since I'm now living in the city and not on a school campus, I should get out and explore as much as possible. Since our schedules at school are so crazy, I generally try to accomplish this goal on my Sunday mornings.

Every weekend thus far, I wake up on Sunday, put in my contacts, and start walking. I explore the local markets, local stores, local tea shops (yum!) and today, the local temples. I started walking today at about 9 a.m. and just got back to my apartment at noon- it was quite the walk!

First I stumbled upon a temple that is about two blocks from my apartment. It's tiny but the top is beautifully painted.

Two blocks further down I ran into another previously undiscovered temple much bigger than the first.

Next I walked further South into the city and saw on my map that I was getting close to the Taichung Confucius Temple and Martyr's Shrine. I had never been there before so I set out for it. I was really glad I did because once I got there, it was like an instant escape from the bustling city streets. The temples were medium sized temples with really nice, big grounds. And best of all, there were English signs explaining the different parts of the temple!

Finally, on my way home I came across somewhat of an obscure temple. You can see it from very far away because it is pretty tall, or at least taller than the average temple, and it's very unique. It seems like there is a very old temple that they wanted to preserve so they built a huge, modern temple serving as somewhat of a shelter over it. It's a little hard to tell from this picture, but I really liked it because it was so different.

After 3 or so hours and close to a dozen temples, I finally ambled home. It is amazing what you can find when you just follow your feet out of your own front door....or should I say front gate past the doormen and parking attendant. Because that's what I did this morning.