Birthday trip to Kenting

This weekend, 7 of us decided to take a mini-holiday to Kenting. Friday night, we decided that my birthday coupled with the end of the terrible week warranted a vacation. And everyone knows that spontaneous vacations are the best! :)


Kenting is "Taiwan's tropical playground," located on the southern tip of the island. It has a national park with hiking through tropical forests as well as beautiful beaches, one of which boasts a coral reef. Four of us left early Saturday morning, taking the two-hour bus south. Even the scenery from the bus was amazing with palm tree forests (I have never seen entire forests of palm trees), the ocean on one side and mountains on the other. Many things we passed I was not sure what they were, such as large groupings of square bodies of water enclosed with stone walls. Each had a watermill churning in the middle, and our best guess was that they were fish farms (?). Three other people had school-related activities in the afternoon, so they did not join us until the evening. However, they also are staying an extra day. Carol and I both had to be back in Kaohsiung by this morning for the first day of school. Some of us adults have real jobs and cannot be frolicking on weekdays lol. :) This will be more funny when you hear what my job is actually like.

Kenting was just so wonderful - a much needed break and get-away. We went cycling, swam in the beach (you should have seen the stares we attracted being the only four westerners in the midst of dozens of super skinny Asians - Carol and I call ourselves Amazon Queens) and splashed around volcanic rocks (I was so in awe of the volcanic rocks that I mindlessly wished out-loud that I could live on a volcanic island... It might take a while to live that one down), went to the night market, hiked through the national forest and saw lots of tropical trees (we even had a guide who went around with us, the only westerners in the park, to point out different kinds of trees and wildlife - he was amazing). Sunday was a simply amazing day. After hiking in the morning (before it got too hot), we returned to our hotel where I took a 20 minute nap while some people showered, went to lunch at a Thai restaurant (one of my favorite cuisines, in case you didn't know), returned to the hotel where I took another 20 minute nap while we waited for our shuttle, and then went to the beach where we went snorkeling! The best kinds of days include lots of physical exertion, great food, lots of naps and beautiful scenery!



The coral reef in Kenting is beautiful. I had never been "for-real" snorkeling before (only fake snorkeling where you use the gear but are in ordinary ocean-water, so you don't see anything), so it was an incredible experience. I felt like I was living in Nemo's world! We even saw Scarface!! I followed him around for a bit, until I lost him in a hole... There were beautiful electric blue fish (I wonder if they glow in the dark) and pretty rainbow colored ones. The coral itself was very interesting to study. There are so many different types of coral, and it was so cool to realize that it is all alive and not just dead rocks!

Our snorkeling experience was kind of hysterical. And it was an "experience." I am not too sure how many westerners they get out there - not many... We arrive in the van, and are greeted by three guys who will be our "coaches." [Sidenote, the indigenous Taiwanese people are beautiful - much more similar to Pacific islanders than East Asians]. They are very excited to meet all of us, and then one of the guys indicates that I look the most "American." In case you thought he meant my blond hair, he then elaborates that I have a "very nice body," and does the accompanying hand motions! Oh yes. He did. And then Kristin tells him it's my birthday, at which point he breaks out singing "happy birthday" in English to me! I was definitely bright red by this point... Oh my. Me with my American body at a Taiwanese beach. Clearly a highlight for them.

Having birthdays does have its perks though. In addition to the van ride to and from the beach, wet suits, snorkel gear and snorkel time which we all got for the bargain price of 12 American dollars each, they threw in free rides with them on their jet ski in honor of my birthday. It was pretty awesome. :) We also did this ride where two of us sat in an inner-tube tied to the jet ski, and then one of them would whip us around, trying to flip us out of the tube into the ocean. So - much - fun.

It was a beautiful weekend, and much needed after last week. It was so wonderful to be away from Kaohsiung, to be completely mindless and to just relax and have fun.

Bekah and I at the night market with our new sunglasses and my new beaded necklace!

Co-teacher pairings, at last...

This past week is at the top of my list for "most stressful weeks of my life." It was the end of a three-week period in which we were meeting and visiting with all of the co-teachers. The first week was a lot of fun. Meeting new people and getting to know them is always exciting, even if it is extremely tiring for me. The co-teachers were all so wonderful, and I just enjoyed hanging out with all of them, without the pressure of feeling like I was being "interviewed" or "examined" like several of the other ETAs felt. The second week began to be slightly more stressful, because although we were no longer with the LETs every day, everyone was picking their favorites while trying to judge which were the favorites of everyone else. The LETs also began applying a lot of pressure to certain ETAs, inviting them out to dinner/lunch, singing at KTV or shopping etc. Now I love being wined and dined, but I must admit that the stress of trying to weigh schools - which liked me the best, which I liked the best and which I knew my friends liked the best (therefore, schools I would rather not pursue so they could have them) - really got to me by the end. Last week was the culmination of all that pent-up anxiety. My problem is really that I want everyone to be happy. I am a people-pleaser by nature, so if everyone around me is happy, then I know I will be happy too. I would rather not get my first choice, just so that someone else will not be miserable for an entire year. However, I also do not like to let people down, which means that if a school really wants me, I have a hard time telling them "no", even if I would prefer not to go there.

In the process of trying to avoid drama and to make everyone else happy, I failed royally. The problem, as my roommates all told me, was that I was sadly one of the most popular ETAs. I do not know why - I mean, I might have the least teaching experience of all 12 of us. If I was an LET, I do not think I would pick me. But apparently, my blond hair and "American body" (yes, I do have a good story to explain that one - check a future posting) and winning personality (?) made me quite popular with all of the schools. I believe that I just fit the stereotypes of what the Taiwanese perception of an "American" is. There are three blonds in the program, but Kevin is a little too over the top (the LETs say he talks too much...) and Kaitlyn is quieter (comes across as more shy). Many schools also were blatantly discriminatory, making it subtly known that they did not want an Asian (two ETAs are ABCs) or only wanted a girl. Whatever the reason, for the first time in my life, I was the "popular kid." And being popular is only fun when everyone wants to be your friend, not when it means they start fighting over you. Then it is stressful.

The last week was also very tiring because we visited all of the schools. The fun part about the school visits was (a) seeing the schools (some of them are so beautiful! and they are only elementary schools!! makes me want to see the high schools...), (b) getting free stuff and (c) the children. The schools showered us with gifts, each determined to make a lasting impression on us. We received several baseball caps, a shirt, flowers, chocolate, food of all kinds and lots of bubble milk tea (珍珠奶茶 - my favorite!) and juice. While I love bubble milk tea, juice with jelly in it is not my favorite, especially when it is the sour plum juice. Think salty, sweet and sour all simultaneously. If it was just sweet and sour, that would be fine. It is the salty flavor that repels me... None of us have figured out why it is such a popular drink here. The other fun part of the school visits was seeing some of the children. The schools would show us all around their facilities and had asked some of the children to perform. We were entertained by school bands (way better than most middle school bands I have heard - and these were only 5-6th graders!), singing children, and demonstrations of swimming (yes, the school had an indoor pool), volleyball, table-tennis and gymnastics. Of course for each of these schools, they were number one in some area, be it an athletics team (the principals' offices were usually lined with trophies), astronomy (one school had an entire astronomy museum on one floor with a telescope in a special viewing room) or creative arts. Additionally, the schools had amazing technology, with special media viewing rooms and smart boards in the English classrooms. Wake did not get smart boards until last year, and even then, they were only installed into library study rooms! The architecture of the schools was also very impressive. My favorite looked exactly like a fairytale castle. The designated English classroom for the ETA even had a tower with a spiral staircase! We were all blown away by the quality of the schools. I kept wondering what education in the States would look like if our government took education as seriously as they do here.

The schools were all so sweet to us, but the process was still very laborious and exhausting. We spent long days riding a bus around Kaohsiung and tramping up and down stairs at all of the schools in intense humidity. The biggest flaw of Taiwanese schools is that there is no air-conditioning - truly unacceptable for the climate lol.

Last Wednesday afternoon was speed-dating, and on Thursday, they revealed the pairings. I would say that Fulbright did everything in their power to make an already stressful process more stressful. Knowing and loving all of our Fulbright staff as I do, the only thing I can think of is that they did not fully realize how stressed-out and angst-filled we all were, despite the fact that we were repeatedly telling them... Even though most of us knew that all of the schools and LETs were all wonderful and that we would all be happy at any of them (well, almost all of us would be), we were all still incredibly stressed-out. It was all we could talk about with each other for the past two weeks, all any of us could think or dream about. *[footnote]* Visiting the schools the final week was fairly pointless, because although I enjoyed seeing each of the schools, by that point in the process, most of the schools were already spoken for by 1-4 of us. Certain schools were clearly off-limits, either because the school had made their preference obvious or because an ETA had chosen that LET as their best friend the first week. The rest of us would just trail behind, admiring the school, yet kind of wishing we could have stayed on the air-conditioned bus. I for one, was terrified to as much as smile at certain LETs, for fear of encouraging even more schools to think I liked them. Then by the time we reached speed-dating on Wednesday, a good third if not half of the schools already had their ETA picked-out, making some of the conversations rather awkward. Both of these activities were good ideas - it was important to see the schools where you might be teaching and it was also nice to finely see all of the co-teachers who were paired up for the year (remember, there are so many schools in the program this year, that most ETAs will be switching schools with the new semester, and a few will even have two schools they commute between during a single semester) together as a unit where you could ask them questions one-on-one. However, the sequencing of orientation could be improved upon by switching around some of the activities. In my opinion, we should have visited all of the schools first, so that we would have started out with our impression of the teachers being linked with their schools. Then I would have had speed-dating to ask all of the important questions from the start and to actually have the opportunity of meeting and talking with each of the schools (most ETAs never met all of the schools until that final day - to be fair, it was very difficult with 22 schools and close to 40 co-teachers compared to only 12 of us). Also, several of us ETAs thought it would have been helpful to start the process off with a small pamphlet which listed all of the schools, their key characteristics (student body demographics etc) and what they were looking for in an ETA (teaching experience, non-Asian, gender etc). The LETs could also be given a similar pamphlet about us, with our brief bio along with what we were looking for in a school (preferred age/grade range, low-income etc). If people would have been honest from the start about what exactly they were looking for, I think it would have been easier to match each other up with the best results. Next, I would recommend another 1-2 days of orientation activities where we were all together so that LETs and ETAs could spend more concentrated time pursuing the pairings in which they were interested. At this point, we could do our rankings and be paired up with each other. Then the week of orientation sessions which we started with this year, could be put at the end, and used to actually get to know your specific co-teachers better. I think it would be useful to have time to learn each other's teaching styles and personalities, and to do all of the practice teaching with the person/people you were actually going to be teaching with for the entire year.

At any rate, the moment you have all been waiting for: which school did I end up with on Thursday? I got my favorite - the middle schools. :) I love the LETs so much and am very excited to be teaching older kids! I was not sure I was going to survive a whole year singing the Hokey Pokey... Sadly, there were only two middle schools, and both were paired together, which meant that only one person could have them. Several other people really wanted junior high school, and while I was prepared to let them have it (and even worked fairly hard to get them to become friends with the co-teachers), my efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. By the end of the week, I had realized the junior high schools were not going to pick the other girl. All of the other ETAs kept sitting me down to lecture me about needing to be more selfish and to quit worrying about making other people happy. I had to finally realize that the only person I could be responsible for was myself. People are responsible for their own happiness and for making their own way in the world. While I can try to love and to help others the best that I can, in the end, I can only do so much. By and large, I believe that most of the pairings turned out really well, and I sincerely hope that the more unexpected pairings will also work out well.

I have to admit, though, I am not a complete martyr and am extremely happy with my schools! :) I will be at Minghua Junior High School the first semester with Ellie and Yachi. The second semester, I will be at Minzu Junior High with Anita. The new semester starts this Monday! More details soon.



**[Sidenote: Most of you are aware that I do not handle decisions well. I can track this personality trait of mine developmentally back to the second grade. At a parent-teacher conference, my teacher Mrs. Fendley told my mother that she had noticed that I often had problems making decisions. She would notice me sitting at my desk, solemnly staring at my paper. Upon asking me what was wrong, I would worriedly respond by asking her whether I should color the girl's dress green or purple. You see, I was too terrified of coloring the dress the *wrong* color, that I could not make such an important decision lightly. The past two weeks here in Kaohsiung, I kept asking myself which color I should use for the girl's dress, and I just did not know! It did not matter that I loved all of the co-teachers and would honestly have been happy anywhere, I just could not decide and was so worried about wanting everyone to be happy.]

Lingjhou Summer Camp

Last week, we helped out with an English summer camp at Lingjhou Elementary Camp. The camp was only on Thursday and Friday, but we spent the days before that preparing for the camp. Monday was our last day with all of the LETs in the seminar workshops, and then Tuesday and Wednesday, we worked on camp prep. The idea, we thought, was that Lingjhou was organizing the camp, and that our role was merely to interact with the kids in English and to plan specific activities which they told us about. Lingjhou has one of the four English Villages here in Kaohsiung, so according to the schedule, most of the time was to be spent there (us talking through dialogs with the kids at the post office, airport, MRT, grocery store, restaurant etc). However, the week turned out fairly chaotic, and strictly off the record, I would say that it was a very poorly run camp. It was not well organized, things were not clearly explained to us ETAs beforehand, and once we got into the camp and activities did not go according to plan, the entire camp was pretty much dumped into our hands. And again strictly off the record, I would like to say that I officially hate the Hokey Pokey song. That's all. All of us are *really* hoping that classroom situations are very different from English summer camp. Otherwise, it will be a long year...

However, there were also lots of fun things about summer camp. The kids were cute, even if they were disruptive and mischievous (Not that I blame them. If I were a fourth grader, I would not be appreciative if my parents had signed me up for English summer camp the second-to-last week of summer. I can think of lots of things I would rather be doing than learning a foreign language.). Plus we got to do story-telling! I love story-telling! We acted out The Three Little Pigs for them. I was the narrator, for yes, I do still have all of my fairy tale stories memorized. Kristin and Kaitlyn made us all super-cute costumes. After acting it out for the kids the first time, we had them put on all of our costumes and act it out themselves. They seemed to really enjoy it.

The other main activity which we were actually told to plan beforehand was an English song. We tried teaching them the Beatles' "Hello Goodbye" song. Interesting experience... The kids did not seem to like singing... Yet we kept trying all week to teach them other crazy random English songs. The problem was that we ended up with lots of dead time during the camp, and the Lingjhou staff all backed off and basically told us to do whatever with the kids. This left us scrambling to recall every song/game we could from our early childhood. It all turned out fine in the end, but a bit more direction up-front would have been greatly appreciated. As for the ETAs, we learned which of us have special abilities when it comes to crowd control and amusing small children for hours on end.

On Friday afternoon, two of us ETAs were able to practice co-teaching. The week before, we had chosen who would teach with which co-teachers. Kevin worked with Jane (LET) to plan a lesson for the younger half of the children, and I worked with Hsiao-ping to plan a lesson for the older kids. Hsiao-ping is amazing. We met on Wednesday to talk through what we wanted to do (we met at this really cute tea house/cafe, where we sat on cushions at a low table, Japanese style - so fun!), and she showed up with a plethora of books, resources and games which we could use. We decided to plan our lesson around "What you like to do on the weekend." The kids would learn new vocabulary such as "play basketball" or "watch TV" or "go shopping" etc. We had about 14 kids for our lesson, and the other ETAs sat-in to observe either Kevin and Jane or Me and Hsiao-ping. They gave feedback to me and Kevin about our teaching, and my biggest problem was classroom management (which I knew it would be because I do not know how to manage a classroom!). My class had the older kids, and among the boys, about half of them were related to each other or were best friends. Over the past two days, they had already caused lots of problems, and by Friday afternoon, I no longer felt like dealing with them. Perhaps ignoring disruptive children is not the best classroom management style... Something I will need to work on... I just really hope that my co-teacher will take care of classroom management, leaving me to have fun with the kids. I think, too, that it will help when we are in a classroom environment. Summer camp is too loose of an environment, making it difficult to be strict with the kids.


All around, English summer camp was an interesting experience. Pictures and videos of the week are posted in a Picasa web album. The link should be in the top left corner of my blog if you are interested in checking it out. Once you click on the link, the album is entitled "Lingjhou Summer Camp."

Typhoon Relief

Many of you have asked me repeatedly how affected I have been by the typhoon. When I mentioned our typhoon experience last weekend, I mentioned how it had not impressed us as much more than an extremely heavy thunderstorm. It is amazing how what to us was merely a lot of wind and rain created so much devastation less than an hour away from us. We live in Kaohsiung City, which experienced very little damage. The flooding and mudslides which have made international news occurred farther out in Kaohsiung County as well as in the counties of Pingtung, Taitung and Chiayi.

Typhoon Morakot was the worst typhoon to hit Taiwan in the last 50 years, dumping over six feet of rain over a 2-3 day period. 121 deaths have been confirmed so far, with that number expected to surpass 500 soon. Another 1300 people are still reported trapped in remote mountainous villages. Washed out bridges and roads have made rescue missions near to impossible, except by helicopters. Taiwan is currently employing 75 helicopters, and has petitioned for more from the US and Canada. Check out this site for pictures of the devastation:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/typhoon_morakot.html


All of us ETAs are obviously concerned about the situation and have begun looking for ways we can help. Today, we went down to the City Hall to help with packing donations, sorting clothes and loading boxes onto buses to be sent out to the various provinces, where they will then be air-lifted in to the victims. We were impressed by the amount of the donations there, which were all given by local residents. Additionally, the building was filled with volunteers from the city who had all turned out to help. However, with about twice as many volunteers as needed, we did not feel super useful, but we were still happy to help in whatever way we could. Three ETAs from Yilan even made the train-ride down here to go volunteer with us.


Carol (far left) and I attempted to make ourselves useful by joining a group of Taiwanese women folding clothes. What we could not figure out was why we were pulling clothes out of bags, unfolding them, shaking them and then refolding them. But always being happy to help, we went along with it. And then we figured out that we were not supposed to be *folding* but *sorting*... Ah the joys of operating in your non-native language... Indeed, I was rather dismayed by how little I could understand of their conversation, so we finally called Kristin (second from the left) over to help translate. And wouldn't you know it: they were not even speaking Mandarin! Sadly, I know no Taiwanese, but luckily Kristin knows both. At least it made me feel slightly better for being so confused... slightly...

Meeting the Co-teachers

This week has been a lot of fun because we finally got to meet all of the co-teachers! We will not be paired up with a specific teacher for another two weeks, so this time has been spent getting to know each other and finding which co-teachers (they are called LETs and we are the ETAs) we think we will be compatible with throughout the school year. There are 12 of us and 34 of them, which means each of us will have between 2-4 co-teachers in the course of the year. Last year was the first year of this Fulbright program here in Kaohsiung (and the seventh year in Yilan). Because the program was so successful last year, way more schools applied to be a part of it this year. While the ETAs last year were able to work with the same school the entire year, this year we will all be matched with 2-3 schools. We will switch schools the second semester, and a few of us will even be working at two schools simultaneously during a single semester. The education bureau obviously thought that they could best use us as native English speakers by putting us into as many different classrooms as possible. I think the city tried to expand the program too quickly, and that many problems will arise as a result. It just seems hard that by the time we as ETAs begin to feel adjusted and comfortable in our jobs, the semester will be over and we will have to switch to a new school and work with two new co-teachers (we will work with 1-2 co-teachers at each school, depending on the school).

There are 20 elementary schools and 3 middle schools, all of which are spread out all around Kaohsiung city. At the end of this month, both the ETAs and the LETs will rank each other, and then we will be paired up accordingly. What makes this process so confusing is that the schools come in predetermined groupings. The education bureau already paired up schools based on their location, so when we as ETAs rank our schools, we will be picking a prearranged package deal. This week, we have all been trying to meet and talk with as many of the co-teachers as possible; then next week we will be working at a summer camp and practicing with co-teaching; and the third week we will visit all of the schools and tour their facilities. I find the schedule/sequence of events unnecessarily stressful and angst-brewing. Since none of us know who will end up with which schools/co-teachers, we (or at least I do) feel pressure to divide our attention between all of the co-teachers, trying to build relationships with each one. The problem with the paired-up schools is that it creates situations where one school may hit it off great with one ETA, but the other school in the grouping gets along really well with another ETA. One obvious example of this is a school who really wants one of the guy ETAs, but the second school's principal has declared that it wants a female ETA (I do not even want to get into the politics of that sexism...). I do appreciate the fact that the bureau tried to pair up the schools based on location, but I still wish we would have been allowed to choose each separately. Additionally, I believe it would have made more sense to conduct all of the school visits the first week (seeing the actual facilities is mildly important in making the decision), and then to do speed dating immediately following, so that we could already be paired up with our co-teachers. That way, instead of us secretly having favorites and being stressed about the eventual pairings, we could already know our co-teachers and spend these next few weeks getting to know them specifically and learning to work with them. Despite my rational side telling me that I will get along well with whomever I am assigned (I rarely have people-problems), it is still extremely stressful for me to be hanging in the balance right now - kind of like the application process for grad school...

On Monday, we did a lot of introductory and get-to-know-you activities for all of the ETAs to meet all of the LETs. Everyone had prepared a powerpoint to share information about themselves and/or their schools. Every other day this week, we have had lectures/seminar discussions on the theory and methodology of teaching English. Some of the discussions have been very useful, while others were entirely too theoretical to ever be of any use to me. Considering that most of the ETAs have never taught before, one would think that the most useful lectures would be on practical skills for teaching English to children. Instead, we have had sessions on public speaking (which even I know is very different from teaching in front of a classroom), psychology jargon (the point of which seems to be the giving of highly academic-sounding labels to obvious ideas and then explaining them in as convoluted a manner as possible), and famous education psychologists with their varying theories over the past century. Interesting - perhaps... but not at all useful for hands-on application. And they want us in a classroom in two more weeks!

Probably the most fun activity we did in the sessions was to create our own lesson plans, integrating activities for teaching both reading and writing (the lesson's meta-cognitive goal? or was that the meta-linguistic goal?... remember, the psychology of this was all way over my head - er - too boring to concentrate on learning oops). We were split into groups of five, yet my group somehow ended up with 10? That the LETs are awesome is the only explanation for that one... :) Anyways, my group used Eric Carle's book "From Head to Toe" to teach a hypothetical fourth grade class animals and matching actions (ie: "I am a giraffe, and I bend my neck"). In Taiwan, the public schools begin their English instruction in the third grade, so we were assuming an elementary lesson with students who already had the rudimentary blocks of the language (ie: phonics). My group, all of which were ETAs, unanimously voted against me to make me the teacher for the demonstration, meaning that they got the fun job of asking me ridiculous questions and of intentionally failing to understand my teaching. I, on the other hand, had the lucky job of making a fool of myself in front of 50 people. In the process of acting out all of the actions while reading the story, I definitely forgot that my audience was made up of adults instead of ten-year-olds. "I am a crocodile, and I wiggle my hips." And yes, I did unwittingly "wiggle" my hips to the great amusement of the entire room...

my lesson-planning group


with the co-teachers at the market / Sue baked our group a coffee-flavored cake!

The co-teachers have definitely been the best part of the week. They are all amazing, and I am so excited to be paired-up and to begin working more individually with them! They also make me laugh so much. For example, one lady has been trying to set me up with her son. Apparently he is single, 24 years old and would love to take me to church! She even gave me his email, facebook account and mobile number... Poor guy... I love mothers! They make the best match-makers. :)

Our other major excitement for the week has been our scooter lessons. I am so getting a scooter! They are really fun!! Plus, it is the only time when I am outdoors here and not absolutely melting from the heat (sidenote: the weather here is intense - having never been in a tropical climate, I was quite unprepared; the temperature is in the 90s, but the humidity is usually close to 100%... just imagine that for a moment... yes, I am perpetually sticky and dripping - delightful image). When I say that everyone in Taiwan rides scooters, I mean about 97% of the people in this country. Whereas streets in Beijing were filled with cyclists, taxis and pedestrians, the streets here are just filled with scooters. There are not nearly as many pedestrians, and the mass transit here (buses and metro system - MRT) is surprisingly under-used. I believe most people also have their own cars, but they find scooters more convenient for daily use.

Typhoons and English Village

I love experiencing new "firsts", and yesterday I lived through my first typhoon. While I was initially very excited, I can now say that typhoons are not all that interesting. They are basically a heavy rainstorm with lots of wind, the effect being to cancel all activity in the city and to trap everyone indoors. Snowstorms are way more fun, because you get to go outside and play in it. Here, you just get very wet. The funniest part is that the Taiwanese seem to be fairly unphased by it. While work is canceled and official offices are closed most places, stores stay open and scooters continue to roam the streets. A few of us did venture out grocery shopping to a department store (Fonda drove us in her car), but I cannot imagine scootering through town in the midst of a typhoon... Earlier this morning, the wind was still fairly strong, but by now, it just looks like an average torrential downpour. According to the news, we did not even see the worst of it, as the eye of the storm passed over Taipei. Since Kaohsiung is on the western side of the island, storms from the Pacific are less violent.

This week has been very busy with group outings - setting up accounts and making official visits around the city. The first few days we bought our mobile phones, applied for our ARC cards (alien resident certificate - like a green card) and opened bank accounts. On Tuesday, we went to meet the local Kaohsiung City Government. The educational bureau was very excited to meet us, having set up a special welcome ceremony for us. We marched into a small auditorium holding the hands of local elementary school children, and then watched the children perform a drum dance replete with brightly colored costumes. This was followed by several speeches made by the district superintendent and finished off with a profusion of official photographs. My personal favorite of the posed pictures was the one of all of us ETAs shaking hands with the school children while grinning up at the camera. By the end of it all, I honestly could not smile anymore. One girl thought it would be good practice for wedding pictures.

On Thursday, we began visiting the English Villages, which are located at four different elementary schools around town (as we were to visit the fourth EV yesterday, typhoon day postponed our plans, so we will see that one Monday). The schools put a lot of effort into welcoming us and showing us their facilities, showering gifts and food upon us. They had prepared slide-show presentations and took great pride in giving us tours of the offices and classrooms. I was very impressed with the level of technology in the classrooms, which was much more on par with a college classroom than a public elementary school in the US. Futong, my favorite school so far, greeted us outside with about 40 school children on the school steps waving pompoms and singing. Then the children presented each ETA with a rose - very sweet. Below is a picture of one of the schools. Notice how all of the classrooms open onto an outdoors hallway encircling an inner courtyard. From what we have seen, this appears to be a common architectural style for the schools.


So far, what I know of our schedule is that we will spend 16 hours a week working with a co-teacher in the classroom, and an additional 4 hours working at the English Villages. Each of us will be teaching at different schools, but we will all rotate through working at all of the four English Villages. The English Village is a relatively new idea which the education department here has been implementing. It is a place where students from all over Kaohsiung come to practice using English in a simulated environment (restaurant, hotel, clothing store, airport etc). The villages are set up to look exactly like their real-life counterparts to make the experience as true-to-life as possible. We were all very impressed by the scale and detail put into the rooms, as shown by the pictures below.











It is quite obvious that the city has invested a lot of resources into the program. While the downside to the program is that each class will only visit an English Village once a semester in order for the villages to accommodate every student, teachers told us that the prospect of visiting the villages makes learning English in the classroom more enjoyable and exciting. A trip to the English Village is a lot of fun for them, teaching them that learning English is more than rote memorization in the classroom. According to Fonda and Alex, some of the ETAs last year really enjoyed working at the English Villages, whereas others were less impressed by their usefulness, seeing them as a waste of time. It will be interesting to see what we all think of them after working there for a few months.

Arrival and Apartment Life

This morning is the fifth day of my life in Kaohsiung, and I have finally succeeded in sleeping till 7am! This is quite the achievement considering that all of us have been battling jet lag by trying to stay up past 9pm and sleep past 4am. Taiwan is exactly 12 hours ahead of the East Coast, so my internal time clock has had a bit of juggling to do. The first day was especially hard. I apparently fell asleep at dinner and nearly dropped my head into a bowl of noodles - making a lovely first impression for all of my fellow ETAs, I'm sure. In fact, here is a picture of me from that first night, courtesy of one of their blogsites as an example of jet lag. :)


After four flights and nearly 30 hours of transit time, I arrived here in Kaohsiung. For the last leg of the trip from Taipei, all 12 of the Kaohsiung ETAs were on the same flight. It was fairly easy to recognize each other since we were the only 12 westerners on the otherwise all-Asian flight. The local Fulbright staff met us at the airport a little before 8am, the beginning of a very long day. They were gracious enough not to plan too many activities for us, but the very fact that we had to stay awake till evening made most of the day a blur for me.

The staff here have been wonderful. Fonda is our local Kaohsiung Fulbright representative who will be here with us all year. She lived in Vancouver for 10 years, studying for her graduate degree in hotel management, but then moved back here to Kaohsiung and now works with us. Two other Fulbright staffers, Alex and Cherry, were with us for the beginning days, but have returned the the main office in Taipei. Our fourth main contact person, Chris, is our liaison with the Kaohsiung education system. He worked as a high school teacher for several years before this, and is now in charge of matching us up with our schools and aiding us in working with our co-teachers. All of them have been so sweet, eager to help and patient in explaining things to us.

This first week has been extremely structured, so much so that I do not feel as though I have seen the "real" Taiwan yet. Our entire days are planned out, being shuttled together by bus from one activity to the next. While I love being taken care of, I am excited to be able to explore the city on my own and to begin interacting more with the locals. I will say, though, the effect of always staying with the group has been to avoid all culture shock so far. Remembering my first few days in Beijing, this experience has been completely different - far less stressful and certainly more convenient and painless.

As I mentioned before, there are 11 other ETAs here in Kaohsiung. The other 16 Taiwan ETAs are placed in Yilan, a city outside of Taipei, which I understand to be more of a rural farming community (Kaohsiung is more urban and industrial). All of us live together in the same apartment complex, located downtown across the street from the cultural center. The apartments are beautiful and much nicer than I had anticipated. The first day we arrived here, we drew at random our apartment spots, dividing us into three groups of four. Last year, the groups were supposedly in different apartment buildings spread out around town, so I think it will be much nicer for us to all be close to each other this year.

My apartment-mates are Charles, Kristin and Kaitlyn. They are all lovely, and I think we will make quite a happy little family for the year. We have a shared living-dining area, kitchen, laundry room (washer - no dryers in Taiwan, apparently...) and balcony. Additionally, there are three bathrooms, and we each have our own room of varying sizes. Mine is one of the smallest, which made me happy because it also means I have the cheapest rent. Speaking of cheap rent, I would just like to rub it in for anyone currently living in DC or NYC that my rent is the whopping price of $160/month, and the apartment comes furnished. :) On Monday, our second day here, our whole group spent the day out shopping at Carrefour and IKEA, buying fun items like bedding and curtains. Last year's ETAs left us a whole lot of stuff (kitchen items, lamps, dehumidifiers, drying racks, hangers etc) to use which has been very helpful in minimizing the amount of items we needed to buy ourselves. However, there were still a few items which we found it essential to puchase, such as mattress pads (the bed mattresses here are more in-line with box-springs -- "very hard" being a more accurate label than "very firm" -- I was fairly sore after the first night on my bed) and a convection oven (how could I survive a whole year without baking?). Plus we decided that our apartment's living room was several decades out of date and in need of a make-over. We are still in the process of hemming new curtains and pinning new couch covers, but I think the end result will be well worth the effort. Pictures will be up soon!

There are several interesting things to know about Taiwanese apartments. The first one is that, for some unknown reason, the faucets and shower-heads collect tiny pebbles which clog up the water flow. Therefore, it is necessary occasionally to pull them apart and to empty out the pebbles in order to maintain steady water pressure. Otherwise, the water begins to sputter and come out in spastic bursts. A second interesting phenomena is that, regardless of the fact that we always take our shoes off before entering the apartment and both sweep and mop the tile floors 24/7, the floors still are perpetually dirty! As a person who enjoys cleaning things and then *keeping* them clean, this is mildly frustrating... A third amusing story has less to do with the apartment and perhaps more to do with our ineptness. This morning, we woke up to find the laundry room flooded under four inches of water. In loading the washer, someone must have bumped the connecting water tube, because it had fallen out of place, and water was gushing out of the machine - gushing out onto the filthy floor creating a lovely concoction of hair/dust balls swirling in dirty water. As the laundry room is not technically inside the apartment (it is in an attached room/balcony overhanging an enclosed stairwell - er not quite, but it's hard to explain) we had not gotten around to scrubbing it down yet. Of course, our mini-flood half did the cleaning job for us, so I guess we cannot complain too much...

Tomorrow I will try to explain what we have learned about our teaching positions so far. Many of you know I was a little hesitant about being thrown into a classroom, so you should know that this week has made me very excited to be paired with my co-teacher and to start working in the classroom!