A week-ago Friday, we got to meet our host families. As part of the Fulbright program, each ETA is paired with a local Taiwanese family who "adopts" us and shows us around Taiwan. They are responsible for introducing us to Taiwanese culture (food, festivals etc) and for demonstrating for us what typical Taiwanese family life is like. The program was slightly competitive this year as over thirty families applied, so that means that each of our families are pretty much amazing. :)
Fulbright hosted a large dinner reception for us and all of our families at Shu-de Vocational High School, complete with entertainment provided by the high school students. This high school is one of the best in Kaohsiung, with special programs in music, dance, cooking, sports, science and technology etc. Their orchestra and dance team performed for us, and they also gave us food gifts from their culinary school.
The high school also has multiple sister schools around the world, allowing its students to engage in cultural exchange by both visiting these other countries and by hosting the foreign students here in Kaohsiung.
Before our dinner reception, the school took the 12 of us on a tour of its German Village and Aboriginal Museum. The German Village has been decorated to look exactly like a German lodge, and is fully fuctional with bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen and dining/living room area for 
when the German students visit. The Aboriginal Museum was also interesting, and once again, we found ourselves the popular objects of photoshoots... They took pictures of us in the traditional headdresses, and one even got sent to the local newspaper for a story all about the "foreign teachers" and their new Taiwanese host families. You can check it out here, though it is all in Chinese: http://udn.com/NEWS/DOMESTIC/DOM6/5133453.shtm.
The night before the reception, Fonda came to our apartments to
give us all information about our host families. Chris had decided that it would be a fun idea to turn the revealing of our host families into a game show (you may remember Chris had a similar brilliant idea for revealing the co-teacher pairings - he loves to turn everything into a game and make a much bigger deal of everything than 
necessary - we are still figuring out how we are going to get him back...). Instead of introducing us to our families before dinner so that we could sit with each other and get to know one another throughout the night, he had us sit at random tables and saved the revealings for after dinner. While all of us ETAs knew who our families were, we 
had to keep it a secret from our host families, who had been told nothing beforehand. And actually, I was sitting by my family all night, but Chris would not let me tell them who I was! Oh Chris... Then after dinner, each ETA went up in front of everyone and started to describe their family. When a family realized it was themselves, they had to shout out "We are family!" before rushing the stage for hugs and more pictures. This third picture is of Chris and Lucy (Sanmin co-teacher who helped Chris MC), so you can sort of know what he looks like. :)My host family is amazing, and I love them so much! Sunnie, my host sister, applied for the program using her whole family, but I have a feeling she just wanted to do it with her fiance Vincent
(they are getting married in January, and I really hope I can go!!), as I have yet to meet the rest of the family. Sunnie and Vincent are so cute, though! Sunnie is also a junior high English teacher (like me), so her English is very good. Vincent 
teaches high school math, and while he is very shy of speaking English, he understand basically everything I say. Sunnie was also trained as a Chinese teacher, so they can help me with my Chinese too!
To foster family unity, Chris came up with another game for us to play. Each family had to create their own chant/motto/cheer. I am not too good at these things... So don't mock the creativity here. But our idea was to call ourselves VAGSS Tang (湯). VAGSS is the first initials of all the "kids" in our family (Vincent, Grace, Sunnie and Sunnie's two siblings), and 湯 Tang is Sunnie's family name. 湯 "Tang" means "soup," and soup is a metaphor for all of us different individuals coming together to make one tasty soup - er, family... Our family cheer than consisted of us stirring soup and saying some rhyme about VAGSS Tang. Yes, this is why I was never a camp counselor, I know, but I tried... For what it's worth, everyone else's chants were equally cheesy. :)
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