Happy Halloween

This week we got to bring one of the famous holidays of western culture to the Taiwanese children: Halloween.  Halloween is not highly celebrated in Taiwan, but many children become familiar with it through their English schools.  Included in the festivities for my students were Halloween-themed classes, a haunted house (with games and challenges), a costume contest, and trick-or-treating.  My Halloween lessons were primarily with my youngest class (CEI02) and focused on using 'monster vocabulary' like ghost, vampire, skeleton, etc..  Each teacher was also responsible for adding a Halloween-themed craft to their lesson, so my children decorated paper pumpkins.  As for the haunted house, one of the most impressive aspects of the week, our TA's decorated an entire classroom into a maze, and stationed the teachers in booths within the maze.  Each teacher was responsible for creating a game for their booth which children would play for prizes (the games included: pin the tail on the monster, bean bag toss (that was my booth, complete with Angry Birds bean bags, and a cut-out pumpkin target), mystery box (where children would stick their hands inside and be startled by a bowl of cold noodles which felt like intestines), apple bobbing, and a heaven/hell challenges (students sit on one of two boxes, one is a seat and will hold them, one is a balloon and will pop when sat upon).  Approximately 150 students showed up to the haunted house (which is a great turn-out for our tiny school).

Overall I would say the biggest complication with Halloween in Taiwan is finding pumpkins to carve.  I have heard multiple stories about the lack of pumpkins, one of which being that pumpkins are not native to Taiwan and therefore need to be imported (however I know there are pumpkin farms because I've just learned Hsinchu county has one), and the other being that pumpkin season is in the spring rather than the fall (I'll have to wait half a year to confirm that).

Happy Halloween from the CEI02 and CEI08 classes

This weekend I went on my first trip to Taipei since training week.  We left Saturday morning and caught a bus to Taiwan's capital city (the trip took about 2.5).  The activities yesterday were devoted mainly to Taipei gay pride, starting with gate-crashing the parade (yes, much like we did in Kaohsiung) and ending with a night of visiting the oldest (and most famous) gay bar in Taiwan: Funky.  Today was primarily dedicated to a scenic view of Taipei from the Maokong gondolas, my first teppanyaki dinner (here), and the bus ride home (which, after the scare of racing through the Taipei metro stations because we were late to the bus was very relaxing).  It may sound like there weren't many noteable moments from this weekend, but that is just due to the difficulty of separating individual memories.  The entire weekend was somewhat of a blur, caused by the constant movement (buses, trains, walking, running, etc.) and seemed to fly by. 

Gate-crashing the Taipei gay pride parade.

This week's interesting facts play into my main interest: language/linguistics.  While I am still struggling with the acquisition of Mandarin, at least I can learn more about language itself.  As I mentioned in my previous post, the Chinese writing system is logographic, meaning that it uses a symbol to represent an entire word or concept, but the character does not indicate its pronunciation (except the tone marker).  This system is called hanzi (and is a complete mystery for me, aside from the characters for numbers(which are similar enough to Japanese that I already knew them), and the character ren  人 which means person).  One of the ways to 'simplify' Chinese for pronunciation and typing purposes is through the use of Pinyin which uses the Roman alphabet (the characters of English) to show a more phonetic pronunciation of the word.  The Pinyin alphabet isn't perfect however, because many sounds in Chinese are not sounds in English, so it requires a base knowledge of Chinese pronunciation to use, but it is the transcription system which I (and many others) find most useful.  The predecessor to Pinyin, which is outdated but still used in Taiwan is the Wade-Giles system, which also Romanizes the hanzi characters, but notes the aspiration/unaspiration of plosive consonants (like p-b, t-d, k-g).  An unaspirated consonant is notated with an apostrophe, so that a word like "Taiwan" would be written T'aiwan to show that it starts with a /t/-sound rather than a /d/-sound.  The main downfall of this system is that people who are unfamiliar with it tend to ignore the apostrophes (both in writing and pronunciation) which leads to constant mispronunciations.  My favorite example of these mispronunciations is a common term among Chinese food eaters around the world: Peking (as in 'Peking duck' or 'Peking chicken'), which came from the Wade-Giles writing of Beijing (China's capital).  The last of the systems that I am vaguely familiar with is BoPoMoFo, which uses symbols and tone-markers to represent all possible sounds in Chinese, which makes it the most accurate system.  Most children in Taiwan learn Bopomofo in school, which they can use for learning new symbols, inputting text into a computer/phone, etc..