Broken, Bitten, and Burnt

I realized this week (though it needed to be pointed out to me) that my class schedule has mad huge strides towards being ideal for me.  When I began working at my school, I inherited an entire class-load of higher-level students, because that was the preference my predecessor had.  I didn't have a choice to trade for younger classes, but along the way my older classes merged or discontinued, and I added new, younger classes to my work schedule, and now my schedule is not only to my liking, but more to my skill set.  I would say that I have always been better at working with younger children because, I had this preference through various volunteer working jobs, through my TESOL training, through church events, and now I can really use it in my work.  I'm excited to say that last week I started another CE01 class (this is the first level my school offers), so now the scale has not only swung to a balanced position, but actually leaned in my favor! Yay!
Speaking of school, this week I taught my second summer lesson, and I decided to merge my former interest in science with my life-long interest in crafts.  The class and I made our own bubble wands out of pipe-cleaner, and then predicted which of the following would make the best bubble solution: hand soap, dish soap, laundry detergent, coke, salt, and bubble milk tea.  The kids seemed to love making bubble wands (and I don't just say that because of the large number of heart shaped wands that were created), and got really into testing each of the bubble solutions and recording their results on our results sheets.  The predictions made by the kids that I found cute were 'coke will make bubbles because if you shake it there are bubbles', and 'bubble milk tea won't make bubbles', no matter how many times I tried to tell them 'it says bubble in the name!'.  As it turns out, none of the ingredients produced substantial bubbles except for the dish soap (which was, not only the children's prediction, but the recommended ingredient for homemade bubbles on almost all websites).
This weekend as exhausted me, in the words of a borrowed alliteration, I'm 'broken, bitten, and burnt'.  Saturday was spent on an attempted, though not successful, mountain walk from the township of Yuanlin to the city of Changhua (approximately a 30km route).  We made it through about 5 hours of the walk, successfully scaling Mt. Baiguo and crossing the border into Nantou county, but at that point we were tired, it was getting dark, and unfortunately we had made it less than 1/4 of the way through our travels, so we threw in the towel and took a taxi the rest of the way home.  I feel so injury prone here in Taiwan, but I do admit full-personal blame for this injury, I made a poor shoe choice for this walk (flip flops), and seem to have hurt the muscles in the arch of my foot.  So, now that I have gotten past my broken coccyx/sacrum, I will have to get used to walking with a slight limp.

The view of Yuanlin from Baiguoshan.

As for the bitten, there's not much to it, I have very prominent reactions to mosquito bites, which appear to be exceptionally frequent for me.  It has been a rather unfortunate realization for my legs which have been bitten (and, I'll admit, scratched) so often over the last year that they might never recover.
And burnt, lucky for me, it is just by the sun.  That's what happens when you spend excessive time on a scooter on various road trips and errands, oh, and the hours on the beach this afternoon may have added to that as well.  Today it was time for another first and we went to explore the beaches of Dajia.  One thing that you should know when picturing the water surrounding Taiwan is that the beaches are vastly different depending on which side of the island you are on (much like the difference between swimming on the coast side and ocean side of Florida).  The beaches on the east coast are beautifully blue, deep, wavy, and fully of salt water, the beaches on the west coast (which is where I live) are not.  For starters, the water was a blueish-brown color (courtesy of the sand), and no matter how far into it you waded, it never seemed to get higher than waist level.  Nonetheless, it was nice to have a day out in the water, so we did our fair-share of swimming, then finished off the afternoon by building a tee-pee in the sand and hiding from the sun.

The 'beautiful' beach in Dajia (why yes, that is garbage and driftwood lining the beach)

And now for my newest cultural realization: the Taiwanese military.  I had a long discussion with one of my private students this week about how the military, and realized how little I knew about the 'enlistment' system here.  For example, in the US we have a voluntary enlistment, but in Taiwan there is a conscription: a mandatory enlistment for all men between the ages of 18-35 who are of good health.  The conscription in Taiwan has undergone several changes in the past few decades, so it affects the eligible men differently.  For example, men who were born prior to 1994 are required to dedicate 2-years to military training unless the number of voluntary soldiers on the island surpasses a certain threshold, then it is reduced to 12-months (which is the currently the cases in Taiwan).  For those men who were born after 1994 the conscription requirement has been reduced to only 4 months of basic training, with the goal of transitioning the active military into a solely volunteer-based operation.  As I already stated, all men are required to do some service time, however, for certain reasons, such as continued education, the required age at which service starts can vary (for instance, students seeking a Bachelors degree may wait until they are 24 to serve, students seeking a Masters degree may wait until they are 27, and students seeking a Doctoral degree may wait until they are 30).
At the age of 18, men will report to the government's conscription offices to determine his educational background and whether or not he is eligible for a delay of service.  If no delay is granted the man will be drafted and will undergo a health exam to ensure they are fit to serve.  Assuming they are of good health they will be sent to train in one of the four branches of the Taiwanese military: army, navy, air force, or marines (with the army being the largest force and therefore the one with the largest draft probability).  After completion of their training, men are no longer required to report for active duty (unless it is done so on a voluntary basis), but are considered to be on reserve until they are 36 years old.