Student Break Started, Still Counting the Days Until Mine...

It’s official, winter break has started in Taiwan, but not for the buxiban students and teachers, our schedules are taking this opportunity to become busier.  To an extent it feels like the cram school system is a glorified babysitting system, and since the parents are still working full time, they send the children to our school for additional hours.  The extra classroom hours are not standard lessons, they are intended to be more fun, so we are given the freedom to plan crafts, sports, or field trips as we see fit.  I covered about 5 additional hours this week, starting with passing out advertising flyers on Monday, teaching the children how to make bird feeders on Tuesday, and making fish-shaped wind socks to teach the kids about Japan on Thursday.  Looking back on the week, I enjoyed all of the extra classes, but all week it made me feel a bit over-worked because lessons that don’t teach to the course guide require a different level of planning (which I tend to spend too much time on). 

Showing off our "Japanese" fish

You may be wondering, why is this the start of winter break, the school holidays are just ending back in the western countries, my students have been curious as well.  The answer is simple: the timing of the country’s major ‘winter’ holiday.  In one of my mid-level classes this week, my students couldn’t understand how so many people could travel for Christmas considering it is only one day, and there is still school, they were very surprised that students would have 2-4 weeks without class. In the west, Christmas is our most important family holiday though.  The students were equally surprised, however, to hear that there is no acknowledgement of Chinese New Year in the western school calendar.  ‘Those poor students, stuck in class when they should be eating family meals and opening red envelopes, how could any country not celebrate the new year’ (well, at least that is how I interpreted the look on my students’ faces).

In preparation, businesses and families are taking care of their “spring cleaning” this week.  A clean house will bring a more fortunate year in terms of luck and money, but, superstition also believes that all cleaning must be done before New Years Eve, and on that day the cleaning supplies should be hidden so your fortune can’t be ‘swept away’.  While I have been neglecting my New Year's Cleaning (though it is my project for this week), I have finally gotten around to the pre-holiday decorating.  We will be entering the Year of the Horse this year, so many decorations, include wall posters or ceiling-hanging decorations feature this animal.  The main decorations are calligraphy posters that are hung around the front doors and windows of a residence.  These posters are often red (because the Chinese word for 'red' sounds like the Chinese word for 'prosperous') and have couplets (poetry) about the spring, which are intended to bring happiness, prosperity, and long life to the family.  Aside from the New Year's preparations, this has been a nice weekend to relax and catch up on my sleep a little bit.  On Friday I had the unique experience of attending a surprise birthday party for someone I had never met.  One of my friends is moving to a new apartment, and her new housemates told her they were throwing a party, and she should join and bring a few friends along.  Well, we arrived, not knowing what we were getting ourselves into, and were ushered into a dark house full of whispering people, and told to wait for the cue to shout, "Surprise".  Feeling a little awkward, and not even sure if we knew any of the people around us, we made our way to the back of the crowd and waited as the birthday girl was ushered along the street, blindfolded.  Despite the initial situation, the evening was very enjoyable.  Saturday was a day of shopping and sightseeing, as we wandered the streets of Lukang to visit the temples and street vendors, then wandered the song listings as we visited a local KTV.  Then today, though not as productive as I would have liked, I went on a Taichung shopping excursion to prepare myself for next week's travels.  I couldn't, by any means, call this the most entertaining of weekends, but it had it's share of "you had to be there" moments, and let me send time with some of my favorite people in this country, so it was perfect.
Today's cultural note is inspired by the reader from my CEI09 class.  One of the stories we had to read this week was about the invention of braille, which got my co-workers and I thinking, is braille international?  Because it is a writing system, it is younger than many of the speaking systems, so there was a chance, but alas, it is not.  While braille systems around the world function similarly, using the placement of raised bumps in a rectangular "character", the assignment of sounds to characters varies in each system.  In fact, there is even a separate braille system used in Taiwan but not in China.  In English, braille is based on letters, but in Chinese there are no letters because each character represents a whole word, so how does the braille work?  Is there a series of bumps for each word in the Chinese language? That would be nearly impossible to learn, so of course, the answer is no.  Instead, the braille alphabet is divided similarly to the Bopomofo or Pinyin alphabets with consonants and vowels and an additional bump to mark tones for each word.  It is read from left to right by feeling the bumps with your fingertips and is used by the blind population of Taiwan (though I don't find it's presence on doors to be as common as the US labels were).

Counting Down to Chinese New Year

Being a teacher sort of makes you feel bad for the teachers that you had years ago, because you start to realize your own youthful behaviors.  For instance, I spent the week thinking, ‘my students are out of control, are struggling to focus, are acting out in unusual ways, what could be wrong?’, but the answer was obvious, this was the week before Winter Break.  The kids can see the light at the end of the tunnel, they are on the brink of a two-week vacation and the last thing they want to do is learn English.  I can’t pretend I was different when I was a kid, however, those last few weeks before summer or winter vacation were always a struggle on my attention span.  To help keep their attention I’ve tried to add a few more memorable aspects to my classes through art projects (everybody loves collages, right?), field trips (to the front stoop of the school), and some temporary shoe thievery (in an attempt to teach possessive pronouns to my youngest class stole a shoe from each of my students and they had to identify the shoes using the target language of “It’s my shoe” or “It’s his/her shoe”).  It may not have been as fun as a day at home with friends and video games, but I’m sure my lessons beat reading text books or taking exams.

Hard at work making a tree collage in our weekly science lesson.

One of the ‘selling points’ for a lot of people when they consider moving to Taiwan is the friendliness and hospitality of the residents, but what does that mean.  Do you move to a country because people smile at you?  Do people need to give you things for you to see their kindness?  Don’t live in a naïve bubble when you travel or you will be taken advantage of, but don’t shy away from kindness either.  This morning I was disappointed to discover that my scooter tire was flat, so I pushed it around the corner to the nearest scooter repair shop, and as I was walking I passed an older Taiwanese couple out on a walk.  For whatever reason the shop was closed this evening, so I turned around and made my way to a main road, where I crossed paths with that same couple.  The man, seeing my struggle directed me forward and began pushing the back of the bike to lighten the load.  Within two minutes he told me to stop, and I looked around confused, not seeing the scooter shop he must be taking me to, only to see him open the door to his own apartment, pull out a tire pump and inflate re-inflate my tire for me.   If that wasn’t enough of a favor, he then brought out his squirt bottle and inspected the tire for cracks (a technique the repair shops seem to rely on here) before fetching his children to translate that the tire was not broken, it just had no air.   I wasn’t asking for help, this family had no obligation to me, but they saw someone in need, so they helped.  Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone thought that way?

And Meanwhile, Outside of the Polar Vortex...

Bundle up, America! Any time I think I'm cold, I just remember the polar vortex which is freezing the entirety of the United States with temperates of 0 degrees Fahrenheit (and colder) even in the south and with windchill bringing midwestern temperatures as low as -36 degrees Fahrenheit with a windchill of 20-30 degrees colder than that.  I will gladly keep my Taiwanese temperatures.
Our 'little' franchise is growing this week.  I'm excited about the arrival of three new teachers that have joined our team of teachers.  The best thing about the arrival of these teachers is that we aren't 'losing' any friends on the island, we are just adding more people.  I have said it before, one of the main deterrents from staying here too long is how much I hate seeing people leave, it is difficult to form such temporary bonds with people and to constantly feel like you are saying 'goodbye', but no one is moving away during this influx (they are just moving to new schools in the same area).

The welcome tour to Taiwan began with a trip to the top of Baguashan.

I love it when I get the chance to break-free of the normal classroom structure and bring something unique to a class.  This week I was able to do that with my youngest ‘intensive’ class using new vocabulary and a new setting.  We went to one of the local pet stores to look at all of the animals and practice free-style conversation.  In general, the focus of the lesson was on identifying, counting, and describing the animals using questions and answers, but if I’m being honest, we did such a good job pre-teaching the language that is stopped being a lesson and was just an hour conversation with the kids.  Everyone found something fascinating, and everyone wanted to draw my attention to it, or to know more about it, “Teacher Kaitlin, what is it?”, “Teacher Kaitlin, it is cute!”, “Teacher Kaitlin, the fish is eating rocks!”.  The kids were so excited to be around the animals, that it naturally elicited speech from them, which was excellent.  The problem, however, was that the small aisles, watchful staff, and limited timeframe limited the activities I would have liked to do.

The kids are excited to see the fish.

This past week I have been working hard to learn and use a new phonetic 'spelling' system in Chinese, called Bopomofo (or Zhuyin fuhao).  I have previously been taking notes using Pinyin, which is a writing system that uses roman characters and tone markers.  I have found Pinyin very useful in my Chinese lessons, but it falls short when it comes to typing, because it requires tone marks that my American keyboard doesn't naturally produce, and while I could use applications and inserted characters, it has simply deterred my from using Chinese on technology.  Bopomofo, however, functions without roman characters.  It was introduced in Taiwan (and is now only used in Taiwan) and consists of 16 vowels and 21 consonants that blend to form all sound possibilities in Chinese.  The importance of a system like this is that, since Chinese is a logographic language (each character represents an entire word or idea), there needs to be an external system for 'sounding out' the words.  As a linguistics major, the thing I appreciate most about Bopomofo is that the order of the characters follow a very logical articulatory pattern, listing all of the similarly articulated sounds together (for example, /b/ /p/ /m/ and /f/ are all articulated with the lips, and /d/ /t/ /n/ and /l/ are all articulated behind your teeth) making the system more logical than most aspects of language.  Because of this, I have begun writing in Chinese more (mainly on my iPod because I can convert the keyboard into Bopomofo), and I am excited about the extra practice it is giving me with character recognition.
My cultural thoughts for the week are fairly food-centric, I was thinking about how much I love Taiwanese street food.  Street food is certainly not unique to Taiwan, it can be found all over the world, but growing up in the midwest, it wasn't a very common sight to see.  Sure, there would be a hot dog vendor here and there (especially around college towns and sporting events), but I couldn't have planned a meal around it.  Here, street food seems to be a staple, and now just for us foreigners without kitchens, but for the majority of the population.  Whether you are craving food or drinks, noodles or rice, meals or desserts, meat or vegetarian, you can probably find it within a 5 minute walk.  The thing about street food that is strange to me though, is how common it seems to be for people to open food stands (or other businesses) on the ground floor of their homes.  It isn't strange to utilize that space, in theory it makes a lot of sense considering you are paying for it already, the thing that confuses foreigners is distinguishing whether or not those are businesses or simply families we are looking at.

Well 'Hello' to You, 2014

Reflection.  Another year is complete in my life, and if anything I could say that it was a unique one.  For the entirety of 2013 I resided outside of the United States, and it is interesting to wonder whether I will be able to say that about any future years of my life.  I am a traveler at heart, and I love being out in the world, but will I have another chance to dedicate a full year to it? Will I have another place I could even imagine spending a full year residing in?  Right now I can't say.  What I can say is that over the past 365 days I have met some amazing people, visited some of the most strikingly beautiful places on this little island, celebrated a year's worth of new holidays, begun studying the most difficult language I have ever faced, learned how to drive a scooter, sung countless songs at karaoke, watched my students grow, and back in my American life I was able to be a bridesmaid in one of my best friend's weddings.  It goes without saying, this was a year I will never forget, it never stood a chance at being forgotten though.

I celebrated the new year as anyone else would, there were fireworks, and drinks, and friends.  The main differences were that instead of watching a ball drop on the top of a skyscraper, I watched fireworks illuminate a giant statue of Buddha, and instead of hearing shouts of "Happy New Year" there were shouts of "Xin Nien Kuai Le".  It was a beautiful holiday, and I rang in the new year with some amazing people, I wouldn't have changed anything about it.

Another tradition in buxiban culture is for the schools to have an end of the year dinner for their staff.  Traditionally this dinner takes place between Christmas and Chinese New Year, and is intended to wrap up the year in both cultures.  My franchise has our end-of-the-year dinner this weekend at a buffet in Taichung.  Take all of your western conceptions of an all-you-can-eat buffet and throw them away, this restaurant was far better.  The food was a combination of western and eastern-style meals hot and cold meals all around, but there were also several stations where they prepared fresh meals for you as well (like teppanyaki, barbeque, sushi, fresh-sliced meats, and soups).  The dessert tables were filled with cakes, and the freezers were filled with Haagen-Dazs ice cream and the drinks were filled with smoothies, coffee machines, juices, and a beer tap.  The best thing about the evening was being out with all of the teachers, TA's, and managers of the franchise, enjoying the conversation and countless picture opportunities.  It was a nice reminder of the things I have liked about the school.

Essentially the entirety of the current Changhua Shane Franchise's full-time staff.

The full time teaching staff of Homei Shane.

I've neglected one of the biggest things to come to Taiwan, which has caused countless tourists, plenty of pages in local and international newspapers, and several cries of 'murder'.  What is this over-reaction you might ask? It is nothing less than the arrival of the giant inflatable yellow duck in Taiwan.  Yes, you read that correctly, a Dutch artist created an inflatable model of the beloved bath toy which is 82 feet tall and has been floating around in harbors since 2007.  The duck made its way to Taiwan last September and has visited three of our big cities, but, some people suspect conspiracy as the duck has popped twice in it's short stay around the island (first around Halloween and then on New Years Eve).  There are mixed reviews on the duck, but if you ask me, it is a brilliant idea.  It is a traveling attraction which has visited 12 countries, doesn't cost people money to see, and creates profit for the host countries through travel and souvenir sales.  As of yesterday the duck has been patched and is back on display in Keelung Harbor.

Welcome back, Yellow Duck.