Happy Moon Festival

There is no way that week contained 7 whole days, it absolutely flew by.  Upon leaving Kaohsiung last weekend I think all of the teachers were dreading the work week, thinking with the various presentations and tests that the days would drag on, and yet, here we are at the end of another week (and, regrettably the end of another weekend).  

This past week, two more of my classes graduated terms, and I held two more presentation lessons (and starting next week I have to attempt to merge together those two completely different classes).  I am proud to say that 'throwing me into the deep-end' with presentations has successfully calmed my fears about them.  My manager says that I am very confident 'on the stage' of the classroom (her words, thought the theatre analogy applies so well to my life that I'm surprised I didn't say them).

September 28th in Taiwan is Teacher's Day.  This date was chosen to commemorate the birth of Confucius, who was believed to be the master educator in China.  I may not be a master educator, but I still got to enjoy teachers day, mainly by creating an activity in which each student had to write a card to the teachers in the school (the cards could be to the manager, the TA's, or the foreign teachers).  As a result a lot of the people in the school have a lot of beautiful drawings and cute cards from the students, and I have 'new wallpaper' for my desk area!

Happy Teacher's Day from CEI07.

This weekend's trip was a short day trip to Maoli county to see the Sanyi wood-art festival.  Many of the residents in the town have wood-carving businesses, and for one month a year they hold a festival to draw attention to the fact.  Each store displayed a variety of furniture and sculptures of a variety of subjects from religious figures, to zodiac figures, to animals (particularly horses for some reason) which were intricately designed.  I am disappointed that I didn't end up buying any souveniers from the festival.

Saturday night I had my first KTV experience, a staple of the Asian lifestyle.  KTV is a karaoke business, but unlike the traditional style of American karaoke, you are only singing for your friends.  Large groups will rent out a room with a TV system (with the appropriate karaoke supplies like lyrics and microphones), seating spaces (and dancing spaces), and an all-you-can-eat buffet.  The room was ours from midnight-6am, but we only lasted 4.5 hours before surrendering to exhaustion and sore throats.  It was a lot of fun (particularly the large group numbers like "I will survive" and "It's raining men")

The full moon tonight can only mean one thing, it must be the Moon Festival (also known as the mid-Autumn festival) in Taiwan.  Many ancient traditions associated with the Moon Festival, such as sacrifice and prayers to the Gods of various religions (such as Tai Yin Hsing Ju the Taoist moon goddess) have faded away through the years, and now the main tradition on the holiday is a family barbeque.  With all of us to far from our families the TA's organized a 'school family barbeque' and we sat around for 4 hours eating (for the number of times in my life I have been told that Americans have huge potion sizes, or Americans eat too much, I have to comment that I find the amount of food consumed here to be much more than I would have been subjected to in the states).  Most of the food was things I come across on a regular basis, I believe the only new foods of the day were rice sausage (which is, as it sounds, a sausage casing stuffed with rice), and water bamboo (which is one of my new favorite foods).