When Did I Become the Homei 'Senior' Teacher?

Here I have arrived, at the end of at era.  My days of being the new teacher are over, as are my days in the intermediate ranking, and now I am the 'senior teacher' of my little school.  I use quotation marks because that isn't technically my title, in my franchise we have a single senior teacher for all 5 school, but is terms of Homei's school, I am now the teacher who has been there the longest.  What that really means, however, is that two of my closest friends here in Taiwan have completed their contracts (one in Changhua and one in Homei) and will be moving back to a life in Europe.  I think I'm only holding myself together because I know they still have a few more weeks around Taiwan before that fateful final day, even though the full week was a reminder of their eminent departure.  From teppanyaki dinners, to pool games, to night market trips, everything was preceded by the words 'the last'.

The 'going away party' - hotpot style

Enough about lasts, let's talk about a first.  I almost thought I had no funny stories this week, then I remembered a unique first which happened yesterday.  I (along with two of my friends) boarded the wrong train and found ourselves temporarily stranded in the town of Dadu (in Taichung County)!  Quite frankly, I'm surprised this isn't a more common occurrence, especially for me, especially considering the number of times I have bolted to the platform and jumped on the train without regarding the signs at all; call it optimism, call it stupidity, whatever it was, it had been a fool-proof method for me for 15 months.  The problem was in the fact that Changhua Station is the converging point of the 'Mountain line' which runs through Taichung city, and the 'Coastal line' which runs through Taichung Port, so we all assumed that since we could see the train was moving in the correct direction, it must in fact, be our train.  Luckily it didn't take too long to spot the mistake, we are familiar enough with the local cities that we had spotted our mistake by the first stop and got off the train in Dadu...what a silly mistake that was.  Dadu is a small town with a limited amount of English, a limited number of people, and limited resources.  The local bus schedule showed we were about 1.5 hours away from the next pick up, there were apparently no taxis, and when we tried to catch the train back to Changhua there was no access to the platform (because there is no raised crosswalk at the station, you have to walk across the tracks when they are unoccupied to board the platform), so we stood around for an additional 40 minutes swatting at oversized mosquitoes and commenting on our streak of luck as we awaited the next train.
Luck (at least where business was concerned) was not on our side this weekend.  While the locations we frequented were establishments we have been to countless times, the service we received was not as foreigner friendly as usually.  Have they recently had bad experiences with other customers (possibly foreigners) so they are getting stricter with their policies? Did we offend them in the past? Do they think that because we are foreign they can get away with it? The world will never know.  What we do know is that one of the local bars has begun charging us a $200NT minimum per person (plus a $50NT service charge also per person) to sit in their booths, and one of our local Karaokes charged us $400 for  outside food/drinks being found in the room.  While I'm not saying these are unfair policies, and do find it strange that they have only just come into existence.
Today's culture note, as inspired by the rain pattering outside my window, is about a member of the arachnid family who is known for showing himself during times of downpour.  One of the largest types of spiders in the world, known at the huntsman spider or a rain spider, can be found in Taiwan (though, my research shows they can now be found around the world, including the southern part of the United States.  In the larger specimens, this spider's leg span gets to being around 10-12 inches.  I am happy to say that I have not come across and foot-long spiders in my time in Taiwan, because, being slightly arachnophobic already I don't think I stay around it.  I have, however, come across this spider (below).  We discovered him many months ago and he had claimed areas of the teacher's room (including the window and the space behind the bookshelf) as his own.

Victor - The teacher's room huntsman spider

A New Kind of Game

Oh dear, it appears I am sick.  I sit here tonight, coughing, sniffling, and armed with a raspy voice, what a terrible feeling. 

I don’t really know how to go about explaining my weekend, because I like to think I am a little classier than the following story is going to imply.  There is no sugar coating it, my weekend consisted of a pub crawl, and while many have seen their variety of pub crawls (zombie-themed, mystery bus tour, subway crawls), but living in countries with public drinking laws has probably prevented you from traveling between 7-elevens.  You didn’t even know until today that you have been missing out on this sort of experience. 

Let’s start at the beginning.  Saturday night was my friend’s birthday, and to celebrate he created a game.  The game is simple, as long as you have a partner, a love of walking, and a tolerance for alcohol.  Over the course of a few hours the players would take a walking tour of Yuanlin, starting at the train station and ending in High-Relax (a local bar).  Along the route, there are 9 convenience stores, and at each convenience store a short interlude was planned, but rather than being relaxing interludes, they were drinking interludes, and a different mixed drink, beer, or wine, was assigned to be consumed.  Each person on the team was awarded 10 points for successfully drinking the assigned drink, 5 points for drinking an alternative drink, 0 points for drinking a soft drink/juice, and -5 points for drinking a water.  Furthermore, the entertaining aspect is that each person lost 5 points each time they went to the bathroom, so people were constantly monitoring each other’s bathroom behaviors.  At the end of the night, the team which completed the route with the most points was rewarded with the remainder of the ‘drinks kitty’, as well as the much deserved bragging rights.  As prestigious of a title as ‘convenience store pub crawl champion’ would have been, I think I can sleep soundly knowing that my team did not win.  Well, by ‘sleep soundly’ I guess I mean ‘only sleep for a couple of hours’, I almost forgot that it took until 8am to get back to our beds, and by that point I had spent hours singing solos in karaoke, lost my voice, and seen about a thousand marathon runners show us how productive mornings can be. 

A few hours of sleep later and we're off to the bowling alley!

My cultural thought of the week centers around an experience you almost certainly put very little thought into: taking out the trash.  Picture most public streets near you, or any local business, do they have a garbage can? In most places I have visited it is easy to dispose of your garbage, and yet you still see streets, rivers, woods, all littered with trash.  Here in Taiwan, it is exceptionally difficult to find public garbage cans.  So what do you do?  I still don’t know, I usually hide mine in my purse until I’m at home or in a convenient store.  Now think, what do you do when you need to take out the garbage or recycling from your house? Throw it in a bin in your driveway? For me to take out my garbage I need to take my bags not only downstairs, but down the street and around the corner to a public dumpster, and the really crazy thing is that I consider myself to be lucky.  Everyday (except Sunday I believe), in the afternoon and early evening, a team of garbage trucks blaring ‘Für Elise’ travels each of the cities collecting the trash from swarms of residents who have run outside with their bags in hand.  If you work or are busy during the collection period, you have to continue holding on to your rubbish until the next time you can chase down the truck.   With all of that hassle, you would think people would refuse to participate, but Taiwan has a highly successful disposal system, and is considered one of the most successful countries in the world for recycling rates.  

Well, Hello Again

Oh?! So soon! That’s what happens when I indulge upon a mid-week update.  A few days later and I see nothing has progressed (either positively or negatively) with my neighbor and the ‘internet fiasco’.  I’ve gotten a lot of advice over the last few days about how to handle the situation, ranging from childish notes, to stolen modems, to discussions with the landlord (in Chinese) to blasting loud music late at night, but I’m hoping an unspoken compromise will work temporarily, so I’m keeping my router unplugged when I am not home so that if, for some strange reason it is affecting her, it isn’t a constant nuisance.  The strategy has worked for 3 days, but I was gone for two of them, so it is too soon to really say how it is going.

Speaking of being gone for two days, I’ve done a really good job of having weekend adventures lately, so I spent this weekend in a back-and-forth between Taichung (central Taiwan) and Taipei (northern Taiwan).  On Saturday, in the afternoon, we bopped around Taichung from the train station, to my friend’s house, to the Chili Cook-Off competition, to the High Speed Rail Station, all within a few hours.  It was a lot of fun.  There was good conversation, enjoyable (and not so enjoyable) music, and lots of chili (which I acquired a taste for somewhere through the years, after avoiding my father’s chili for my entire childhood). 

The Chili Cook-Off crowd, enjoying some music on a warm November afternoon.

That night I had the treat of watching one of my friends perform in a stand-up comedy show in Taipei.  Your initial thoughts are probably either: “but Kaitlin, you don’t like stand-up comedy” which is still true, but I like to be there for my friends, or “Do you understand the language well enough to be enjoying jokes in Mandarin” to which the answer would be ‘no’, but thankfully it was an English-based comedy show for a primarily foreign crowd.  There were 7 performers throughout the evening who performed short stand-up sets about a range of topics relatable to our lives here as teachers in Taiwan, and poking fun at the language barrier, the cultural differences, and of course, the crime circle more commonly referred to as ‘kindergarten education’.  The weird thing about hanging out with the Taipei crowd last night was being around so many performers, I haven’t been around so many stage people since I was in high school, but so see a room full of comedians, magicians, singers, it was a reminder of the kind of platform Taiwan can provide for performers, and how much you can do here besides just teach.  Don’t worry, I’m not saying I’d like to get on the stage, I got enough of that for the year at the Halloween Extravaganza.

After way too late of a night, too early of a morning, too little coffee at breakfast, and everything else that caused functioning to be difficult this morning, it was time to catch the train back to Taichung.  Essentially every fiber of my being was screaming ‘go home and sleep’ but there is nothing like a night club in the middle of the day to turn your mood around.  Lucky for everyone, specific memories of the day have been lost in a haze of the Filipino’s strong 7% beers, pasta, mirrors, sweat, and the Macarena.

I discovered one of the greatest a worst things about Taiwan this week.  Years ago, inspired by Halloween, I discovered a listing of some of the most unique abandoned (and thought to be haunted) buildings in the world.  In this list was a 1970’s village of futuristic pod shaped houses.  Each set of pods consisted six pods connected by a central staircase, and they were constructed in a line around swimming pools with the intent that the area could be used as a resort.  Unfortunately for those involved in the process, the resort never made it to its opening day.  The project or land was thought to be cursed and several people involved in the construction, or just people driving along the road towards the construction site died.  So, sad and abandoned, the site began falling apart and was good for little more than pictures.  It wasn’t until this week that I rediscovered this pod city, and learned of it’s location: San Zhi, Taiwan, just outside of Taipei, in a convenient location for tourists or Military personnel staying in the northern part of the island.  The heartbreaking news for me is that the city was fully demolished in 2010, leaving none of the pods in tact (despite petitions to turn one into a museum). Now where will I go to get my creepy building fix?

A few of the pod structures I will never have the joy of photographing by myself.

Emotional Rollercoaster

Here we go, almost 3 weeks of updates, all piles into one, mid-week post.  I’d like to start with the most frustrating realization of my week, which is actually the cause of the delay in my posts: my neighbor.  It appears that the lack of internet I have been re-experiencing for the last few weeks was not due to my router, or my computer, or any logical problem at all.  It was due to the fact that my new neighbor has decided to unplug my room’s cords from the building modem, thus rendering my wall-port useless.  While I would like to grant her the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was not unplugged maliciously, since sitting at home this evening she has returned to the modem and unplugged it again.  For the first time in my life, I am worried about my living situation, oh dear…

Well, I have had a very busy few weeks which have put me through a rollercoaster emotions.  I started off two weeks ago feeling overworked, underappreciated, and generally unhappy with my work life. Most of the mood was a byproduct of a culture conflict involving one of the biggest holidays in Western culture: Christmas.  To be entirely honest, coming to a Buddhist country, I did not expect much recognition for the holiday from the locals, and I expected to celebrate on the weekends with my foreign friends, and in early morning Skype calls with my family back home.  So it follows that I was shocked last year to discover that since I work for a British-owned company, the day is a holiday and we are not required to work on it.  Instead of teaching, I spent a wonderful day in Yuanlin with my friends, drinking mulled wine, eating steak, playing games and exchanging presents.  We were informed this year that we would not be granted the same luxury this year, that because Christmas is not a national holiday in Taiwan it wasn’t possible to cancel the classes, which is a reasonable thing, because it means the parents who are working do not need to arrange special care-taking for the day, but the presentation of the news was not done well by the management.  As I have already mentioned, our company closes on Christmas, and it is in our official work calendars that it is a recognized day-off, so when informed that it would be a work day, several teachers questioned how the company’s head-office felt about the news, and we were informed that ‘franchise schools are given permission to make adjustments to the holiday calendar’.  Accepting this as true, many of the teachers voiced concerns to head office (some in the form of complains, some in the form of suggestions for future implementations of this rule, and some with an air of general sadness), and what we got in return were e-mails stating that no such permission was given to the franchise, and that for the past 17 years Shane has been open in Taiwan, Christmas has been a holiday, and there is no intent on changing that now or in the future.  Since the initial conflict, the schools have resolved to cancel classes on Christmas and allow us the day off, but the issue still stand that we were lied to, and we have no real way of knowing how common of a trend lies like this are.  What I do know is that it changes the dynamic between management and staff and put unnecessary strain on all involved.

The entire situation had me upset for a few days, but a dangerous trek through Wulai and a night in Taipei brought my spirits back up.  Wulai is a small city about 40 minutes outside of Taipei, and is home to an aboriginal population and an 80 meter tall waterfall.  The waterfall was gorgeous, but before getting to that simple beauty there were a few dangerous adventures to be had.  We started by searching downstream of the waterfall for a natural rock slide, which is said to be smooth enough to slide down without a wetsuit, but it is only accessible via river trekking.  Unprepared for what the trek would entail, we set out into the river carrying our bags and belongings for the weekend.  Within a short distance up the river we decided to abandon our belongings (not wishing them to be soaked and destroyed in the river), and we began adding short stints of swimming to our trek.  Bruised bodies and pained feet (from stepping on sharp stones) didn’t successfully get us to the waterslide, and with the fear of missing the waterfall in the air, we abandoned our quest.  We made it back out of the river and switched to walking along a nature path back to the main city.  Changhua isn’t known for it’s greenery, so it was nice to be around all of the plants, and we happily walked along for about 40 minutes, then, it became…an adventure.  Ahead of us were several locals who had stopped and were beginning to turn back.  Now, why would they be doing that 40 minutes into the hike? Because an area which most likely used to contain a bridge, was now nothing more than a cliff-face with two ropes strung along its wall.  Trendsetters that we are, however, we grabbed that rope climbed across.  Shortly after we came across obstacle number two, a landslide had destroyed another bridge, but there were no cliff-faces, just a few 2x4’s across the rocks and water, so again we climbed across.  Within a few minutes, we were confused by the streams of water being sprayed into the air from a busted pipe.  Why are there pipes in the middle of a mountain trail? If we had stopped to think about it, we would have realized they were carrying natural hot spring water to the local hot spring bath houses., but we didn’t think of that until after the sting of scalded feet had occurred.  When we reached the end of the trail, there was a huge gate, and several warning signs about how the path was out of commission, it would have been a completely different day if we had been walking in the opposite direction.  Seeking a slightly safer location in the mountains, we next made our way to the Wulai waterfall, which is about 80 meters fall and splashes down on into a popular hot springs area.

Hanging out at the Wulai Waterfall.

The rest of the night was, eccentric, but not full of as many stories as I would have liked.  I found myself in the place where “gay” meets “Halloween”, no really, both Taipei’s gay pride parade and Halloween festival/party appeared to occur on the same day, which led to an interesting assortment of people on the streets that night.  The main thing that stood out about the gay bars this year was the pricing.  As with other countries, there is a trend in a lot of bars in Taiwan to host a special where women get reduced entry or drink prices or something, but for pride weekend there was a ‘reverse special’ where men’s prices were cheaper.  On the outside, this seems like a fair enough deal, there were two glaring faults in it however, the first is that, the men’s prices weren’t actually reduced, the women’s prices were just increased (they wanted $500NT for men (about $17 US) and $800 for women (about $27 US)).  I’m all for a good bar, gay or straight, but especially at 3am, I was not about to spend that kind of money to squish into a crowded room of drunk, sweaty people.  The second fault is that in a weekend where the theme is equality, and everyone is fighting for a similar cause, this pricing does not just discriminate against straight women, but lesbians as well.  So, what is essentially being said with this statement is ‘Thanks for all of your help this afternoon, ladies, but we don’t need you anymore’.  Seems like the wrong weekend to be making those kinds of statements if you ask me.  That became an almost angry commentary, but to be honest, I was tired and discovering an expensive bar was a perfect excuse for me to go home, no hard feeling from me, just thoughts.

After the anger week, my rollercoaster veered onto a more enjoyable course, and I had a pleasantly routine week.  I worked, slept, ate, and, oh yea, celebrated Halloween.  I spent a while dreading the return of the Halloween season because it is so difficult to figure out costumes in Taiwan (considering it isn't a popular holiday here for anyone except the students in English buxibans), but all of the costumes my friends and I put together turned out really well.  For the first time, I chose to do a scary costume this year, and went as a scarecrow, using lots of face paint, a plaid shirt, cut up jeans, and shredded paper instead of straw.  It came together well, and watching students jump when they saw me lurking in the dark doorways made it worthwhile.  I appear to have been the nominated foreign representative for Halloween, and so I taught a theme lesson (we made pipe-cleaner spiders, paper plate webs, and had toilet paper mummy races), then brought the classes trick-or-treating to the local businesses, then I helped the TA's host a haunted house.  It was really fun.

The teachers on Halloween.

That weekend I crossed off a few more things on my Taiwan bucket list, starting with something I mentioned almost a year ago.  Although it is now a dying art, I can now prove it still exists in Taiwan: funeral stripping.  Performing for the deities, and the deceased, as well as the men, women, and children who gather around the truck bed stages, scantily clad women do public pole dances to popular music (the music that I heard was all in English too). 

I also scooted 2 hours away to see one of the first sites I put onto my bucket list, marker of the Tropic of Cancer in Chiayi.  The thing about this site is that the reviews aren’t very favorable, and I’ve been to the marker in Hualian (another county which the Tropic intersects), but still, it had to be visited.  And so, accompanied by one of my friends, we followed the highway and arrived (without a single wrong turn), at one of the most unique structures in Taiwan.  Somewhat resembling a spaceship, or a water tower, instead of the typical design of a vertical pole (which is the typical design because it’s location on the Tropic will not cause it to cast a shadow on the solstice) Chiayi’s marker is a space exploration center.  Complete with inaccurate models of the planets in our solar system, momentos (or models of momentos) of space exploration, and a lot of poorly translated astronomy exhibits, the location provided at least an hour of entertainment for us.  Would I say it is worth a two hour drive? Probably not.  Would I say it is worth seeing while you are in the area? Certainly. 

The Tropic of Cancer marker: Chiayi.

And here we are again, drawing much nearer to the weekend that I am used to when I post.  It's been a good week, but you'll have to wait to hear these stories...