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.