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).