A Friend From Afar!

“Let it go, let it go, can’t hold it back anymore…” Has everyone else been hearing this song as often as I have lately?  It appears Disney has succeeded in creating an incurably addictive song, and my students are all infected as well.  Even my oldest class has requested the lyrics so we can sing it together (and they never sing anything).  The song’s popularity, while initially started by the movie, was clearly fueled by the daily rehearsals of our mid-level CEI class for last weekend’s mother’s day show, but before we get into that, it’s time for a catch-up for the first 2/3 of May. 

May started in one of the best ways imaginable, with a visit from one of university friends.  It was inevitable that Anastasia and I would start talking, with our practically identical semesterly selection of linguistics and TESOL classes we shared a lot of time in the same classroom, doing the same projects, and even co-student teaching the same classes.  We lived such similar lives that even after graduation we found ourselves on the same path, and as we met for an end-of-the-summer going-away lunch we both broke the news of impending moves to Asia (she would be going to South Korea and I would be going to Taiwan).  It may sound silly but it was a relief to have a friend on this side of the world with me as I was acclimating to my new life, even if she was a few hours away, she was much closer than the people I had left back in the states.  We both adjusted so well to our new lives that we renewed our contracts, but we still hadn’t actually made it to visiting each other.  Finally, last month and almost-last minute trip was planned, and she flew into Taipei for an extended weekend at the beginning of the month.  I taught my Friday classes, jumped on my scooter, a local train, and the high speed train, and arrived at her bus stop only minutes before her bus arrived.  After a few mishaps getting to the hostel (my navigation of Taipei is atrocious) we got started on the desperately needed catch-up discussions that brought us to 4 am and ruined our chance at accomplishing any sightseeing in the morning hours. 

Saturday’s adventuring was pretty minimal, due to the late start and our intended evening plans.  We tried to visit the Taipei zoo, but arrived at closing time, and instead rode the Maokong Gondola through the mountains and by a scenic view of the city.  We were blessed with good company in both directions of the gondola journey.  On the way up, we were seated with a Taiwanese couple, a Chinese woman, and a Korean woman.  The country details are important because they created a perfect situation for two linguists to watch three different languages interact and allowing all six of us to chat.  The hours flew by and before we knew it we were late to our evening plans.  We raced back to the hostel to change, and made our way to the opening night of a comedy club to see my friend and the last few performers of a 3-hour show.  We got a few good laughs from the show, but we really weren’t there long enough to call it a highlight for the evening.  What we did get from the night was a couple of new friends who dragged us along to a well-known foreigner bar.  Determined to call it an early night, we only stayed out until 5am (as you can see, that didn’t work out so well).

Somehow we still managed to wake up at a reasonable time, and accomplish everything on our Taipei To-Do list.  Chiang Kai Shek memorial, Sun Yat Sen memorial, Longshan Temple, a fortune teller, dinner at Modern Toilet, and dessert at the Shilin night market; it was a busy day.  The highlight of the day came around dinner time, when the simplest of things became strangely memorable.  For starters, at dinner it is customary to sign a napkin or paper and slide it into the glass table to leave your mark on the restaurant.  Deciding the best way to showcase ourselves was through various languages, so we picked a simple word, “hello”, and wrote it in the 9 languages we have studied between the two of us.  Following dinner we were walking through the streets of Ximending, looking at jewelry, when Anastasia said she was considering a new piercing, and minutes later we both had needles through our ears and fresh studs set in our cartilage.  Walking away from the shop we heard a few people begin to squeal and scream behind us.  While I might joke that this is a normal reaction to foreigners in Taiwan, that is far from true, so we turned around to check out the commotion.  There, small and terrified, was a young mouse, surrounded by a whole swarm of Taiwanese people poking at it and photographing it.  The poor mouse could barely move out of fear, and we were afraid it wouldn’t be long before someone stepped on it.  I sent Anastasia off to get a cup from McDonalds to catch the mouse in, but before she returned I had managed to ask a nearby shop owner for a box and had already picked up our new rodent friend.  Not wanting to be stopped by locals, I caught Anastasia’s eyes and we marched right out of the busy streets and to a quiet park nearby to free it.  It is not that any of these events are amazing on their own, but the random nature of each unrelated event kept us thoroughly entertained.

Greetings in Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and English.

Outside of one of my favorite temples in Taipei, the Longshan Temple

At the Sun Yat Sen memorial.

Anastasia is having her fortune read.

Asia, a section of the world that considers poop to be cute.

Anastasia stayed to explore Taipei for a few extra hours on Monday, but I had to catch a high-speed train and race back to Homei to start my teaching day.  It took most of the week to recover my energy from the weekend. 

The majority of my downtime for the following two weeks was spent on preparing for the Mother’s Day show we hosted last weekend.  While the school hours were spent singing and rehearsing various poems and theater skits, my evening hours were spent testing my artistic abilities with the sketching and coloring of puppets for Where the Wild Things Are.  It was a time consuming project, but the results, coupled with a story corner reading of the book made for a cute little show. 

Along with the story corner, the Mother’s Day show consisted of six acts from four of our classes.  The songs performed that morning included a nursery rhyme style song called “Mommy, I Love You”, Taylor Swift’s “The Best Day”, Abba’s “S.O.S”, and Idina Menzel’s “Let it go”, so I can now recite each of these songs…backwards…without music…while undergoing and form of distraction you can think of, they are imprinted on my brain.   We also put together a reader theater version of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and a poetry reading called “Super Mom”.  The whole thing was co-hosted by me (in English) and one of my TAs (in Chinese).  I am proud of the final results, it was great to see the kids pull off such a great show, but my favorite thing about it is that the whole thing is over now and we can resume our normal class schedules (1.5 hours might seem like a lot of time for a class, but it is hard enough to cover the necessary components without the addition of 10-15 minutes of song rehearsals added into it). 

Immediately following the show the TAs invited me and another teacher to lunch in a nearby pasta shop, and we quickly lost track of the next two hours.  I rushed home, changed for the evening’s festivities, and rode off to Taichung for the goodbye dinner of our franchise’s senior teacher.  Dinner was served in a nice little Thai restaurant, provided a wonderful location to reunite with all of the teachers from our now overpopulated staff (the only problem was that the tables were too small and we were separated not only from the Taiwanese members of staff, but into two tables of foreigners as well).  We shared some jokes over hours of drinks (then left the restaurant and enjoyed still more drinks), wandered Taichung, played some Scrabble (After all, what is a night out without Scrabble?) and ended up having a massive slumber party (Why were these such a hit as kids? I find the comfort of my own bed and waking up of my own accord to be far more preferable.).  We woke up to heavy rain the next morning and by mid-afternoon realized that our plans for a scenic scooter trip would be to no avail, so we donned our ponchos and practically swam our bikes back to Changhua.

A panorama of the dining area at our Thai dinner.

I was talking to my manager the other day, and I came across another interesting cultural difference between Eastern and Western cultures.  This time we were discussing names.  I was helping address envelopes to the mother of one of my students by writing names and streets in Pinyin so they could be mailed.  I don’t typically refer to my students by their last names, so I don’t know most of them, but for one boy in the class I was aware that he and his brother share the last name Liu.  I was about to write this on the envelope when my manager told me that their mother’s last name was Wu.  Why would this be the case?  Well, I asked my manager and she seemed confused at first, “Because she is their mother” was her response, but this made me equally confused.  As it turns out, when couples are married in Taiwan, the last name is often not replaced, so a husband and wife will typically retain their birth names (though they can choose to tack on the new last name to the end if they want), and the children are named using the father’s surname.  This shows that there is still a strong emphasis placed on males in Taiwanese society (which shouldn’t come as a surprise).