Teaching in Taiwan
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Corey was kind enough to walk me the few blocks at 6 a.m. to the City Air Terminal, where I checked my bag (New York, please heed the example set by Hong Kong and Seoul and get one of these in the city!) and got on a bus for the airport. I was picked up by a driver hired by American Language Village (ALV) the program for which I was working for starting on Monday. Since the cheapest flights to Taiwan were on Thursday, as opposed to Friday – Sunday, the program graciously agreed to host me a few extra days. I had thought I would be going into Taipei to shack up in a hotel for a few days, and I was excited to see the city. However, the cab driver pulled up at a hotel within 15 minutes (Taipei is about an hour away from the airport) and left me in the lobby with my luggage. The first thing I noticed were massive wreaths laden with flowers propped up on easels all over the sidewalk – later I learned these are traditional decorations for funerals… After Sophie, the camp director, called into the front desk to speak to me, I discovered that I would be staying in this place, called Taoyuan, until Sunday, when I would be transported with a few other teachers to a hotel closer to the center of Taipei. Needless to say, my fairly comprehensive Lonely Planet Taiwan didn’t have a whole lot to say about Taoyuan, which is basically a suburb of Taipei whose only touristically-significant feature is the airport. However, I decided to embrace the chance to explore a place that could showcase some uncontrived culture. A place whose New York equivalent is Western Queens.
I had expressed some concern to Sophie that while I was happy to stay in Taoyuan until camp started, I did not have a map of the area and hence would have a difficult time finding my way back to the hotel if I wanted to do some exploring or, say, take a day trip. In a harried way, she volunteered to swing by the hotel and give me a quick tour of town. It was also during this phone call that she told me I spoke too fast and that my students might have a hard time understanding me. I explained that I was talking to someone who knew English and that I planned to speak slower when in class.
In the meantime, I marveled at the sheer enormity that was my room. Compared to anywhere I had stayed in Asia (except for maybe the suite in The Atlanta, way back in Bangkok), it was a palace. The bed was larger than a twin! And there were TWO of them. There was space for my suitcase on the floor! There was a little couch and a coffee table! There was a TV with – gasp – HBO and Star and Cinemax and – oh yes! – CNN! (There were also several channels of free porn.) The bathroom had an actual tub (no curtain, but hey, it was still a step up) with a hose I didn’t have to hold myself and a towel rack. The bathroom itself was in fact larger, I surmised, than Corey’s studio in Seoul. I blessed my good fortune and ran downstairs to meet Sophie.
(N.B. Later, with the other teachers, we concluded that the lovely spacious hotel was in fact a love motel. I had thought that the little signs down by the elevators that showed pictures of the different types of rooms, including one with a circular bed, was just for advertisement’s sake. But apparently, if you read the Chinese, it says which rooms you can rent by the hour, and so forth. And this also explains the porn. There are a lot of these in Korea, too, particularly by train stations and airports. But I figure it isn’t all so sketchy, necessarily – in parts of Asia, children live with their parents until very late in life by Western standards, and I think its understandable that people in relationships need someplace to go…)
She drove me around town and pointed out the important sights – the bus station and an internet café and a 7-11 and an IKEA near the hotel that was so large and conspicuous that I could use it as a landmark if I got lost. We ended our tour at a supermarket-cum-shopping center named Géant, where we sampled tea from a stall and had hot chocolate from McDonald’s. While we were waiting at the counter for our drinks, I noticed that the Happy Meals came with baseball cards, and there were about 40 different options. At first I thought, “Neat! Taiwanese people are baseball fans!” Then I realized that every baseball card depicted the same player – Chien Ming-Wang, #40, pitcher for the New York Yankees. He is at the center of a national obsession. I saw his face everywhere, promoting everything from sneakers to cars. Later on, at camp, many people had on shorts and jerseys with his number. This trend meant, oddly enough, that Yankee paraphernalia (probably bootleg?) was on sale EVERYWHERE. Ah, reminders of home!
After being dropped back at the hotel, I took a beautiful nap. Afterwards, I headed down the block to the 7-11 and bought peanut butter, jelly, and whole wheat bread (which is very hard to find in Asia). I also bought a soup with noodles in it and a side of rice with pork on top from a old lady who concocted her wares in a large metal cart the size of a hotdog stand next to the 7-11. She brought me a stool to sit on and I ate on her prep counter, able to peer into her groundfloor living room where the TV was blaring. Back at the hotel, I did some laundry in the sink and scarfed down a good ol’ PBJ before my HBO party.
Friday, February 2, 2007
I slept late and continued to watch premium cable (they had Sex and the City! And the news! And Spanglish, which makes me cry.). I took a luxurious shower in my massive bathroom and set out to find lunch. I came across a small place with a counter in front and some wooden tables in the back and managed to tell the owner what I wanted by pointing at what other people were having. I wound up eating something as a side dish that might have been tofu but also might have been some sea creature. I like to guess; it keeps me on my toes.
I then headed to the internet café, where I spent five fantastic hours doing some serious catching up on e-mail and Facebook and the NYT, etc. That morning, I had received a call from Vanessa, who I had communicated with via email ever since I responded to ALV’s posting on eslcafe.com. She had said that she knew I was in town on my own and she wanted to know if I’d like to have dinner. I said, “Definitely.” And we agreed to meet at the IKEA at 5:30. I arrived there a little early because I’d had enough of the internet café (which was full of guys playing video games with very loud sound effects – and guys whose games were still running but who had fallen asleep with their heads on the keyboard), and I spent a wonderful half-hour browsing through IKEA. It was literally Scandinavian design infused with an Asian flair. I bought some awesome wonton-soup-style spoons in primary colors and enjoyed looking at the set-up room displays that incorporated a lot of Chinese New Year decorations.
Vanessa and I ate at Géant at a fast-food restaurant where you point to different ingredients and the chefs stir-fry it right in front of you and serve it, dripping with oil, with a side of sprouts and rice. The customers perch atop stools at eat off an oval counter. Vanessa then took me to a night market in Jhongli, a nearby town, where I bought a CD by Jacky, who is apparently a very well known pop star in Taiwan, and a pair of black tights. I played a little arcade game where you have to pop balloons with a dart, and since I popped two, I got a little lychee-flavored candy as a prize. Other highlights of this small-town night market included the gerbils and various birds for sale, the meat for sale that Vanessa identified as dog, the live snakes on display that you could point to and they’d kill on the spot for you to use the meat…and eating a chocolate-covered frozen banana.
I had a breakthrough on this night – in Vietnam, Steve and I kept hearing this little ditty a la an ice cream truck, but we could only see garbage trucks on the street. Well, in Taiwan, some of the garbage trucks played Beethoven’s 5th, and Vanessa told me that this is because the garbage trucks don’t actually stop and pick up garbage, hence they play music to alert the neighborhood to come on out to the sidewalk with their bags to throw in the back of the truck. Walking home from the internet café the next day, I saw one of these trucks meandering at a snail’s pace down the avenue while, from all directions, men, women, and children in pajamas and flip-flops converged on the sidewalk to toss in their cargo.
Some more HBO and I called it a night.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
The night before, Vanessa had given me a map of Taoyuan, and it turns out that the hotel was kind of at the outskirts of town. I had the hotel front desk (whose staff spoke zero English) call me a cab (thank god the word “taxi” is universal), and I showed the driver the part of the map where it said dim sum in English with a bunch of Chinese next to it. I was taken to a fairly high-class dim sum place that was supposedly 24-hours, but at 11:30 a.m. I was the first customer and they appeared to be just opening. I had a wonderful array of dim sum dishes…at that point, I developed favorites: the shrimp in the slippery rice paper and custard-filled buns, as well as shumai (shrimp wrapped in yellowish dumpling), and shrimp+ vegetable steamed dumplings, and stir-fried turnip cake. I also befriended a lovely waitress named Karen who was from Penang and working at the restaurant while on vacation from a nearby university. She was studying international business and wanted to practice her English, so we talked about Malaysia and my travels.
I took a 45-minutes walk back to “my” internet café with a pit stop at of Taoyuan’s main temple, Jin-fu, which was very colorful and busy. I sat outside for awhile, watching as people pulled up on their motorbikes and dashed into the temple for a quick offering of incense or cookies or fruit or a garland of fresh flowers accompanied by a hasty prayer. Often, moms or dads had young kids in tow, and they goofed off at the back of the temple while the adults did their thing. There was also a large furnace in which the adults burned jo paper. I remembered that Chinese New Year was coming up in one week, and then it made sense that it seemed busier than other temples I’d seen. Stores along my way were all decked out in red, selling everything type of wall and door hanging imaginable. This New Year was going to be the Year of the Pig, but a particularly lucky one, apparently, a year that only comes around once in a couple hundred years.
In any case, I did my internet thing until my head spun, running out to grab a delicious hot bubble tea at the store next door. Back in the hotel, I watched more wonderful English TV until Jennifer, my roommate for the duration of camp, arrived! A wonderfully warm and sunny 25-year-old born in Seattle, Jennifer works for a pharmaceutical company in Las Vegas and was trying out this two-week teaching stint to see if she and her boyfriend might want to take time away from their jobs in the States and live/teach abroad for a longer period of time. We spent the remainder of the evening getting to know each other before we crashed.
Sunday February 4, 2007
We took leisurely showers and searched for a not-gross lunch in Taoyuan without walking over to the main road where the internet café and the IKEA were (the place I had eaten on Friday was closed). We managed to find a buffet-style thing where we could point to what we wanted (I stuck with veggies and rice and tofu, which I could safely identify) and get it in Styrofoam containers to go. We were ready to go at noon and were driven to our new hotel in Banciao, a part of Taipei that has a stop on the subway but still is not in the city center (only about four stops away, though). It was during this ride that we met some of our fellow teachers – Brian, an MIT grad studying Chinese on tropical Hainan Island, and Tyler and Masha, a couple currently living in Bali but who seem to be rather nomadic. Petite Masha is Russian but has lived in Germany, and muscular Tyler is from LA, and they met in Indonesia. Very inter-multi-national!
When we got to the Tung Li hotel in Banciao, we met the other teachers: Andre, a middle-aged South African who teaches at a Catholic girls’ school during the school year and does this during vacations to make some money; Mark, a guy in his late twenties/early thirties who has a masters from the States but then decided to go to Asia to take a break – and then he met his current girlfriend while teaching at ALV last summer and decided to stay in Taipei and study Chinese; Hindy and Daniela, two sharp girls from NYC who are recently graduated college, are in the midst of a big Asia backpacking trip, and doing this to pick up some money; and Dana, a twentysomething who is between contracts teaching English South Korea, but who has since college held various cool international jobs (e.g. babysitting on cruise ships). We were all cabbed to a fairly brief orientation at Ginling Girls’ High School, the all-girls school at which our first camp was held. I will hold off on the specifics of the orientation because I will write in a different format about camp.
Jennifer and I were assigned a room that could barely hold our suitcases, let alone ourselves. On top of that, the room was basically a raised wooden platform with some mats rolled up in the corner. WTF? This was a far cry from Taoyuan. I marched downstairs and after some negotiating, arranged a room switch. We wound up taking a room that Dana had been assigned to, which meant we shared a bed, but since we were two people and she was one person, it made sense. It wasn’t the bed on the floor that bothered me, it was just that we had no space for two people! In any case, the hotel was spotless and really nicely decorated, with hardwood floors and a shiny chrome bathroom, so we made do despite the cramped conditions. A bunch of us headed out to get some dinner at one of the nearby night market (I had this delicious wrap with a lot of veggies and some potentially fake meant in it – apparently a lot of the meaty-looking things in Taiwan are either made from tofu or mushrooms), then we hung out for a bit at McdDnalds. A quick stop at the internet café and I crashed.
American Language Village
Teaching at ALV was an extremely interesting experience that was unlike any I have had before, so I have tried to capture it in such a way that anyone who may be interested in teaching there has a vivid sense of what it was like.
PHILOSOPHY: “Keep Talking, Keep Learning.” At least in theory, the goal is to get Taiwanese students to loosen up and use their English in fun contexts without fear of punishment. I applaud this goal. Taiwanese students are good at writing in English (very neatly, too) and they have good comprehension, but they are super shy when it comes to speaking. In school, I learned the teachers can be very cruel, and so the camp atmosphere – which is zany, to say the least --is a good way to encourage them to practice speaking.
DAILY SCHEDULE: ALV runs three one-week camps in February (since that’s when Taiwanese students have a massive vacation from school), and a bunch more in the summer. At my first camp, the day ran from 8 a.m. to 4:10 p.m.; at the second, 8 a.m. to 8/8:30 p.m. (Teachers and TAs had meetings before and after the camp day.) The days were made of a combination of 50-minute units. There were different kinds of activities: ESL teaching (once a day, if that), teaching in English on various cultural topics (Taipei Landmark Introduction, Taiwan Local Food, Pizza Introduction, American Games, etc.), situational teaching (Mini-Olympics, Sport Teaching, Steak House and Table Manners, Clothing Store, Daily Utensil), and various fun things (Quiz Show, Auction, Capture the Flag, Wind Chime Making, School Fair, etc.)
DANCE: The camp obsession. No kidding. I mean, we danced ALL THE TIME. Opening ceremony, campfire, in the classroom, evening activity, closing ceremony, afternoon dismissal. Mostly in a really simplified Backstreet Boys meets *N Sync meets Menudo meets New Edition meets Asia meets Bring It On kind of way. ALV has their own set of music that they use for these things, and the TAs have a massive store of knowledge of all of them, and the teachers fumble around the best we can. This really should have been dance camp, I swear. The camp song is to the tune of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and hundreds of kids stamp and clap at the same time. It’s wild.
The closest analogy I can summon for this kind of peppy community, one that has quirky traditions in the realm of song and dance and games, is FOP.
Monday, February 5 – Thursday, February 8, 2007
ALV Camp Week #1 – Ginling Girls High School, Banciao, Taiwan
Location: Banciao is about four MRT stops away from Taipei Station, which is the center of the city. I likened it to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, or maybe even the further reaches of Astoria. By day, it seemed that almost everyone worked in the center, but by night, stalls appeared on side streets everywhere and the streets hummed with low-key activity -- teenagers out with their friends, families out on a big group – and a lot of street-food-buying and window shopping. (Is it possible to window shop if there are no windows? Like, if it’s a stall selling metallic purses? But I digress.)
However, at 7 in the morning, we had to take a 20-minute cab ride from our hotel to the school where we were teaching, so I suppose the school itself may not have been so centrally located. The school was a large two-story structure set back from a large boulevard (where there were, among other things, a Carrefour and a massive IKEA), and the classrooms were in horizontal rows with the doors all facing a kind of outdoor corridor. My classroom, C4 (Class #4 of 10), was on the second floor. At the end of each corridor was the bathroom, which was quite interesting, because once you were in a stall, you went in a kind of common trough, and jets of water streamed through the trough (which ran under all the stalls) in order to “flush” it. Different classes were assigned to clean the bathroom every afternoon. I’m just happy they never made the foreign teachers touch a mop. Outside, there were two large basketball courts, one of which had a track around it. The area around these was full of palm tress and nice bushes. The auditorium where we held our opening and closing ceremonies was in a separate building.
TAs: I was assigned to work with Nicky, a fantastic university student. She was petite and wore very punk-type clothes and pulled off an edgy hairstyle better than I ever could. Every foreign teacher is paired with a Taiwanese TA, and I think this is a crucial part of why the camp works – the TAs know what’s going on -- many of them have worked for several camps – and the foreign teachers, especially the first-timers, just fumble along and ask the TA for advice several times a day. Also, they mainly take over when it comes to teaching the dozens of songs and chants and dance routines, because it would impossible to teach the foreign teachers so much institutional history, especially since there is no real orientation (a slight problem I will talk about later). They were all extremely nice, and they seemed to be a great group of friends scattered at universities across the country who are close because they have worked together at several camps. I heard through the ALV grapevine that they get paid much less than we did, and I know they certainly had more cramped rooms at the hotels, but they attached to the camp and its culture and ecstatic about their friendships. Jennifer and I often heard them late at night in the hotel, talking and laughing, playing cards or camp games or practicing their dance moves. The foreign teachers couldn’t have functioned without them – they knew all the logistical things, like where lunch came from.
The students treated us – the teachers and the TAs – like celebrities. We posed for endless photos taken by cell phones and digital cameras. We signed autograph notebooks and created signatures with big flourishes. We gave out our email address and promised to write and to never forget them. On the last day, many students cried for a considerable length of time after the closing ceremony and clung to us during good-bye hugs. I believe it was hard for them to finish the experience in the same way that the end of a two-month sleepaway camp experience is emotional for American teens.
Students: I had 25 students, girls between the ages of 13 and 15 (though they seemed younger) clad in light purple and yellow track suit, seated at desks in a large U-shape in my classroom. They are given English names in middle school, when they first start learning English, and I had two Anns and two Jennifers. I also had a Winnie, a Penny, a Shelly, an Angel, a Veena, and a Belle (who didn’t know her name was famous from Beauty and the Beast!). Judy was a popular one, too.
While the foreign teachers were assigned to specific classes (mine was C4, like I said), we rotated several times a day within our “team” (1-5 was Team A, 5-10 was Team B). In C1 was a student with the most memorable name – DoReMi. No kidding. She was a strong girl, too – a real leader.
On the whole, my students were very sweet, quiet, and obedient – and they didn’t talk. It could have also been that they are “punished” when they speak Chinese at ALV – we take away one of their fake dollars with which they “buy” lunch, and if they don’t have a dollar they have to do the chicken dance to get lunch – so my guess is that they figured if they couldn’t speak Chinese and they were nervous about their English, it was better not to say anything at all. Their reluctance to speak in class – and I think this stemmed from a fear of being making a mistake in public – lessened over the course of our days together. I tried to make them more comfortable by drawing a little chart on the board. On one side of a vertical line was the word “camp,” and on the other was the word “school.” I had my students think of words that described each one, in order to make clear the difference between the two environments.
Teaching English: The idea that this would be substantive was laughable. We would get our schedules the day before in the after-camp meeting, and it was only then that we would see what subjects we had to teach based on the scant material in the books provided for us by the camp. We had three resources that the students also had (read: we had no materials explicitly for the purpose of helping us plan lessons) – a Student Reference book with topics like Punctuation and Writing a Draft as well as American Games and Taiwan Local Food and Pizza Introduction, an Activity Reference with lyrics to most of the songs, and an very slim, oftentimes-incorrect ESL book published by god-knows-where in England. (Funny, since the name of the camp is American Language Village.)
The materials provided in the reference often made little sense in connection to the topics at hand. For example, there was a 50-minute chunk of time one day devoted to “Dress Code.” The Student Reference book had about three pages describing the differences between Formal Attire, Black Tie Formal, White Tie Formal, Business Formal, Business Casual, Cocktail Attire, Dressy Casual, and Casual. These descriptions were not only pointless, but also they also contained words the students wouldn’t know and wouldn’t need to know. They were highly technical and sometimes just plan wrong. I soon learned from the more veteran teachers to create my own lesson plans for the topics we were assigned to teach for any given 50-minute period. So for Dress Code, I defined Formal, Semi-Formal, and Casual on the board and had my students brainstorm different locations (the beach, the cinema) and events (a ball, a date) to which they would wear them. Then I had my students design outfits of their own and label them in one of the three categories. I walked around checking up on everyone’s work, and I saw quite a few trendy outfits, many of them on figures reminiscent of anime characters. One design showed a slender girl with a heart-shaped face, large eyes, and long wavy hair sporting high boots, a short skirt with ruffles at the bottom, and a top with fur at the collar waist and wrist. I also saw a couple of elaborate floor-length ball-gowns.
For situational teaching, I had to teach the same thing – Clothing Store – to all five classes in Team A. Again, there was no guidance or instruction as to how to teach the topic in an interactive manner, just two pages in the book with some useless exercises and some lines for the students to take notes. I had 25 minutes in the situational classroom, which contained a clothing line hung from the ceiling with some clothes on hangers, as well as posters advertising various items all over the walls (these posters were EVERYWHERE, and often the English wasn’t correct). I was encouraged to “teach with the posters” but through a combination of talking to the veteran teachers and my own ideas I came up with a lesson plan that worked. First, I went through and pointed to clothes on the rack, and they would shout out the name of the item. Then we brainstormed where would they wear them to, in what weather, what time of day, etc. They I wrote up a dialogue on the board between a customer and a shop owner, and I had volunteers come up and “buy” clothes from the rack. ALV has a fairly effective reward system wherein you get a bead if you talk in class or help the teacher or answer a question or anything. The students put them on the string of their nametag necklaces and it becomes a source of pride. After we returned to the home classroom, I drew some sketches of more obscure articles of clothing on the board, since they had the basics down – like bathrobe, flip-flops, bikini, belt, earrings, ball gown, etc. Then I split the class into two teams, lined them up, and called out the name of one of the articles of clothing. The first person on each team had to run up, and whoever put a hand on the drawing on the board first got a point for their team. This game was used by almost every teacher in some incarnation – it was quite useful.
Another game that we played a lot was an easier equivalent of “To all my neighbors who…” We split the class into four or five teams and giving every team a name – like for Taiwan Local Food, one was dumplings, one was stinky tofu, one was turnip cake, one was noodles, etc. We then mixed up the teams and sat them in a circle – on the floor or in chairs – with enough space for the whole group minus one person. We then called out one or more of the team names, and those people had to find a new position in the circle, the one who was left was stuck in the middle and had to call out a new team name to get back into the circle.
But for the first lesson on Clothing Shop, I really had no idea what I was doing and I just winged it. I think its unfair to the students to have to listen to a teacher who is just talking for the sake of talking – and there is so much guidance that ALV could give new teachers if they just created a teacher’s handbook using advice and sample lesson plans from experienced teachers and just encouraged creativity and deviation if you had a new idea.
Other Activities: Every day after lunch the students had naptime, during which they shut the lights and closed the blinds and laid their heads on their desk for half an hour. No joke. It must have been wicked uncomfortable. But it was a sight – especially when, during the Huwei week, 17-year-old boys who showed such bravado during the rest of the day were sleeping like babies.
The school fair was really fun. The students brought in an old toy and an old book or magazine from home, and then they could spend some of their ALV dollars purchasing some of the items, as well as the dumplings, popcorns, and yummy waffles that the TAs made at different stations.
For the closing ceremony, each class prepared a performance. C4 was assigned “The Marching Song” which is an odd variation on the “Left, Left, Left Right Left” military-style ditty. (We also had to perform our class chant, which was along the lines of “Rabbits! Rabbits! Rabbits! We are the best!”) The highlight of the closing ceremony, though, is the teacher fashion show. Using construction paper, scissors, glue, and whatever other materials can be found around camp (plastic bags, ALV fake money, beads, playing cards), the students have to make the teachers “oufits” to wear over our clothes. This inevitably turns out to be hilarious. The male teachers are often clad in bras with cone shaped cups and short skirts. I got to wear a princess-style cone hat with curly pieces of red paper stapled to the bottom as hair, a pink construction paper skirt, a gym class-style piney with a little drawing of me and the signatures of everyone in C4 and pink plastic bag leg warmers. Nicky and I danced down the aisle of the auditorium as flashes went off and the C4 students went wild.
There was a quiz show one of the days, where students volunteered to come up on stage and answer trivia questions (the answers were sometimes inaccurate, but we’ll put that aside for now). If the student got the question right, they won the chance to pop a balloon with a piece of paper inside that named their prize. Some of the prizes were pretty basic, like a candy bar, or the chance to have the teacher of your choice do the chicken dance. But there was one particular prize that stood out – a student was able to pluck out one strand of hair from Daniel’s head. The girls all squealed. Daniel who? He was the “camp leader,” a 23-year-old who was basically the head TA. Wearing stylish jeans (which in Asia means ripped or dyed with some pattern or with pieces of denim just hanging off), he often lead the entire camp in song and dance; when the TAs would perform special choreography for the rest of the camp, he was always at the front of the pyramid. I think he secretly would love to be a pop star. He was cheesy but very charismatic, and he could psych up the whole camp and quiet them down five minutes later. Anyway, the best part about the quiz show prize was that afterwards one of my students, Veena, caught up to me and said, “I wish I could have 10 of Daniel’s hairs!” I cracked up.
Food: Breakfast and lunch were provided by the camp. Breakfast was often a white bread double-layer sandwich with eggs or meat (or fake meat) or shredded lettuce or chopped unripe tomato filling in the layers. I opted to eat vegetarian at camp, because I figured it was safer. Lunch was eaten out of Syrofoam containers in the classroom and often contained pretty oily mushrooms or veggies and rice and tofu or fake meat. The students brought their own chopsticks in very cute little containers.
Excerpts and Quotable Quotes:
From our daily schedules:
“Camp Rules: Happy and Smile, No smoking, beers and alcohols, No slippers and flip-flops” … “Second day of our camp, everyone gogogo!!” … An activity: “Hit Song and Hot Dance”
From letters and thank you notes:
“To sexy Hana: I feel you’re a really good teacher. Let you to teach is very happy. I hope that you can remember me forever. I will sent e-mail for you! Love, your dear student Elissa pen” … “Hana, Thank you to teach us. I happy to meet you very much. I like you very much, too. And thank you agin. Angel Lin (on the back) (I realy don’t want to say good-bye to you!) I am sad!” … “Hana, Thank you in the treatmet of these days. Wish that you are happy every day! And you are so beautiful! ~Jennifer” … “Hana. Thank you: I am so happy at ALV. HAHA ~ Don’t forget me! By Penny.” … “Hana: You smile is beautiful! You never angry to us! You are nice! You are beautiful, too. I like you very much. Shelly~” … In a card that says “Thank you Teacher” on the front “Hana, Please don’t forget me! I will miss you! Everyone will miss you! C4 will be No 1! Wendy”
After-hours: Most evenings I just grabbed a quick dinner out and then crashed because I was so exhausted. On Tuesday night of that week, and on Wednesday, I went to Taipei 101 and had a fantastic peanut-chicken dinner in the food court, which is really one of the best food courts I’ve ever seen. On Thursday night, we had our end-of-camp dinner at a Taiwanese steakhouse, which is completely different than any steakhouse I’ve ever been in. First of all, when you order your steak medium (in my case, Daniel was our translator), it comes so rare it is practically still mooing. I sent it back and then was satisfied when the inside was a deep pink color. Any steak meal (we were given a spending limit of about 10 USD, by the way) came with an all-you-can-eat buffet that featured, among other items, soup, really bad ingredients for salad, veggies, flan, ice cream, soda, along with toast and butter and jam. After dinner, I bought a fantastic hooded sweatshirt that is navy blue and has the I Heart NY logo on it with NATURE written underneath. “I love New York nature”? What does that mean? I love it. I stopped into a colorful temple by our hotel, and then we all headed back to Tung Li to grab out luggage and take a taxi to a hotel in the center of Taipei, near Taipei Main Station, for two nights. The Fortune Hotel, Jennifer and I joked, is really quite unfortunate. Lonely Planet says it had its heydey in the 1970s, and we can definitely see why. Our room had paint peeling and cracked bathroom tile and was generally kind of decrepit, nowhere as clean or well decorated as our room in Banciao. But at least this one had two beds. I am pretty sure I killed a bedbug, and after that incident Jennifer and I neurotically checked our bedsheets.
Friday, February 9, 2007
Tyler, Masha, Jennifer, Brian, and I had breakfast at the branch of the ubiquitous Taipei chain Dante Coffee that was adjacent to the lobby of the Fortune Hotel. For under three dollars you could get an egg, toast, and a hot chocolate, and while we were staying at the Fortune we always had breakfast there. Hindy and Daniela joined us, and we split cabs to the Museum of World Religions. The museum was the brainchild of a Taiwanese monk and the person who designed the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. worked on it. My expectations were high and not entirely fulfilled. We first saw an animated movie about a young girl who appeared to be living in New York with her grandfather who asked questions about why different religions didn’t get along, and then suddenly they would be beamed to Egypt or Tibet or Israel and there’d be a musical number with a lot of camera zooming in on various religious scenes, but then, if you ask me, it was a bit lacking in focus…Then we went into a big room with displays for each of nine major religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc.). For each one they had some panels describing the main tenets and some artifacts and photos to illustrate some of the rituals and traditions. For each religion there was also an interactive display where you could put on headphones and listen to more information about some aspect of the religion, and there were animated trivia games and cartoon shorts as well. For the Judaism one, I listed to a Jewish grandfather rabbi character with a heavy Brooklyn accent explain some tenets of Judaism in a hearty tone to a young blond backpacker person. It was interesting, and I did learn things, but it did seem like there was something lacking. The best part of the museum, I thought, was in the center of that room, where there were intricate models of various sacred buildings for the different religions. They had the Old-New Synagogue in Prague for Judaism, for example. And many of the models had little cameras inside that you could operate with a joystick in order to view the interior decorations on a screen in front of the model. I also enjoyed the downstairs room of the museum, which basically laid out the life cycle – birth, adolescence, middle age, marriage, old age, death – and compared how different religions celebrated or treated those landmark moments. Along the side of this exhibit there were some rooms running videos of interviews with various religious leaders, and I sat and watched one of those for awhile, finding it fascinating to hear about how these people got into the professions they did.
But the actual highlight of the museum was the incredible restaurant attached to it, Tao Shine Vegetarian Restaurant, which had a massive and absolutely delicious vegetarian buffet. The spread of desserts (including two types of cheesecakes) and fruit as well as the many kinds of hot, fresh dumplings were scrumptious. It was there that I tried stinky tofu, a Taiwanese delicacy, for the first time, and decided that I did not like it. It tastes less stinky than it smells, but it was still not an entirely pleasant experience.
After stuffing ourselves to the brim, Jennifer, Hindy, Daniela, and I head to the area around the subway stop Xinhai, because Daniela’s TA had told her that there was good shopping there. After scoping out the intersection where the subway was, we found no clear place to shop, so we asked a nice young guy where to go. He spoke limited English, but we followed a little map he drew on a napkin and found a network of narrow streets chock full of small stores selling shoes, clothes, and bags. I bought gold and silver flipflops, because how necessary are they? Back at the Fortune, Jennifer and I saw off Daniela and Hindy (who had worked the camp before Banciao). We set out with the noble goal of seeing Longshan Temple (one of the biggest temples in Taipei), but we were sidetracked by several un-noble activities. First, we saw this little table on the sidewalk that, for $4 or so, created 100 little stickers with people’s names on them, and you could pick the background theme of the stickers and the font and so forth, so of course we had stickers made, and then Jennifer wanted some for her boyfriend and her sister, and I got some for my mom that say “Dr. Alberts” and for Fran just because one of the sticker backgrounds had Little Twin Stars and I know she loves them. While our stickers were printing, we got bubble tea (as usual – hers cold and mine not), and these little fresh doughy cakes with warm chocolate inside that were being sold by a little store opposite the sticker table. Armed with our stickers, we continued toward Longshan, and then we passed a Carrefour. Remembering my love affair with the one in Phuket (as well as the Wu-Mart I patronized during the HCAP trip to Beijing during spring break 2006 and the E-Mart from Seoul), I dragged us in there. I mean, Target equivalents in other countries are just so cool! Jennifer and I emerged from the store about an hour and a half later, arms laden with bags. Among my purchases: a mahjong set for Grandma, Chinese New Year boxer shorts, a pig pillow-cum-speaker into which you can plug your iPod, a webcam, and various colorful pens and markers. Jennifer enjoyed the kitchenware and flatware departments and also bought a pig pillow/speaker!
We finally made it to Longshan Temple and decided to buy incense and make some offerings and be introspective for a little while (a stark contrast to our blatant consumerism, evidenced by the bags at our feet). The temple was bustling with people just doing their thing. We hung back to watch how it was done – light the incense from a central candle, hold it with both hands and wave it over your head as you mumble/think with your eyes closed and then jab it into a large urn with sand in it so it sticks up and the smoke can still be emitted. We tried to use the guidebook to figure out which gods to pray to. I think I picked the one for learning, the one for travel, and the one for general help or assistance. It was a nice moment to reflect.
We walked to nearby Snake Alley, which is a touristy but not to be missed place where there are stalls with gigantic snakes and their handlers feed them live rabbits and so forth in front of gaping tourists and kind of seedy locals. These stalls are in the midst of restaurants (some serving snake), erotica shops, souvenir stalls, and massage places. Jennifer and I decided to go into the clean, upscale-looking massage place and treat ourselves to a 40-minute foot massage for about $8. More expensive than Thailand, but so cheap compared to the US. We relaxed in big leather recliners that had little TVs attached, so I watched MTV Asia and CNN, and we played with adorable teeny-tiny dog owned by one of the proprietors. Fully relaxed, we headed back to the Fortune and prepared to depart the next morning for Huwei.
Saturday, February 10 – Thursday, February 15, 2007
ALV Camp #2 – Yang-Tze High School, Huwei, Taiwan
Location: Huwei is a smallish city in central Taiwan. The most noticeable difference between it and Taoyuan or Banciao was that the buildings were smaller and there was less traffic. Other than that, things seemed pretty similar – lots of stalls that popped up on the streets at night, too many McDonalds and KFCs and 7-11s, some internet cafes and bubble tea shops and small restaurants. From talking to my students, I learned that Huwei is definitely considered “the country,” and I think that would have been more apparent had I drove 10 minutes or so away from the town center.
Our hotel was located in what I gather is about the center of town. It was alongside a grassy traffic circle with a metallic fountain in the middle, surrounded by three fake-plasticky palm trees – one green, one yellow, and one red.
Yang-Tze High School was located about 10 minutes by bus from our hotel, and it actually was quite a large school. The main building seemed to be about four stories, but only the first two contained classrooms. The top two had dorm rooms, where the large majority of the female students stayed during camp. (The official name of this camp, as evidenced by a banner at the opening ceremony, was “Yang-tze Senior High School English Living Camp.”) Though I asked if the school was a boarding school during the year and was told that it wasn’t. So I’m not sure what how those dorms function during the school year. Then there were two basketball courts, and if you followed a concrete path there was a large concrete courtyard (where we played a crazy game of Capture the Flag) surrounded by a narrow three-story building around its perimeter. Classrooms were on the bottom level (mine was in this part of the school), with the boys’ dorms above. Walk down another path and there was the auditorium. In the back of the school there was a nice fountain with rocks around it, and there were palm trees scattered about. I love palm trees. We had a large room reserved for teachers at this camp, and there were computers with internet, which was totally clutch, even though the camp administrators restricted their use to dinner hour.
TAs: My TA this time around was Johnson. I really lucked out. Johnson was very easy-going and sweet and genuine, and the students loved him and cheered for him like crazy when he performed the dances with the other TFs. The only weird part was that he told the students he was Korean, which I didn’t exactly understand. I know he studies Korean in college, but he told me his family was from southern Taiwan! In Banciao, another TA had told his students he was Singaporean, and another one said she was Malaysian. But they are all Taiwanese university students! My best guess is that the camp asked them to do this so that the TAs seem as foreign (and maybe command/deserve as much respect) as the English-speaking teachers. Anyway, Johnson was a sweetheart and we had a blast.
As for the other teachers we had, in addition to Tyler and Masha and Jennifer and myself: Gerhard, who taught at the same school as Andre from the Banciao camp, Vincent, a teacher who had an established career in the US but decided use his skills to allow him to travel, Katie and Lynn, a really lovely niece-aunt team from Canada (the former is trained as a teacher and is traveling before getting a full-time job in the states, the latter, like Vincent, was an established teacher who is capitalizing on the desire for teachers in Asia in order to travel and live abroad), and then Rachel, from New York, Heather, from Canada, Scott, from Vermont, and Colm, from Ireland, who all taught in some combination of winter programs in Japan and Korea and were using the money earned to travel around Asia. It’s a good philosophy – work intensely for about two months and use the earnings to live frugally in Asia for at least six more.
Students: I had 30 students this time around – about two-thirds of C6 were boys. Unusual name time: I had girls named Ruby, Ivy, Verity, and Noodle (who was a real strong leader), and boys named Kleth (an attempt at Keith?), Kim, Gray, Felix, and Nesta (who is named after his favorite Italian soccer player – he wears his idol’s jersey, too). In C9, there were two girls named Agnes and Dorothy, and when I made small talk with them one day I mentioned that those were generally the names that of older American women – and they said, “We know, we know. Your grandma, right?” They had a sense of humor about it, and it was very funny. Apparently their middle school English teachers assign their names, but I feel like that can’t be the whole story.
The students in my class had this inside joke about this slightly plump boy named Steven. They basically just paid a lot of attention to him and glorified his name. Whenever I would ask for a volunteer, one or two people would cheer, “Steeeeven!” And he would just blush and adopted a look of pleased embarrassment.
Our class name was “Toxic.” A la Britney Spears? I didn’t ask -- it was their idea, but I found it hilarious, especially since the other classes came up with gems like “Rainbows” and “Dragons.”
Their sense of style was interesting. These kids were in central Taiwan, but the way they dressed you’d think they were fashion plates. Several of the boys had just regular jeans and t-shirts and sweaters (often Yankee-themed – Chien Ming-Wang, #40, strikes again!), but some had the dyed/sewn/patched/fabric-hanging-off jeans. What stands out is one of my boys, Ian, who one day wore a white button down shirt open at the neck with a shiny blank tie tied properly but loosely around his neck. With the intense shaggy, edgy haircuts that most Taiwanese high schoolers seem to sport (including the girls), he looked like he could have been in a magazine.
Kleth and Felix talked to me the most, and I felt like I really got to know them. Kleth would ask me about America and tell me about life in Huwei, and Felix and I would talk about pop culture, since he seemed to know everything about movies and music and fashion. (Example: an extended conversation about journalism as it relates to The Devil Wears Prada.) Felix often wrote on his assignments things like: “it is so hott” or “sexy.” Noodle was the most outspoken girl. She often cracked jokes in class but respected me and would listen when I said it was time to settle down (though I encouraged her leadership). I think she is a very atypical Taiwanese girl, and when we said goodbye I hugged her and told her that she was beautiful, and her eyes filled with tears and she said, “Nahhhhh.” My guess is that she tells herself that she doesn’t fit the Taiwanese standard for female beauty, and thus she behaves, quite brazenly, more like a boy. I hope that I helped her see that, worldwide, there is a much larger range of acceptable female behavior than in Taiwan.
One day, coming back from lunch break, I found a little green apple decorated with Sharpie on the podium in my classroom. It said “For You” and also had some Mandarin characters and a little cartoonish depiction of a girl. I was a little confused and wondered out loud if it was for me, and later that day I noticed the person had added a parentheses after the “For You” that now said “(Hana).” Johnson translated the text for me and it said something along the lines of “you are a very nice teacher.” If I had to guess, I’d say Felix gave it to me, but I’m not sure.
I had to give awards at the end of the week for most beads, most leadership, and most improved English. I decided instead to take matters into my own hands and give one male and one female best leadership (Nesta and Noodle), one most improved at English (Kleth), and one male and one female best class spirit (Ian and Ruby). The latter two individuals were less out-there in their class participation, and I know for a fact that it meant a lot to them to be recognized alongside the more outspoken members of the class. At the end of the week, the two of them kept hanging around, a crying Ruby hugging me repeatedly and sheepish Ian lingering to take “just one more picture” of the two of us (and his graduation certificate) with his cell phone. For all of Felix’s effort, I feel really bad that I didn’t give him anything… but I gave him a warm goodbye and we’re keeping in touch via e-mail, so I hope he doesn’t feel slighted.
English teaching: For situational teaching, I lucked out and got MiniOlympics (you teach the same one five times, and I was sick of Clothing Store from Banciao). So for 20 minutes, I taught about the Olympic rings, the different events, their history and timing and where they were/will be held in years past and future. Then we read the official Olympic oath and talked about what it means to take an oath and promise something, and we reviewed the meanings of the difficult vocabulary words in the oath. Then I had them stand and raise their right hands and repeat a short oath after me, which made them giggle, and then we headed outside to play this hilarious relay race where they had to pass a basketball from one person to another using only their legs and no hands. This led to a lot of awkward guy-girl knees-splayed passing interactions.
I would say the low point of the teaching was when we had to teach the more serious topics, like punctuation and conjunctions. For the latter, there were a few pages in the student reference book outlining six rules and about 12 exceptions that seemed inordinately complicated for the level of the students and the purpose of the camp. For both of these, I tried to plan my own lessons, but there just wasn’t enough time to make it interactive and I feel that I was just boring them and/or they were incredibly confused by what I was saying…. The camp really has to improve the materials they give teachers for these subjects.
The high point, for me, was jigsaw teaching. There was a story in a dozen out-of-order sentences about a couple and a snake under their mattress. The teachers were only provided with the story – no tips at all for what to do with it. So I had them read the story silently, and then out loud, and then we talked about what the hard vocab words meant, and we reviewed some of the key words in terms of chronology, like “again” and “went back to sleep.” Then I split them into groups, and they cut out the sentences and worked on gluing them back in the right order. I promised the team that got it correct first 10 beads per person, so they were into it. When they showed me a completed story and there were parts that were incorrect, I showed them why one part of it was wrong and asked them to try again. I really think they grasped the story and the chronology behind it at the end, so I was thrilled.
There was one class unit called “step to writing,” and, since the material provided proved absolutely useless, as usual, I attempted to use that time to teach about stories, using transition phrases like “one day,” “next,” “then,” “finally,” etc. I then had them do an exercise where they wrote a sentence and folded it over and passed it on to the next person. It didn’t work out so well, as evidenced by the following examples:
“One day, Hana’s walk in school. And then everybody would like meet her…First, she go the the Taipei 101…They are studying in the library…Steven kill the Jonson, We are very angry…Wendy: Dancing cha ha…very tired. I want to sleep…Its dangerous…I have good idea!…It’s so nice…I very want to go shopping”
“Steven! Your ass is sooo big”
“Thanks for everyone…I like everybody. Because everybody is so nice…She like watching TV and shopping…Jonson is beautiful…Stevent! Dancing the cha cha”
“How are you…What are you going?…The winter vacation ALV camp is so crazy…pig! pig! pig! pig! pig!!!! All pig!! I don’t what I write!…Hana’s so beautiful…She is go to park and dancing…I want to kill everybody in ALV…I am god…Henry! Dancing cha cha”
“I very very very like Hana and Johnson…So I’m so happy and sad these day!!!…It’s so cool. Everybody so busy…She is very like that boy. But he has a girlfriend. So she is sad…I liked to play basketball…I am a pig…Nesta: dancing cha cha ~…Nice to meet you…Are you fat?…I want to take a bath…Gray is good”
“I’m very very very love Nicky and Daniel…It’s so pig am I…Everybody is so smart…e don’t like drink coffee and don’t like sports…They liked to eat steak…All the C6 people sleep in the class…Noodle! Dancing cha cha ~…Oh, tired…Noodle is delicious…Noodles is one pig…Oh! I want you.”
Other activities:
We had an auction on one of the days, and the students were given a few extra ALV dollars with which to bid on assorted items, the most disgusting of which was a grody jar of dried and salted meat of some kind that all the students seemed to love. In my class, Nesta took the lead and realized that the trick to beat the other classes in bidding wars was to get all of C6 to pool their money. Everyone was sitting crosslegged on the ground in front of the school’s main steps, but Nesta kept leaping up in excitement whenever he had gathered together enough money to outbid another class. C6 collectively (through Nesta) bid on a stuffed animal keychain for me and a little figurine for Johnson. We felt the love, and it was so funny to see the kids so into it and bidding like 40 ALV dollars for a little thing of Mentos. I served as auctioneer for a few items, and it was a blast.
Another one of the activities was a treasure hunt, and Johnson and I were manning a station beside the fountain that was essentially a version of charades. We would show an English word (violin, Michael Jackson, or turtle, for example) to one person from each of the two teams that showed up at our station at a time, and they would have to act it out or use other English words to get their team to say the word on the card. It was hilarious and frenzied and everyone had a lot of fun.
On the second to last day, the students cooked dinner for everyone instead of us getting food from the kitchen in the little Styrofoam containers as usual. This slightly-dangerous adventure was preceded by a brief lesson in the classroom about the different kinds of ingredients we were going to use. Naturally, the information in the Student Reference book about “Field Cooking” was absolutely useless, and I didn’t even know the English names for some of the vegetables! I could say, well, this is LIKE bok choy or LIKE spinach, but there wasn’t really a direct translation. Again, like many things with ALV, I thought the concept was fantastic – a hands-on activity where we could go over related vocabulary and have fun and all that – but the materials provided for both the students and the teachers (which was the SAME text) was grossly inadequate. In any case, Ivy, Ruby, and Ian stepped up and took charge – and I was so happy that they students who were not the most vocal in the classroom – and manned our three tabletop burners and woks. I was especially impressed with Ian, who cracked an egg into our wok and, after adding the rice and vegetables and chicken, expertly flipped it all around using the pot handle. A savvy move for a teenage boy. The only downside to the cooking extravaganza was that it was rather windy and napkins and plates and pans various other objects kept blowing off our table and getting dangerously close to the fire. In addition, this was the time during which some of my students’ relatives were permitted to visit, so I was trying to communicate with them and keep them all happy as my students were being a bit careless with the burners.
During the Huwei camp, ALV had decided that they were going to make an informational DVD about daily life at camp that would also serve as a set of instructions for new teachers on how to teach the various subjects and activities. Hence, all the foreign teachers were videotaped several times. The difficult part of this was that, in many cases, we had no instruction or advice or tips or materials on the thing that we were teaching except from our TAs (who were fantastic, but still, that’s a lot of pressure on them and they are not getting any of the glory). I was videotaped teaching the song “Happy All The Time” (thank god we got the chance to practice that beforehand), and teaching about cleaning supplies during a supermarket situational activity. The only materials I was given for the latter was a bunch of actual cleaning supplies, like a mop and a sponge and a bucket and a toilet plunger, right before I had to teach. So I thought fast and basically went down the row of items at my station and asked if people could name them and what they were used for. If a student got something right, I taught the group to do a brief Fonz-like “Heyyyyy” cheer for that student while lifting their arms in the air. If no one could name the object or its use, then I told them, trying to make things inventive, like pretending to ride the broom as if I were Harry Potter. Then, at the end, I split the group into two lines and said the name of one of the objects, and then the two people at the front of the lines had to run up and touch the object, and the team whose player got to the object first got a point. Like I said before, this game is very useful in many situations and I worry that the teachers over-utilized it because we all learned tips from each other informally and had to plan lessons very quickly and wing it a lot of the time. I worry this made it rather monotonous for the students.
Since this camp ran from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., we had evening activities. One of the most hilarious ones was blind date, which the kids absolutely adored and all of the teachers and TAs found hysterical. I don’t think I had laughed that hard in a very, very long time. One of the highlights for me was when Jennifer was picked to be one of the guessers, and when one of my students, Nesta, was picked to be one of the bachelors. He answered the questions very sweetly in the face of a lot of hooting from the audience, and when Jennifer had to pick a guy she looked at me and I flashed her Nesta’s number, and she picked him and then they had to go back to back and both turn around at the same time. It was hilarious. He nearly died of happiness and beamed for the rest of the night. For the rest of the week, he hung around her classroom during breaks and he wrote her a sweet note on the last day. It was adorable.
Just like the last camp, the closing ceremony on the last day contained a fashion show. C6 made me skirt made out of ALV dollars, a strapless pink top with a bow in front (which was Felix’s design), and an intricate hat made out of several boxes with beads and stars taped all over it and ribbon sprouting out the top. They made Johnson a similar skirt and a bikini-style top as well as a pointed hat and beard that was supposed to make him resemble some Taiwanese icon on TV. We danced down the aisles to wild applause. For our class performance, C6 was assigned to create and act out a commercial about anything. Since “Steven!” was our class inside joke, we decided to sell him, and we had various vignettes about the different things you can do with him – he can teach you how to do the Cha-Cha Slide, he can help you with your homework, he can do housework, you can eat him if you are hungry and desperate, and he brings good luck for Chinese New Year. I don’t think anyone else really got the jokes, and it was hard to hear because they were all afraid of the microphone, but C6 had good laughs, so that’s all that matters.
The most salient memory from Huwei camp is the campfire on the final evening. I have never experienced anything like it. We started off by lining up in the basketball court by class, and then we slowly walked into the cement courtyard through an aisle lined with of tiki torches. It was mostly dark by this point. When we passed between the last set, really high flames flared up and everyone ooohed. We arranged ourselves by class in clumps that formed a circle around the campfire. Then Lion-King-Circle-of-Life-esque music blasted while some TAs with torches lit up the central pile of wood and it flared up high into the sky before settling down into a normal-sized fire. (It was not an LNT fire – in case any FOP leaders out there were worried – but because we were on cement it was very well contained.) Then we proceeded through a loooong list of activities and songs and dances that were all done, for the most part, in this massive clumpy circle. Much time was spent chanting our class name (“Seeee-six, seeeee-six, seeee-six!”) answering Daniel who only had to say “Seeeeeeeeee….” and in response a few hundred voices would scream their class number and hold it up with their fingers. We danced to all the songs whose routines we had learned in the auditorium and in the classroom earlier that week. We watched as the female TAs did a dance to a slow Chinese song wielding a small lit torch in each hand (C6 chanted, “Johnson, Johnson, Johnson!” out of loyalty.) We played a game where each class stood in three lines with their hands on each others’ shoulders, had to hop a certain number of steps forward and back as a unit, and the first team to slap the hand of their TA in the center of the circle won. My class took giant leaps and we won to the first round. My students were very proud. At the end, fireworks went off and the campfire flared and everyone just started running around the campfire and it was just crazy. You could feel the love and warmth and team spirit and solidarity in the air – it was very intense and the kids just had so much fun. You could tell they felt really happy and fulfilled, and it really bonded them.
Excerpts and Quotable Quotes:
Nina in postcard: I love you so much! I think that you are my model whom I can learn. Where you go, I wish we can keep in touch! Forever!!
Ricky in Lai-See envelope: Good luck. All one’s dreams come true. Congratulations on getting rich. On dollar,
Adorable yellow card with “give hana’s gift!!” on the front that they gave me on the last day:
Wendy: Thank you take care of us. Nice to meet you. I will remember you forever.
Freya: U give me any beautiful memory and funny time.
Hana ~~ I love you. You are my sister!
Hi~~~Hana!!! Thank’s for your teaching. I first see you, I think “Wow ~~ How cute the teacher is!! I’m very happy in this vacation. Thank you.
I miss you forever – Shaun
Whis you can find the job you love by Felix
Cool! Hana. I’m noodle. Thank you to take care me: Yo. Man! I’m strong. Noodle
Food: The first night in Huwei, the whole staff went out for a hotpot dinner, where food is cooked over individual little stoves on your table. I believe I got a beef one (out of fear instilled in me from Guilin where we ordered something similar for chicken and got the head and feet and so forth). In my little pot was a dense rectangle of something dark-reddish that looked like it was made up of little circles all squished together. I was informed by the more knowledgeable at my table that it was pig’s blood, and I decided to eat it and discovered that it was quite yummy. There was also a piece of tofu-that-looked-like-meat (like I said, common in Taiwan) that had a purple cartoon character printed on it. They do really weird things with food here. Definitely more outlandish than in Southeast Asia.
At camp, the food was pretty much the same – for lunch and dinner we got Styrofoam containers with rice and a few hunks of various other dishes. I stuck with the vegetarian option, since it was safest, and my other dishes were usually mushrooms or some green vegetables or tofu. There was often a large vat of soup or a drink accompanying that we ladled out, family-style, and the best part was when there was a whole big metal jug of BUBBLE TEA (Jennifer and I were thrilled). This camp’s food beat out Banciao simply because of little food table in the teacher’s room that contained bread and a toaster and nutella and peanut butter and spreadable sweet condensed milk. A bunch of us supplemented every meal with those goodies. (Oh, how I had missed peanut butter!)
After-hours: Although we were usually totally exhausted after 12-plus hours of camp, we made an effort to get out at night and see the town. Jennifer and I managed to shop at two surprisingly chic clothing stores for a small town in Central Taiwan – one called Bait and the other called Jungle. After patronizing Jungle, we passed by the equivalent of a 99-cent store and I kind of went wild over the little kitchen items and travel-sized containers and hair accessories and stationery supplies. I mean, I found a pair of barrettes with the pattern of the American flag but in the shape of strawberries. You can’t make this stuff up.
Jennifer had heard that it was common for Taiwanese women to get their hair washed and blown-dry on a regular basis, similar to the way that American women get manicures to pamper themselves. We had also observed a higher-than-average rate of hair salons in Taoyuan, Banciao, and Huwei – though many definitely looked like the front room of somebody’s house with a few chairs in it and hair on the floor. So we decided to try it out and went to a salon (that actually LOOKED like a salon, so we felt safer) a block from our hotel. It was an experience and a half. First they sat us in these barbershop-type chairs and shampooed our hair with us sitting straight up. Then they gave us a fabulous head and shoulder and hand massage. Then when we went to rinse off by leaning backwards into a sink, the normal way, we got another head massage and also a face massage, which was complemented by running streams of water over our faces. Then they blow-dried it stick-straight and super-flat. All for 120 NT, which is about $4. It was awesome and very relaxing and extremely fun. We had a sneaking suspicion that everyone in the salon was talking about us, and an adorable little girl kept dashing up to us and saying things she had learned at school in English (like, where are you from, and how old are you, etc.)
On the last day of camp, before taking the bus back to Taipei, we ate in a steakhouse. This one was much nicer than the one we’d eaten in in Banciao – the meat was about the same, but the accompanying buffet was much better. Afterwards, we took a cab to the bus station, during which we had a friendly driver who had lived in Los Angeles and talked to us about why he had returned to this small town in Central Taiwan. He said that life in Huwei was easy and relaxed. He could drive his taxi, not work too hard, and make a fine living, whereas in America you had to work ten times at hard and to live a lifestyle without nearly as much leisure or privilege. It was an interesting perspective to hear.
As part of a brainstorming exercise – because they are so used to being held back since they fear mistakes – for ten minutes I had them write as many answers as they could to this question: If I were president of Taiwan, what would I do?
The answers proved to be hilarious and very insightful:
Wendy: First, I want to everyone can eat their meals and don’t hungry. Next, I want to buy my favorite things. Then, I build school that children can go there.
Ping Chang: 1) I will spend a lot of money to build a beautiful house. 2) I want a pretty woman. 3) I want many delicious food.
Noodle: 1) I would need to do thank you my mom and Dad. 2) I need enjoy my life. 3) need do many things, ex: make public things. 4) I need to eat all Taiwan’s noodle.
Kim: I will kill bad person. I will have a long long long holiday.
Ted: If I were president, I must take care of people in Taiwan. Besides help all the people of Taiwan, I will take the high economies. Besides that things, I want to enter the United Nations.
Shaun: change the money color…give everybody for well-being…to repair the road better…do myself better
Felix: 1) I want enjoy my life and help poor people. 2) Most important I want every people can hear pop music in Taiwan everywhere and every top singer will come to Taiwan. It is very Hot!
Ruby: 1) I want to take care of centry people. 2) Make a living for people. 3) I want to take care of Taiwanese students for edu. 4) Make a beautiful city for all people
Verity: 1) I want to make all of centry people everyday happiness. 2) I want to public more and more well. 3) I want to anything is nice (no robber, no stolener) 4) I want all of the world full of peace. * I want to join (UN). We need many centry support to Taiwan.
Anon: Protect animal…help poor people
Tina: 1) Make a beauty nature 2)Don’t be polution 3) Intrude 101 in treament 4) Propert animals 5) Ask students to go exercise every day.
Freya: If I were president of Taiwan, I want to do something for my people. It’s good things. Most people is tired of their life, so I want to do something for them. One thing is let poor countries be have beautiful. Popular, rich and power!! Second, I want to make a law for old man and child and mother. The law is good for their life.
Nancy: I want to take care of some poor people.
Anon: I would be play for take some picture to Kenting, Moon Sun lake, Taipei 202…If I had rich, I were to play all the Taiwan. If I had rich I were to eat all Taiwan local food.
Isabel: If I were president of Taiwan, I would do best welfare. And I would write new promise. I can listin more people what are they talk something. Help the poor people. Build more place. Become best beautiful.
Nick: If I were leader of country, I should help the people in Taiwan, and take of people. For example, “Promote the social welfare.”
Gray: 1) I will fight the china. 2) I will buy more Japan candy for Taiwan people. 3) I will help more poor students.
Ian: 1) I want to people play baseball every day. 2) I want everybody have a lot of money. 3) I will student have a lot of vacation time
Anon.: 1) I want to school have more vacation. 2) Help poor people
Daniel: 1) Now I live in the country. It’s not convenient to go to department store buy something. If I want to go to department store, it was so far. So I think difference between town and country too much. 2) I want to help that they don’t have the job people.
Steven: 1) I want to built a 102 structure. 2) I want to build convenient traffic. 3) I want to help people. 4) I want to increase many job for person.
Joe: I will be considerate to people in Taiwan. I will construct many things in Taiwan. I will help poor people. I will surrender America.
Nesta: If I were president of Taiwan, I want to make everybody feel happ. How to make everybody happy? First: to make new laws. Taiwan’s laws is very bad! That is helps bad people and hits good people. So, I want to make new laws. Second: To make friends with every countries. I think Taiwan can’t use money to make friend with other country. We need to
Ricky: First, I will make Taiwan’s education as well. Why? I think Japan, US, and Europe’s contury very nice. We should learn how to do it. Second, improve Taiwan’s education.
Alex: I am going to buy a big house. I am going to help the poor people. I will be compile the new law.
Kleth: I think that I will improve our time when you attend to school. I hope it be like to the west country. Just be relax. No pressure. No complication.
Taiwanese observations overall: There are framed pictures of Chiang Kai Shek in pretty much every classroom. When I was teaching C1 one day in Banciao, I asked them who it was, and they sort of whispered amongst themselves before DoReMi answered, “The father of our country.” Very telling.
Taiwan is very big on recycling, In the classroom, we had this row of pink plastic bags for food waste, white paper, colored paper, plastic, glass, and some others that were categories I didn’t know. Apparently you get fined bigtime if you don’t recycle properly.
In our meeting the night before Huwei camp started, Daniel casually mentioned that the women should wear makeup because ALV wants everyone to look good in the DVD. I exchanged glances with some of the other female teachers – just because – well, no one in America would instruct women outright to wear makeup to look prettier. It’s just one of those forbidden areas, I guess, or at least, there’s a tacit understanding that it’s a women’s choice whether she wants to wear makeup or not. Cultural differences.
At one point during Banciao camp, one of the girls from another class comes up to me and asked for my signature (this happened a lot). She looked at me while I was scribbling (I changed my signature for camp, by the way, because I was embarrassed by my normal one) and she said, “Your eyes are so big.” It made me sad because it reminded me of the 7-11s all over East Asia, where they sell these little plastic sticker things that you can stick on your eyelid to make your eyes open wider. I told her cheerfully that her eyes were beautiful, too, and I hope that made an impression.
Jennifer and I would generally share our cultural observations and one of the most salient ones we picked up on was that, for a Taiwanese female, it is more desirable to be cute than sexy. It fits in with the ruffle-y clothing, the girlish barrettes, the desire to have big eyes, and the more middle-school behavior that we saw from high school students. It was just such a far cry from behavior at an American high school, where you can get the stereotypical James Dean rebellious thing going on, or see girls trying to look and act older than their age. But in Taiwan, women kind of revel in girlhood for quite a while – even 30-something women dress like they are 13.
At the Huwei camp, Zeke (who had been a TA at his previous camp) was in charge of the DVD project. They had taken hours of footage every day. On the last day of camp, during the lunchtime meeting, Daniel talked to him quietly in a corner and all the TAs looked very sad. We asked what was the matter, and Daniel was apparently relaying a message from Leo (the camp director) that all the footage had come out wrong and that all Zeke’s work was a total waste. Zeke was wiping little tears from the corner of his eyes, and I felt so bad for him. I gave him a big hug and reassured him it was all going to be all right. Then at the end of our meeting, Natalie (team leader) brought out a cake and everyone sang happy birthday to Zeke and told him the whole DVD screw-up was a joke and that the DVD was fine! I asked Johnson and he said it’s a pretty typical Taiwanese thing to do to play mean tricks on people when its their birthday! Very odd.
Friday, February 16, 2007
After the breakfast special at Dante Coffee, Jennifer and I made it to the National Palace Museum just in time for a 10 a.m. tour (okay, we were a little late and I talked our way onto the tour) with Lydia, who was only the best tour guide ever. The museum is massive and takes up about eight buildings, and in the 2.5-hour tour (it wasn’t supposed to take that long, we just kept asking questions and so Lydia just kept going) we barely covered two floors of one building. The museum is really special and has one of the best collections in the world because when Chiang Kai-Shek and the rest of the KMT party retreated to Taiwan after being defeated by Mao’s Communist party, they took with them thousands and thousands of works of ancient Chinese art. Their argument was that if they left them in China, they would be destroyed (which turned out to be true… Cultural Revolution, anyone?). Anyway, now China wants back a lot of the collection and Taiwan says no. The collection spans thousands of years and there are works from all over China and Taiwan and Tibet and other places, too. It’s all very well laid out, too, and the only problem is that there’s too much to see in one visit. But it’s a must-see in Taiwan, for sure. Highlights included: learning about the different types of jade and how its use was changed and modified over the years and across the regions, the jade cabbage with two little jade bugs given by a king to his one of his wives because both cabbages and bugs reproduce quickly and plentifully, the evolution of different kinds of porcelain and ceramics through the ages (depending on which dynasty!), the various Buddha statues, and this cool piece carved out a single piece of ivory that somehow contains 20 concentric spherical shells that aren’t connected at all. Lydia and I both have no idea how the artist managed to carve those innermost shells. Jennifer ran off for her afternoon daytrip to Yingko while we saw the special celadon ceramic exhibit and looked at some landscapes and portraits.
After hitting up the gorgeous gift shop, I ate lunch at the wonderful tea house called
I hopped a cab to Dinhua Market and tiny yet colorful City God Temple (the Palace Museum is a ways out of the city and a little tricky by public transport). The market was mobbed with people picking up supplies for Chinese New Year, everything from fried fish to candy for the kids to the traditional red signs for good fortune to pounds of mushrooms to tea to meat… it was sight, that’s for sure. Many vendors wore headsets with microphones attached, and their sales pitches blared and blended together in the bustle of the street. I bought a little handpainted red sign for good fortune that I plan to frame.
I walked by the Taipei Eye to see if Jennifer and I could get tickets to the Chinese opera, but it was on hiatus for, guess again, Chinese New Year. I passed by Cave’s Books, a recommended English-language bookstore and picked up Barack Obama’s memoirs and a deliciously trashy work by the author of the book Sex and the City was based on. After stopping to burn DVD with photos to free up space on my memory card, I met Jennifer back at the hotel and we went for dim sum at GaoJi (in the Xinyi neighborhood). We devoured pork buns with sesame seeds, vegetable dumplings, shrimp dumplings, custard steamed buns, and spring rolls before walking around for a bit and heading back to the (Un)Fortune(ate) Hotel to sleep.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
After our usual breakfast special at Dante Coffee, Jennifer and I headed out to find the California Fitness gym near Taipei Main Station. Her boyfriend manages one of the branches in California, so we figured we’d pop in, take some photos, and inquire if transfers to branches abroad were possible. After tracking down the health club (which was practically deserted because Chinese New Year means the whole city retreats to the country where their families are from), we went to a three-story shop that sold Chinese handicrafts called, creatively, the Chinese Handicrafts Mart, on
We donned big sunglasses and sauntered through the heat down to the imposing Chaing Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, which is absolutely massive. Three HUGE white archways comprise the front entrance to a giant plaza, which is then flanked by two HUGE buildings in traditional Chinese style (one is the National Theater, and one it the national Library), and then at the other end of this football-field-sized plaza is the memorial itself which is in the shape of a big pyramidal type stupa. Unfortuately, we couldn’t go in to see the statue or CKS’s two Cadillacs or his used clothing because the inside was closed for Chinese New Year, but we wandered around the park, watched people do tai chi and practice martial arts and breakdance, and sat on the steps of the theater contemplating which the Taiwanese worship CKS so much. In short, his KMT party tried to fight Mao’s communists in China, it didn’t work, and he got kicked out to Taiwan where he tried to plan a takeover of China, which never materialized. Instead, he turned into a dictator and under his regime a lot of liberties were denied to the Taiwanese and many people died if they disagreed with the government. So why the hero worship? Our theory was that although as a ruler he did very bad things, he did keep the communists away from Taiwan, and the Taiwanese are fiercely proud of that and their sometimes-contested independence. That must be why his visage is in the classrooms and auditoriums of both schools at which I taught in Taiwan – the overall significance of his rule perhaps negated how cruel he was.
After a pleasant walk down the street at the southern edge of the park called
We took a cab to Green Leaf restaurant and arrived just as it was, naturally, closing for Chinese New Year. I remembered that the food courts that are typically in the basements of large department stores are supposed to be excellent, and thus we walked a few blocks to the food court in Mitsukoshi on Nanjing Road. On our way back to the Fortune Hotel, we passed a store selling makeup and kitchenware and various sundries, so of course we went in. Emerging with large bags (this store sold a whole line of Sanrio products with the label USAüHANA, so I mean, what else was I supposed to do but buy the aptly-labeled toothbrush and washcloth and chopsticks…). We stopped in a store called WorkingHouse that seems to be the Taiwanese version of Ikea married to Bed Bath and Beyond, and it proved to be a great store. Naturally, we stopped for bubble tea at the ubiquitious if a little pricey Ten Ren chain.
I ran back to Dinhua briefly to get some traditional Chinese New Year snacks for Grandma, but it was clear that in the one day since I had been to the market last, many shop- and stall-owners had closed up for their own vacations. The street was still bustling with folks doing last-minute holiday shopping, though. Near the Fortune Hotel, I discovered a shop where I indulged my craving for tea supplies. For about one dollar per item, I bought matching little cups and a little teapot and a little sugar and milk container (even though I know the Taiwanese mostly take their tea plain) with a white and blue bamboo design. I couldn’t resist and bought a cup with a built-in tea leaf strainer with a white and green bamboo pattern for another dollar. (When Mom saw me unload all these goods on the kitchen table, she shrieked in delight. She loooooves kitchenware.) I then saw Jennifer off from the ever-so-lovely Fortune Hotel, and then switched hostels myself via cab. Meeting up with some other ALV teachers at the World Scholar House, we went for a night out at a popular expat bar called The Brass Monkey (which was absolutely empty) and played a little bit of pool. When Marcus (a fellow hosteller from Hawaii who works at an English-language newspaper n Taiwan and befriended our crew) and I returned to the alley (it refers to a smaller street perpendicular to a bigger, wider street) where the WSH is located, we found a mom and dad and their kids lighting sparklers, cracking sticks that they hold in their hands and wave around until they burn out. They offered us some, and we gladly partook in the celebration of Chinese New Year for a few moments before retreating inside.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
I spent the day with Ryan, a lovely guy currently living in Japan with his wife who was in Taipei briefly (and staying in WSH) before heading on to do some trekking in the middle of the country. We headed south (noting that the place was practically a ghost town – we couldn’t even find a bubble tea place open!) to Da’an Park, where we saw older people doing funny exercises and a church choir holding what seemed like an impromptu practice in the stands of a small amphitheatre; I walked barefoot along a self-foot-massage walkway that was basically peppered with rocks and it was….interesting. We walked east, chatting amiably and stopping to pick up some bananas at a fruit stand. We turned to walk north in the direction of the SOGO department store (which we figured would be open because it’s the biggest in Taipei) when we passed a stationery store. I picked up some stickers for Mom and then Ryan pointed out an electric fly-swatter, which he said that pretty much everyone in Asia has. That sealed the deal, and I bought one for the apartment. (N.B. When I unpacked that and showed it to Mom, she stared at me in disbelief. Three months in Asia and you brought me THIS, she was thinking.)
After a lovely lunch at the SOGO food court (which has more Korean and Japanese food than Taiwanese!), we hopped on the subway (where I noticed a spot on the platform labeled “waiting zone for female passengers at night”) and emerged at Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. Nowhere near as grand as CKS’s memorial, but the park and the building dedicated to him were nice nonetheless. It was closed, naturally, so I peered through the glass doors at the mammoth statue of the father of modern China.
We walked over to Taipei 101, planning to go up to the observation deck on the 89th floor at dusk so that we could see the view both in some daylight and all lit up. This meant we had time to kill, so we walked around the area, which has been developed relatively recently. I wanted to go to the Taipei Discovery Center, which has an urban planning museum, but it was closed. I insisted that we patronize a department store called “New York, New York,” where I found another branch of WorkingHouse and bought a glass mini-teapot that I’d had my eye on since I saw it at the WorkingHouse store in Taoyuan. We next headed to the great English-language bookstore in the shopping mall at the base of 101, called Page One, where we bought too many books but loved every second. I bought a little notebook with blank pages inside that said I Heart Wang on the front, except the heart was in the shape of a baseball diamond. More evidence of the obsession with Chien-Ming Wang… but he’s a Yankee, so I’ll take it.
After getting our tickets for the observation deck, we then waited on a rather long line to get into the elevators to take us to the top (89th floor) of 101. (Okay, so on Chinese New Year everyone in Taipei seemed to be ether shopping or going to the top of 101 instead of running their businesses as usual.) When we got up to the top, we saw that we had made a poor choice. Instead of seizing the merely cloudy weather earlier in the afternoon, we had decided to wait so that it was now raining, and hence nearly impossible to detect anything through the windows of the observation deck. We did try to find sites corresponding to the little schematic diagram labeling which buildings were which. While we were at the top, though, we realized that much of Taipei is nondescript from that high up, because the only really noticeable landmark is Taipei 101, and since we were in that, there wasn’t that much exciting to see, except that Taipei is surrounded by hills. And on clear days, you can see a river. It was still cool to be at the top of the tallest building in the world (at least until that one in Dubai opens). There was also a cool exhibit about Chinese lanterns. We walked up a few flights of stairs to the 91st floor and saw a brief movie about the buildings construction and stood outside in the cold and the rain for a few minutes before we decided we were done. We also saw the building’s damper, which is this giant steel ball that hangs down part of the middle of the building and apparently keeps it balanced and prevents it from swaying in the wind. The weird part, though, was they called this marvel of engineering “Damper Baby” and made it all gimmicky and child-like and WEIRD. There was this poster with a fake ID card representation of the Damper Baby that said had year of birth (2003 when the building opened) and weight (660 tons). It was strange. But cool to be able to see this object that allows the tallest building in the world to stand upright. Apparently in other skyscrapers you can’t view the dampers, but 101 has a special viewing circle for theirs.
We headed down to the YUMMY food court for dinner, and then picked up some treats at the same fantastic bakery I had gone to the last time I was here (Shun Chen bakery, www.bestbakery.com.tw). There’s also a Wholefoods-like supermarket there that we wandered through, and I noted that soy sauce aisle contained about a hundred different varieties. I kid you not. We cabbed it back to WSH and spent some quality time watching The Soundtrack Channel, which plays music videos for songs that have appeared on movie soundtracks. It’s a really clever idea! Do we have this channel in the States?
Monday, February 19. 2007
My last day in Asia! I wanted to live this one to the fullest. I set off early for Danshui, a town at the northeast edge of the city named for the river it sits beside (which opens up into the nearby sea, I believe). It’s the last stop on the green train line, and many people live in Danshui and commute into central Taipei to work or attend school. The place was quiet and quaint in the morning (the Taiwanese are notorious for staying up late and sleeping in), and I wandered through the calm streets, found a dark and winding alleyway containing a market, bought a bubble tea, and ducked into a CD store when it started to drizzle. I had heard a song on the radio while in Taiwan and I wanted to buy it in order to put it on my computer. However, I only knew one line of the song, so I sang it for the amused store clerks who spoke almost no English, and just keep singing/humming that one line. Finally, one of the clerk’s faces lit up in recognition, and she pulled a CD off a shelf and popped it into the CD player. And sure enough, there was the song! That reminded me that I had heard a song when I was in Beijing the previous March that I hadn’t been able to find in the US. When I sang parts of that song for them a few times, they managed to find that CD as well. Armed with more than my fair share of Chinese pop, I headed off to find lunch.
I noticed a place with large pictures of dumplings on the front, and I had a wonderful dim sum meal there, accompanied by very genial waiters. Then I shopped for a bit, picking up some earrings for $1 each to put in my cartilage piercing and some garish metallic belts for $3. By this time the streets had filled with day-trippers, and I walked west, passing some bustling temples. Having reached what I gathered to be the end of town, I headed south and walked back to the train station along the riverside promenade. I passed lots of arcade games and ice-cream vendors and shops. I wandered into Lonely Planet-recommended Mosquetard (spelling is incorrect...I know) a mooncake shop that is always mobbed because it offers free samples of cake and tea. I contemplated taking a boat to the not-so-aptly named Bali, where all of the Taiwanese visitors seemed to be going (later I learned that there are good seafood restaurants and a kind of promenade over there), but I opted instead to head on to Beitou, the hot springs haven of Taipei.
I took the MRT to Beitou, where I had to switch for a little train shuttle to the Xinbeitou stop. Once there, I attempted to use my map to find the free outdoor public baths, but to no avail. Instead, I wandered around the oval park in the center of town, noticing that several hot springs trickled alongside the roads, and looked for an indoor bathhouse. There were many hotels/resorts that allowed use of their baths for one afternoon lining the roads, but if I was going to pay, I wanted it to be nice. I inquired in one hotel that was going to charge me about $20 to use one hot bath and one cold bath for a few hours. No way, I told the guy behind the counter. However, a Taiwanese family of four in front of me did shell out to use a private suite with their own attached baths for the afternoon. Apparently, as in Korea, going to the baths is a family affair! After checking out a few more places, I found a place across the street from the eastern tip of the park called Spa Spring (www.spaspringresort.com.tw). For about $20, I had access to a bunch of different indoor baths and outdoor baths (a bathing suit required) and a few indoor baths attached to the women’s locker room (bathing suits not permitted).
So I eagerly changed into my suit and tested out each of the nine or so different options in the indoor section, which ranged from a hot jacuzzi with powerful jets on your back and feet to a tub where you sat on a circular bench and allowed water to rain down over your head and shoulders to another tub where you propped your arms up on little armrests on either side of you and allowed your butt and legs to float up so that you were in a sitting position but partially underwater and let the jets massage your bottom half. It was stellar. And it was as much fun to observe the various Taiwanese customers (mostly families or large groups of young people) and how they experienced the baths. The kids sort of ran around and, ADD-style, dipped themselves into each one for a few seconds before running on to try the next one. The adults, on the other hand, seemed to relish sitting in one spot with their eyes closed, and their minds, I imagine, far away from their children. Meanwhile the teenagers, from what I could tell, were engaging in some tame flirtation. (At least, that’s what I gathered without being able to understand a thing anybody was saying.) I headed upstairs and tried out some of the outdoor hot baths, which were on the roof, and it was very cool to relax in the steaming water as I watched fog pass over the lush green hills. Taiwan is very mountainous and at least, while I was there, seemed to often have misty weather. No one was in the naked baths, and in any case, I wanted to go back to the massaging ones, so I chose to forego that aspect of my package.
Feeling cleansed and refreshed, I next headed to the Shilin Night Market, the mother of all markets in Taipei. Though I do agree with the sentiment that once you’ve seen one, you’ve basically seen them all, Shilin was a sight mostly because it was so packed that you could barely move of your own volition. You had to let the crowd carry you along at its turtle-like pace. I bought a bubble tea and one of the pancakes with onion and scallion and shopped for the few things I still wanted – namely, garish metallic purses. Using up the rest of the money I had allotted myself for souvenirs, I bought a brown purse, a silver purse, and a gold purse. (No, Mom, this was not buying in excess. This was seizing the day so that I could leave Asia with no regrets. Really.) Satisfied, I pushed through the throng and caught the MRT back to the center of Taipei, where I got off the subway at the closest stop to World Scholar House (which was still a little far away), and then decided to chance the bus system.
After some advice from a nice Taiwanese young man who spoke some English, I got on the right bus, and attempted to follow our path on my map so I would know when to get off. However, there on the bus was Marcus, from the hostel! Even across the world, in strange cities, there is familiarity, and warmth, and community, and it does feel like it’s a small world. So he told me where to get off the bus, I went back to the hostel, and I packed up the tons of stuff I had acquired and bid farewell to my hostel family.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
With much difficulty I dragged myself and my four large bags out of the hostel at 4:30 a.m. I hailed a cab on the dark and deserted street, but only after carrying my stuff to the corner, in the process of which my big giant cheap plastic plaid bag broke. The cab driver spoke absolutely no English, and my repeating airport, drawing a picture of an airplane, saying Taoyuan loudly, and pointing at my watch didn’t help matters. He pulled up next to a security guard who attempted to translate airport for me, but my driver still didn’t understand. He then pulled up to a relatively nice hotel (three-star, perhaps, where, I noted, the rooms were about $100 a night) and asked the very kind gentleman behind the front desk to translate. Finally, the driver understood and told me via the gentleman that he would charge me 2,000 NT, or about $60. I had read that the journey should only set me back about $30, so I refused, and by this point I was so aggravated and worried about my flight and so gosh-darn homesick that I was in tears. It was 4:45 a.m., and my plane was at 7 a.m., and I had read that the airport was one hour away.
Did I mention that it was pouring rain? It was. The nice guy at this hotel helped me take my four big bags out of the mean man’s taxi, and he called another taxi for me who would charge me a reasonable price and who he said would arrive in 20 minutes. He handed me a tissue and offered me chocolate and told me that the reason this was so difficult was because it was Chinese New Year and everyone who’s anyone was on vacation, and the drivers who were left wanted to make as much money as possible since they weren’t lucky enough to get vacation. As I dried my tears, he introduced himself as Grover and told me that he studied business for a bit in North Carolina. We chatted for a while, and he helped me into my new cab and sent me on my way. We reached the airport in half an hour because no one was on the road, and I had my broken bag taped up and then checked in successfully.
It’s very unfortunate that my wonderful trip in Asia ended on such a frustrating and unhappy note, but I know that it was due to the holiday and the ungodly hour of the morning, and by that time I was just a little tired of living out of my suitcase and not having home-cooked food. (N.B. Mom later said that when she saw me come out of customs, she thought I looked like a refugee because my one medium-sized suitcase and small backpack had morphed into a large (zipper-expandable) suitcase, a big plastic bag, a big backpack, and two large purses.) By the time I flew into my mom’s embrace at JFK airport about 20 hours later, I was ready for two weeks of rest and recuperation at Chez Alberts after an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime trip.
posted by HRA @ 7:18 AM
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