This is the music of cooking

Enjoying some food stuff at a teppanykai place in Jhongli. The food was excellent, as was the English on the menu. Fried eggs were even listed under 'Hot Pursuits'.

More of my Super Cute Students

In every class at Gloria we play lots of games to keep the kids attention. These can range from a dice game to a ball game to converted drinking games like flip cup. The desks in class are set up to make two distinct teams so after every game there is a winner and loser. The kids chant "winner winner, yeah yeah yeah! losers losers..." and then proceed to announce the punishment for the losing team. A lot of times the losers have to sing a song or do the chicken dance, but my personal favorite is a little thing called bumbum man. In bumbum man the winning team picks a vocab word and the losing team has to stand in front of the class and spell the word with their butts. Last week I managed to sneak my camera out without the kids knowing and got a video.

Here are a few more of my adorable little nuggets. Notice how they are trained at an early age to rock the peace sign in pictures.

This is Melody. She is itty bitty and has such a quiet voice that I can barely hear the words come out of her mouth. I think my sister Rose used to wear a pony tail like that when she was young.

This is Sandy. The day I came back from vacation she asked my co-teacher how to say "Where did you go? I missed you, I love you." in English. Now she comes up and hugs me before and after class. I almost can't handle how cute she it.

Howard is my youngest student, I think he is only 3 and is still learning to speak Chinese. When he says family it comes out more like bapabe.

Feast

I like the straight forward advertising.

Random

As long as it's not random it's ok.

Buning Star

Check out number 6. I've been dying for some malignant tea.

Little Bird

Directly translated into English, the Taiwanese slang for penis is 'little bird'. I see this sign everyday from the bus window, and everyday it makes me laugh.

Fancy Fish

Last night to celebrate my roommates Asian departure, the entire dorm traveled in a pack to a Japanese restaurant nearby. The restaurant was only a small bar, so to fit all 10 of us we had to help carry out tables and stools to set up camp on the sidewalk. We ordered a ton of food and beer and sat in the street enjoying our treats.

The food was amazing, but today my stomach was a wee bit crazy. I did some googling and found out we were eating a fish called Escolar, aka 'Butterfish', which wikipedia says has 'potential health problems related with consumption of the fish'. I guess this big guy is unable to digest the waxes in its diet, so its skin is up to 25% oil. Although it is delicious because of its buttery fatty flesh, it's probably not the best choice for dinner. It has actually been banned in a few countries including Japan and Italy, so I think in the future I may steer clear.

After consulting with my roommates, it turns out we all had an experience similar to this.

No smoking, No dogs, No ninja farts???

Seen outside a Vietnamese restaurant in Jhongli...

Thanks For Clearing That Up

Seen on the MRT in Taipei:

My Daily Walk To School

Near the Neili school where I teach almost every day is a street lined with a muraled wall. The other side of the street is a lot of abandoned buildings that look like they burnt to a crisp.

Most of the mural shows happy pictures with people smiling and trees and rivers, but at the very end in of the wall is a much more somber mural with people crying in the windows of burning buildings.

This is one of my favorites. It shows the trucks that drive around to collect garbage. So that people know they are coming and can come out and throw their trash in the back, the trucks constantly blast ice cream truck like music. In this mural you can see people holding their ears in pain as the truck drives by.

White Fungus

This was for sale at a Thai restaurant in Jhongli. Sounds delicious.

5 Second Rule

My mom used to make sun dried tomatoes every year, slicing them and putting them in a dehydrator in the kitchen. I guess it never occurred to her to use the railings on the deck, or the sidewalks for that matter. In Taiwan it is a common site to see sliced veggies drying in the sun. Sometimes they are spread on a cloth outside a house or business, but most of the time they are scattered on the sidewalks and road. Recently someone has been drying some unidentified vegetable on the wall outside my dorm. Appetizing isn't it? I hope that goes into my dinner tonight.

My prettiful students

At certain milestones in the curriculum here we have to put on a big song and dance to show off to the parents the massive amount of English we have taught their kids. These demos are a mix of games (using spelling, phonics, speaking, answering questions, etc), songs, little plays, and then each student has to go up and give a self introduction into a microphone. I just had demos in about 6 classes recently, and after one I got some of my students to show me their self intros on camera.

This is Alice, my smartest student in the class.

And this is Randy, not as smart, but very spunky.