Galerie Taichung

... home I need to go through my Chinese teacher first. The difficulty in communication is a pain in the butt! I will keep working with them and hopefully I will find something that works with them.<br><br>Another thing about school. The Chinese teachers are all very concerned with pleasing the parents. The parents sometimes have more of a say in the classroom than the teachers. They dictate what goes on. This past week my Chinese teacher was concerned about sending home one of my student's ...

... got in the mob of people to start and we started running and we soon realized that everyone else that had the yellow numbers, meaning the 5K race, were all on the sidewalks still. We looked around and we were running with all the longer distance racers! We ran for about the first 2 blocks before we got off to the side. We then got back in line and got ready for our race. It was funny to see all the different people that were running it! I walked the race with Norma, I am too lazy ...

... just in case we needed a way to get home! After saying goodbye to Andres we started our hike. We chose a trail that was supposed to take about an hour to complete and was supposed to be a medium difficulty hike. Whoa were we in for a surprise when we started the trail. We climbed up stairs for the first 10 mins of our hike! Oh and temperature was right around 95 degrees! It was a pretty intense hike and we were all soaked with sweat by the time we ...

... bumper sticker on it. So to get her back I printed off a Twins logo to put over her bumper sticker....but it didn't stop there. To make sure that she saw it right away we moved her scooter into our kitchen. Ideas started to flow and we just kept adding more things to the scooter. By the time Katie got home her scooter was covered with magazine clippings and other random things from the house! It was quite a sight! On Saturday morning my other roommate, Emily, came home. We were ...

... sky with oohs and ahhs at times, quite entertaining and it got our blood pumping as well. There were stands with protective glasses that we could put on and look straight into the solar spectacle. We ventured to our local bookstore, Cave Books, and then on to lunch. This is far from a change of routine for us these past couple months. We usually head back to our apartment around this time of the day and see if we can get in a ...

... towards some bright lights. We later discovered that we found the aboriginal village. We wandered around the market but the area we really wanted to go to was on the other side of the hotel. We managed to again hitchhike back and the couple took us right into Sun Moon Village. We wandered around for quite a while trying to find a particular hotel mentioned in our guide book. Upon realizing that meals were going to be costing more than the hotel we went to a ...

Cornel provides teachers with many opportunities to make a little extra cash in their spare time. Whether it involves teaching a class in the evening hours, supervising an extra recess, storytelling at various locations within the community, or writing stories for our school magazine, there is definitely no shortage of opportunities to get out and make a little extra dough to spend on weekend trips. Jilda recently ...

... out on kind of a rocky note. Initially, I was supposed to teach a group of siblings (a high school-aged brother and sister) on Tuesday evenings from 7pm until 8pm. However, word was given to the mother of the children that their future English teacher was "an attractive, twenty year old American male" and she immediately requested a new instructor for her children. She told our administrator that she could not have her daughter ...

... Kenneth is a brand new student to Cornel and arrived a week later than everyone else while his parents registered him for classes. He was very quiet, but after the first few days, started talking a lot more in class and willingly volunteering to answer questions. He has really come into his own in just one week and it is great to see the other students accept him into our class. It is as though he didn't miss a single day of school and he has been with his ...

... a middle school that completely collapsed due to this disaster. The school looks just as it did in 1999, and pathways can take you inside of the safer parts of the building to see just how much damage an earthquake can cause. One of the more eye-opening aspects of this was the school's track and field. The ground shifted so badly that, in one area, the track splits about five feet vertically. They are very impressive disasters that ...