Hotel Vision Taichung

... I decided to take them. We meet from 8-10PM on Thursday night after teaching all day. Going to these lessons puts things into perspective of what my own students go through. Many are in school all day, 7AM-7PM or later. When they are in class I expect them to be well behaved and listen but I sometimes forget that they don't get time to play. When we go to Chinese we sometimes get a little talkative and I can tell that our teacher gets ...

... with the movie I got home to welcome my roommate back from her month at home. Now our house is full, all 5 of us are in the house for good. It is nice having everyone back but it will be a full house! I am a little nervous 5 girls in one house sounds like drama to me! :) Good thing we all get along and everything is good so far! On Saturday night one of the teachers was having a poker night but I was so tired I decided to pass and just go to ...

... goodies! For the party we tried to make a cake. Here in Taiwan they don't have normal ovens, just toaster ovens. We decided to give it a shot and try to make the cake anyways. My roommate Emily was in charge of the baking. She put the cake in and continued to check on it. After almost 3 hours of the cake in the toaster oven it was established that it was no longer cooking and that we had burnt out our toaster oven. We were left with a pan of 1/2 cooked ...

... on any ladders!

4. We were doing a writing assignment in class and I asked my student what kinds of things his mom cooked at home and he responded that his mom doesn't cook! It blows my mind that they eat out for all their meals! There are street vendors selling food everywhere though!

5. It is so humid here and we don't keep the air in the rooms unless we are in them so our rooms get hot and humid. To prevent our clothes from molding we ...

... some teachers got together at one of the houses and just hung out. I was able to experience trying to drive a scooter in a mini skirt....much more difficult than you would guess!! haha My roommate got a good laugh at watching me try to do that.

Saturday was an exciting day. A group of us took our scooters to a waterfall. It took us about 40 mins to scoot there. It was funny because we went through some more rural areas and there were 12 scooters that made the trip ...

... was available here). Following Fridays, we joined with Brent and walked to a night market. The night markets here are similar to the games area of a carnival. They sell all sorts of random things you never knew you needed until that day. They have a variety of fried food (as well as some local delicacies that include chicken feet and snails). In addition, they have carnival games all over the place where you can win stuffed animals and toys. We ended up ...

... the couple entered to loud music. It was really a fun sight to see! The food we ate was rather unusual. There were thirteen courses of all sorts of Taiwanese dishes ranging from fish and shrimp to tofu and chicken soup. Although there was definitely a lot of food, a lot of it was items that just did not suit my fancy and I elected to grab a bite to eat at a local restaurant near my apartment after the feast was overwith. While we were eating, there were aboriginal ...

... plain do not care about the summer Olympics. I have a few theories about the lack of enthusiasm for the games. One could be the fact that China is not really looked very favorably upon by the Taiwanese due to economic, political, and historical reasons. Or, two, the fact that such a small island has a very limited number of athletes who have very little chance of medaling against athletes from much bigger countries like the US and China. It could be ...

... Katie is a first year teacher who went to school in Minnesota. Although I think she had similar mixed feelings when it came to the sudden shift to team teaching, we get along well and organized our class so she taught the first half (while I helped out the struggling students), and I taught the second half while she corrected papers and helped out students as well. My "Ducks" classroom blended in very well with her ...

... and ready to roll. Early in the second game things were looking rather bleak. It was a back and fourth affair with no side claiming victory. However, just as my team was about to pull away with the win, one of our players lost his footing and slipped. I immediately seized control of the situation and filled-in for his position and we ended up winning the second match. The third and final round was as intense as things have gotten here in Taiwan. A loophole ...