My Mom, Monkeys and a Monastery

      My mom has arrived in Taiwan!!!  She got here Thursday night, and this weekend we took her to southern Taiwan for her first adventures, to Kaohsiung!  As I've been here over a year now (and 3 days!) this trip really took its toll on me and my frustrations of traveling around an Asian country with very limited Chinese for so long.  Trying to find proper buses to take us to our desired locations sent us on multiple wild goose hunts, and after zigzaging around train stations and bus stations, we had to move down our list of attractions.
      Our first stop on Saturday was Monkey Mountain.  This is essentially a mountain right along the coast, with a stop along the way to the top that is littered with monkeys.  They are everywhere running free and wild.  It was a little scary, I didn't want any limbs to get torn off, and most people kept their distance.  One man was throwing something that looked like popcorn to the monkeys and they ate it up.  He was also hand feeding one in a tree, he would reach out to it and the monkey would take the food directly from his hand.  Then the pack of wild dogs came and started chasing the monkeys around and barking like crazy.  It was quite the show.  One monkey was trapezing on the light post wires over our heads!  There were even 2 little babies with mothers protecting them, very cute.

 Mr. Monkey wanted to go for a drive. 

But he just settled for this cup he snatched from the scooter. 

View from Monkey Mountain       5 little monkeys sitting in a tree..

       Sunday we visited Confucius Temple.  It was said to be pretty popular, the largest Confucian temple in Taiwan.  When we finally go there, two other people were there and on the way out, so we were for real the ONLY people there.  It was soo strange!  I said to Greta "this is so weird, I can't believe there's no one here."  She replied, "yea, I wish I weren't even here." This was due to our wonderful mother being here, and already starting to drive us nuts after only a few days of being reunited! All in good fun though.

        Next we bused to the Fo Guang Shan Monastery.  This is the largest monastery in Taiwan, and was just finished in 2011, so very new as well.  It hosts a few huge Buddhas (though not at large as the one at Emei Lake that I scootered to a few weeks ago) and a very pretty and serene place.  There were tons of large tourist groups, but didn't seem too crowded outdoors and walking around, just inside the buildings.  There was a neat museum with a lot of information about how Buddha came to be, and a 4D movie that we missed out on because of the showing times :(  From the main monastery area we took a little golf cart up a hill and off to the side to see even more temple places and another big gold Buddha!

 Big Buddha surrounded by 8 Pagoda's of Enlightenment.  

A giant shimmer rooster at the monastery... makes sense?  Tons of statues, some are fist pumping, see them? 

There's 480 little gold Buddha's all leading up the gigantor.  

        Later, we took our mom to see Lotus Pond with the Tiger and Dragon Pagodas.  She's been very amused with, oh everything here, and taking just an outlandish amount of photos.  I feel extremely touristy traveling with her, and it's opening my eyes to some of the things I've started to become so accustomed to over the year, perhaps more on this later.  I'm very glad that she's enjoying being here and interested in everything!
        Sunday evening we took a short ferry ride from the harbor to a small island called Cijin.  Here we had a fantastic supper of fresh seafood and all very cheap.  There's also a beach area here, but it was around 9pm when we were done eating, so we couldn't see it too well, but it looked like a cool place to swim and relax during the day, unless of course it would have been crowded with people, which is probably the case.

         Monday we made a stop at Central Park because I wanted to see the grass labyrinth, but it was pretty overgrown and not very tall.  It was a nice park with interesting sculptures floating in the water.  Then it was time to return north and get back to work Monday late afternoon!

Oh, and today before going to work after we got back, I finally tried this Tuna Waffle from a tea shop I love, and it was fabulous!! Looks a little.... eh, but trust me. Tuna waffle, try one if you get the chance. 

Open House: A journey to find new students and make the white girl feel weird

       Something I never got around to explaining more of:  Open Houses.  You hear the words, I think of a retailer showing a house to the public, getting to meet your new 5th grade teacher, and now McDonald's.  HESS is big about open houses because it's a great way to recruit potential new students.  Many branches hold the events right at the school, it makes sense.  My branch has a variety of locations it chooses to put me on display.  The primary one being McDonald's.  Yes, I must go to an extremely crowded, 3-story McDonald's, and sing the rainbow song on Saturday afternoons.  Not the highest point in my life.  And we wear these awesome hats! 

This picture is from my first ever open house, almost a year ago.  Outside the MD's in YangMei.

Sometimes we sing a song about animals.  I searched for it on YouTube and found the exact HESS version that we have, and what do you know... little Asian girls singing it!  They probably came to my open house, their dance moves are almost identical to the ones I do!       

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xldN5zhG0XA

      When we go to McDonald's I have a group of 10-20 kids and teach them some vocabulary, a sentence pattern, song, play games, and then I must "read" giant storyboards to them.  I say "read" because there are no words on the boards.  There's an outline of what the story is supposed to be that I can see before we get there, but really I just memorize/make up a story to go along with all of the pictures.  One is about Lily Mouse and her battle to get dressed according to the ever changing weather.  The other is about Orville the sheep who wants to build an airplane.  Exciting stuff!  I'm always the only WHY-GORE-EN (foreigner) there, so even older people sometimes stop to watch, and of course there's the tons of other people there just trying to eat in peace. 

      The 2nd venue is the library in YangMei.  The best part about doing open houses here, is that they're on Sunday morning.  Yes, I am so lucky that sometimes I get to work every day of the week!  At least these ones are only once a month.  I'm surprised they still want me to do them, as the first one was after my friend, Dawn's, birthday.  I misplaced my phone, didn't wake up to an alarm... oh but good thing the manager had Anthony's number as well so I could wake up to him shaking me saying Grace was outside our building to pick me up!  A lovely experience that was.  Now I know not to let things get too out of hand when I need to go prance around in front of small children and their parents on Sunday mornings.  This location generally yields the largest amount of kids, and their parents all sit in the room with us watching and encouraging them not to be afraid of me.  

     And then of course very rarely do we hold open house at the actual school.  I think this is because my branch is rather small, and it's more fun to put me on display publicly.  These open houses are on Wednesday nights, and the worst because the largest amount of kids to ever show up was 4.  The parents leave them there, so I must entertain them for an hour, then once the parents return they talk to the secretaries for awhile about prices and things.  I run out of ideas, and lately enthusiasm.  

      I had an open house yesterday, which was Saturday, so that means McDonald's!  While we were setting up one of the secretaries that comes along to help asked me if I liked doing these things.  I said "not really, it makes me feel weird."  She thought that was pretty funny.  I can only hope this may have been my last one as my weeks of being Teacher Annika are coming to a close, and my mom will arrive on Thursday and we'll be traveling on the weekends.  

      HESS is apparently a big advocate tor McDonald's because not only do I perform open houses there, but this past Wednesday I took my kindy kids on a field trip to a McDonald's.  I'm not even entirely sure why, the Theme is fun places to go, but they're learning about the beach and post office, not fast food!  The school ordered a large batch of chicken nuggets and french fries and some tea so that each child got to eat one nugget, about 5 fries, and a small dose of tea.  Abe and I both have small class, so we went together.   While there he said to me, "Well this is good, it's every kindergarten teacher's job to teach the kids about the basic things in life, we're showing them great eating habits!"  It was an excellent time, I got paid to sit at McDonald's for 2 hours and watch the kids eat.   

 Poor Jimmy was naughty and not allowed to eat any McDonald's.. it made me so sad to see him sit there and watch the other kids :(   Hopefully he learned his lesson!

 Yum, yum, they said. 

1...2...3 Don't Mess Up!!

       If you've talked to me in the past few months, you've probably heard a lot about preparation for performances.  The Taiwanese go ape shit for these things, and you begin practicing for them months and months in advance.  I was a lucky duck and ended up with 3 performances all within 10 days of each other.  That meant a lot of cram rehearsals and prop making all at the same time.  There is an incredible amount of pressure put on the kids, especially for kindergarten, which is a little sad as they are just chidlren, and aren't performances supposed to be for fun?  No, not in Taiwan.  They are stressful and a lot of (unpaid) extra work. 
     Performance Number One was for the end of my Tree House 2 class.  It was on the 4th of July, and I mentioned before that we did Snow White and the Four Dwarfs.  We began practicing for it at the start of April.  I had to make a script for them that would be 30 minutes long, as well as include some songs and dances, and then play a game with the parents at the end.  Oh, and give out a special award to each student for something they're good at, and give a speech telling them how I'm leaving and won't be their teacher for Tree House 3.  My Taiwanese co-teacher made a 10 minute video with clips and pictures from over the semseter and showed it at the beginning of the performance, so overall the show lasted about 45 minutes.  The school rented costumes for the kids, but I made the backdrop and a few other props for them.

 The kids goofing around before show time.

     
        Performance Number Two was a graduation.  The main set of English classes here are called Step Ahead.  They start at level 1 and go through to 16, it takes about 4 years to complete the series.  I got this class at level 13, and now they graduated.  This one took place on July 12, and didn't involve as much work as the kids are so much older and able to make most of the props themselves.  They were also supossed to be able to write the scripts themselves, but it was a bit of a disaster, so they chose what they wanted to do, gave me the "script" and then I rewrote it so that it made sense and had enough characters for everyone.  There were 2 plays, and for some unknown reason one group really wanted to do "The Little Match Girl," only they changed it to "The Little Match Boy."  The other group wanted to do a news story about Jeremy Lin.  I had to write a conflict between him and Kobe Bryant.  Yeah.. that was interesting.  They also performed two songs, "Lollipop," no, of course not the Lil' Wayne rap version, the one by Mika, and "Golden Age" by.. I'm not sure, but it's that catchy song from the Heineken commercials.  I had to help choreograph a little, but the Taiwanese teacher was more involved for this.  This show lasted about an hour, and I also had to give a speech.  We began teaching these kids the songs in like Novemeber, so it was a slow and gradual process of learning everything, and they all did a good job.  No pictures from here because, well, the kids are older and didn't have costumes and not so cute, and I felt weird taking pictures of 13 year olds.

        Performance 3 took place on July 14.  It was kindergarten graduation.  There are 3 levels of kindy:  small, middle and big. At my branch there are 2 small classes, 1 middle, and 2 big.  Although it's mainly about graduation, it's also a chance to put on an all school performance.  Soo many shows to prepare.  The small and middle classes each did an English show, a Chinese show, and a music show.  The big classes did an English show, a music show, and a Japanese show.  So in total there were 15 shows.  For each show there was a costume change.  I had to get 20 three-year-olds into 3 different little oufits!  At least the order of performances was varied, so it wasn't too rushed.  The foreign teachers had to put on a little skit, so I was dressed as the Evil Queen of Hearts.  There was a Snow White, Alice, the Mad Hadder, and the White Rabbit.  For some reason the Taiwanese staff ordered these outfits for us, and then we had to make up a play for how they all came to be together.
       For my class, I had the kindy kids do "The 3 Little Pigs."  There were wolves and pigs and they were super cute.  I painted 3 different houses for backdrops, and worked with the kids a lot for them to be able to move around the stage and not get lost wandering about.  The wolves moved from house to house, howling!  They also sang 2 songs with little dances.  I didn't have to do much preparation for the other 2 shows, as the Taiwanese teachers took care of that, and they have a music teacher who did that show.
      We had to arrive at the venue by 1130 am, it started at 1, and ended around 4, then clean up til 5, and it was all finally over!  Since April we've been taking time and even full days out of teaching to practice, so it will be weird not having to do that anymore.  It's a pretty glorious feeling not having to worry about it.  It would have been even worse had I had a big class, because they were graduating from kindy and the teachers had to give speeches, put on longer performances, hand out diplomas, all sorts of stuff.

Costume Change number 1:  Music Show
       

Costume Change number 2:  English Show

Costume Change number 3:  Chinese Show

The Chinese Show was about forest plants and animals and then some evil people (in the witch hats and capes) that wanted to turn them all to stone! 

And the final outfit change was normal clothes, after it was over, some got very dressed up! 

        The manager of the branch was so kind and had arranged to take allll of us out to supper afterwards.  Foreign teachers and Taiwanese teachers, totaling around 25 people!  It was a very nice place, 5 courses and we were stuffed to the max.  Now, Tree House classes ended on Friday, Kindy ends in 2 weeks, and I'll be done as a teacher in 4 weeks!  Oh sherbert.. where has the time gone!?   

 The Kindy Foreign Teachers, being awesome!

 All of the LongTan Taiwanese Staff together. 

Before supper we had an hour to kill, so we went with the Japanese teacher, Neko, to get some drinks.

Anthony Turns 25 at Fulong and Wulai. Plus, how Taiwan said "Happy Birthday" to America.

           7.7 was Anthony's Birthday!! Holy smokes I feel old... I'm dating a 25-year-old!?!  Eesh.  Just kidding, I know it's really not old at all, and now he can rent cars!!  Instead of having a big birthday bash blow out like most of us have done for our birthday's here, we chose to have a little get-away weekend, just the two of us.
          The top of our list... beach time!  I'm always craving the sun and being able to actually spend time outside in it.  Saturday morning we hit the train and were off for Fulong Beach.  It's a popular beach in the Nothern part of Taiwan, and I thought it was pretty great.  There are two sections, one that was crowded with people, lifeguards that apparently don't let you even submerge your whole body in water, AND you have to pay 40 NT (a little over 1 US).  Then there's the other side where you need to walk down a bit further, but way less people, and it's free. The sand was wonderful, and the water was perfectly shallow so you can lay on the sand and still be in some water.  There were also quite a few people out trying to surf in this area.  The waves were pretty consistent, but rather small I thought.  They stayed out there for a long time though, and more kept coming, so it must have been decent.  I don't know anything about surfing. 

The weather was great, so I don't know why the sky looks so cloudy above.  You can see the beautiful blue in the others.  It is Taiwan afterall, so of course there's a temple next to the beach.  Anthony's stylin' and protecting his skin.  Then after the beach!

       We stayed at the beach for 4 or 5 hours, and faced the inevitable sunburn from the tropical sun.  I put on sunblock, I swear!  It's not too bad though, and my legs needed some serious color.  The only part of my body that gets regular sun is my arms from driving my scooter.  After Fulong we trained backed to Taipei, had dinner, got some cupcakes from the cupcake guy (thanks Steph!).  There's this foreign guy who opened a small cupcake/cookie shop that's delicious, and luckily it was near where we ate dinner, so I got some treats.  Anthony couldn't enjoy them due to this allergies and the guy said there's a chance things get mixed. 

       After supper we boarded a bus that took us to Wulai, where we spent the night at a Hot Spring Spa Hotel.  It was kind of expensive, but the room was nice with a huge bathroom area.  We got our own Hot Spring tub, a separate bath tub, and a shower area.  The hot springs felt nice, but a little uncomfortable on our sunburns.  Still, we really enjoyed it!

       Sunday morning we had complementary breakfast, where we had our choice of Mexican Beef Roll, or Steamed Dumplings.  We went with the dumplings.  Then we started walking towards the waterfall area.  We passed through a market area with pepole selling lots of things.  Wulai is an Aboringal Village area, turned touristy.  Their speacialty is some sort of millet wine, but we didn't try any.  We hiked/walked around up a moutain road for about an hour until we reached the waterfall.  It was pretty and poured into the green river hot springs below.  We also took a cable car up to the top of the waterfall, which had a nice view overlooking the mountains and river.  It was so peaceful and nice to get out of the city and away from the stinky pollution!  Although it was hella hot out all weekend, it was an amazing time together. 

 Those railroad tracks are for a little train that can take you up around the mountains to the waterfall, I never saw it running though.  We walked.  I found the yummy ice cream from the Firefly Festival! Ice Cream Genie, I love your milk egg pudding flavored ice cream!!  There were lots of people swimming in the hot springs river. 

     

     

        America also had a birthday this past week.  Yes, it was a Wednesday, but you know what.  We still needed to have a party and celebrate.  Many of us foreign teachers also had Kindy at 9 am the following morning... that was not such a treat.  But Wednesday night was fun.  After listening to the awesome "I love America" playlist I put together (with great input from others) at our apartment, we went to our favorite foreigners bar The River, located ever so conviently just a few blocks away.  You know, finding fireworks here was much harder than I thought.  I mean, I guess I didn't look too hard, but I asked a number of people.  Their response, "Fireworks are illegal in Taiwan, you can only find them during Chinese New Year."  What a joke!!  People are nonstop lighting fireworks off day and night around here.  Allll the time.  Seriously.  Rainy was awesome and had some left over from CNY, so we could have some fun with snappers, bottle rockets, and things I don't know the name of.  We went to the park across the street to light them off after we had been at The River for a while, and brought a slew of people with us.  There were a few students from France there, and some guys from Germany, they all came to celebrate in blowing shit up in honor of America.  I don't think we were really supposed to be lighting off fireworks at the park though... and after a while we heard police sirens and ran away, but we didn't do any damage or cause any harm!  

 Rainy and I wish our massive stash of explosives.   Yaaay The United States!  What's Canada doing up there?!

    

Austin's outfit. Just redic!

         Another bonus factor to going out Wednesday night was that I had my Tree House semester performance show that evening.  I was happy to be done having to reherse Snow White and the Four Dwarfs with them.  I think the parents enjoyed it, they were all recording it on there iPads and Smartphones.  Remember REAL video cameras?  And how it was kind of a big deal to have one? The kids looked cute in their costumes, and didn't mess up their lines too much.  We'd been practicing since April, but it was a bit hard for them. 

 Here the kiddos are practicing for the big day, and then all dressed up in the costumes.  They all told me they were nervous once they saw their parents and siblings arriving, so cute!