This past weekend I went to Yilan and learned how to surf! Four other people and I rented one long board + our own personal surf instructor for the entire day for a whopping total of 150NT, or about 5US$ each. First, they taught us how to jump on the board while the board was still stable on the sand.
Then we jumped in the water and tried it! The water was pretty cold for Taiwan standards, but still warmer than Lake Mich at ANY time of the year. The surf instructor held the surf board for me, I laid down, and he pushed me onto the wave. If I didn't immediately fall off, I kind of stood on the board, but then immediately fell off after that. The falling off part wasn't so fun, especially since I got sand in places that sand should never be. But surfing was pretty cool and I'd recommend trying it at least once. I'm not rushing to go back and do it again, but I'd definitely go if the opportunity came.
Not only was it super cheap to do, but the guys who we rented from gave us a ride back for free. They just let a group of 5 randos hop in their SUV and drove us back. I'm blown away by the kindness of the Taiwanese some times... can you imagine letting a group of foreigners who didn't speak English into your car that you didn't know and driving them around for free? I didn't think so. The moral system here is very different from back home. Things like that aren't uncommon - the Taiwanese can be downright nice in ways that Americans rarely are.
For instance, I clearly don't know Chinese, but I still have to function in society. I order food out a lot and use a variety of techniques.
The point and giggle. This technique works best in places with pictures and people who are sympathetic to my illiteracy.
Have a coworker write down what I want on a piece of paper in Chinese and I hand the paper over to the worker. This is a bit more effective but still embarrassing.
Other desperate measures are acting out the type of animal I want to eat. I once moo-ed to a waiter.
Why not just speak Chinese to them? Oh, because nobody has any idea what the fuck I'm saying when I speak Chinese. The tones are ridiculously hard for me and I've pretty much just given up.
Anyway, for the most part, people put up with this ridiculousness and try to help me out when ordering food or buying something. Occasionally someone will pop up and translate for me if the worker can't speak English. I try to at least start in Chinese every time to not be rude, but I know some less culturally sensitive people who just walk up and speak English to the workers. And you know what? A lot of them don't mind and really try to help. They even apologize for not speaking English better. Seriously?! I'm in your country! Imagine that back home... someone just walking up to a worker and speaking Spanish? Hells to the no. Pointing at a picture to order food? You might get service, but the workers most likely would be gossiping about you and secretly telling you to "go back to your country" or "learn some friggen' English already." I can't comprehend that situation working back home.
Don't take this as a Taiwanese > Americans or that Americans > Taiwanese. Although the Taiwanese have proven to be kind in ways that would probably not happen back in the States, we similarly have several courtesies that aren't practiced here often. People bump into me without apologizing, rarely hold doors open for each other, don't follow traffic laws AT ALL, and even the most decent of people pull illegal activities all the time, like companies reporting less income so they pay less taxes (happens A LOT). Oh, and I'm illegal here. Even though I do work for Hess, all the kindergarten teachers are technically not allowed to teach and to the government officials, we don't exist and our companies just lie about us. The police have come into my work and I've had to hide on the roof. Seriously. So both cultures have their awesome points and low points.
Speaking of low points, I got robbed last week :-/ I had 10,000 NT, or around 350US$, sitting in an envelope in my apartment and last Sunday I noticed the envelope was missing.
It sucks because I've always felt like Taipei was a really safe place. I never thought I'd actually have someone break into my apartment and steal money. Luckily, they only stole the cash and didn't take my laptop or any electronics. But still, it's not fun getting robbed, especially weeks after I buy an insanely expensive plane ticket to Africa and don't have a bunch of cash to throw away.
------------------------------------
Since I live in Taiwan and internet sites register this, I keep getting ads in Chinese, despite the fact that I can read hardly any Chinese symbols. These three symbols constitute about half of what I can read: 一二三. They mean yī, èr, sān, or 1, 2, 3. I know, I know, you're super impressed that it only took me 8 months to learn such complicated symbols. Anyway, sometimes I'm curious and my browser, google chrome, will translate it. For instance, when I saw this ad, I wanted to know wtf it was trying to tell me. Today, I was curious and translated, and I got this gem.
I was blown away by the depth of this ad. Clearly green men are being used in a metaphorical sense, and the repetition is surely a literary tool of geniousness. How could only 1,736 people like this?!
I'm visiting my friend Katie, who is volunteering in Tamale, Ghana in the Peace Corps. My stay will be a total of 2 and a half weeks in late July / early August and I will also be staying a few nights in Hong Kong.
In the process of purchasing said ticket, of course something had to go wrong. I tried to book my ticket through Cheapoair.com. I learned a valuable lesson: don't book anything from any company with the word "cheapo" in the name. Très sketch. I might have to cancel my credit card and reissue it and also have some Cheapoair worker from India inviting me to go visit him. Why do I have so many problems with India? Moral of the story, don't book anything from Cheapoair.com or onetravel.com, they're a scam.
In other news, today I took my kids on a field trip to a Barbie museum.
Yup.
A Barbie museum.
It was actually pretty boring. I expected a museum of Barbies from the 50s and 60s up until now. In reality, it's just a bunch of new-ish Barbies with clothing sewn by members of the community. It's kind of a cool idea, but nonetheless, boring. Everything was in Chinese, so I had to amuse myself by creating names for the Barbies such as "Jungle whore Barbie" and "Drunken frat boy Ken."
I don't actually know any of these people. I found it on google. Sorry. Actually, this isn't even the same Barbie museum I went to - apparently there are more than one of these things in Taiwan?!
The road trip back consisted in me teaching my kiddos important life lessons, like how to properly engage in a thumb war and how to count to three in Spanish.
In other news, according to an e-mail I just got, I will be soon getting a lot of money! Right there in my junk mail folder was an e-mail from Ghadaffi's son saying he'd like to give me 20.5 million dollars in off shore account funds from Libya. All I have to do is give him my credit card information, and BAM! Instant millionaire! Thanks, Saif! If you need a flight from Libya, let me tell you about this great deal I heard about from Cheapoair.com...
This is probably too early to announce to the world, but whatever; I'm unofficially staying another year in Taiwan. I was offered to teach double kindergarten classes after I complete my contract and I won't have to work at the buxiban (cram school) anymore. This means more hours, but more consistent hours - I'll be working closer to a 9-5 job (9-4 Tues/Thurs, 9-7 MWF, and NO SATURDAYS!). I haven't signed anything yet, which is why I say "unofficial"; you never know what could happen in the next few months.
The past weekend, I took another scooter road trip with Victoria. This time we decided to head to Wulai, located south of Taipei. It's famous for a waterfall, as seen below.
A bit underwhelming, no? Or perhaps just whelming. Definitely not overwhelming.
After feeling whelmed, we saw a gondola that went above the waterfall and thought, why not take it? So we did, and I was expecting a pretty lookout, maybe a coffee stand or something up on top of the waterfall. Instead we found....
...An archery range. Really? ARCHERY? What?
Oh, and then an ostrich came storming by us. It's just so normal.
Then I shot at stuff. Again, what normal people do on top of waterfalls in Asia.
There were some hiking paths with very inviting signs on their entrances.
Here are some more [normal] pictures of Wulai:
view from the top
In conclusion of this blog post, I give to you the following: a poster that is placed outside both schools I work at and throughout the city of LuZhou. I think it provides for great English language learning through new vocabulary!
You know those moments they talk about when teachers realize the absolute beauty in their work because they've educated a child, taught them an invaluable life lesson, touched the life of a child and given meaning to both the student's life and your own?
Well, I didn't have one of those moments today.
I did, however, have this moment today: "Teacher Robin! You are bum-bum SO BIG!" Translated from 4-year-old-who-is-just-learning-English: "Girrrl, your ass is HUGE!"
Thanks, Henry. SEE IF I LET YOU PICK OUT THE STORY TIME BOOK EVER AGAIN.
Also, blogspot.com tells me where my traffic comes from. Apparently if you google search Celine Dion Drinking Games I am the fourth popular website and if you google image search Dolphins Doing Math I am the second popular image.
Google associates my blog with the phrases "Celion Dion drinking games" and "Dolphins doing math"? Only two words can describe this. FUCK. YES.
I've realized that most of my blog postings involve the uncommon, strange happenings in my life but rarely do I write about my daily life doings. They seem quite boring to me, but obviously many of you don't know what it is that I *do* exactly here in Taiwan. I work at two different schools, that we call "Kindy" (short for kindergarten) and the "Buxiban" (Chinese for cram school, or an after school class).
TL;DR version of a day in the life of Teacher Robin: Teach Asian babies how not to say "I want to eat some cock". Puke in taxi. Look at pretty rocks. Wear Hello Kitty. Repeat.
For those of you interested in hearing the whole story, let's break it down.
Kindy
Every morning, I wake up at 7am-ish. Because I only live about 15 minutes walking distance from the kindy, I haven't purchased a bicycle or scooter or anything and I just walk to both branches. To be honest, scooters scare me shitless. I've tried to maneuver one in back of my old apartments and almost crashed into a wall. And that was with no one else around. Taiwan's streets are crazy packed and people don't follow traffic rules; I don't even want to imagine trying to drive WITH people around me. Just sitting in a taxi will make me car sick sometimes because of all the sharp turns - I actually puked in a taxi last night (though that was probably due more to an all-you-can-drink buffet that only cost 10$ than to the crazy driving).
Anyway, so I walk to the kindy and try to get there by 8:30 because the class starts at 9. Our kindergarten teaches 3 different ages of kids: small class (3-4 years old), middle class (4-5), and big class (5-6). I teach small class, so their English is the most limited. I have a Taiwanese teacher help me who teaches them Chinese in the afternoon, but I'm the only one really "teaching" during this time. She mostly helps with crying kids, parents, and paperwork while I teach. We start off by gathering all grade levels and teachers outside to exercise for 15 minutes. The NSTs (Native Speaking Teachers, AKA the white foreigners) switch off each month who leads it and picks out which songs to use, a combination of HESS (the company I work for) songs and normal songs. When I lead, I want to the students to learn culture so I pick classics like Lady Gaga and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (they're Asian, I couldn't resist!).
After exercising we bring the kids in for a potty break, water, and sharing time. My kids probably don't speak English at home so to "warm them up" to speaking English, we do things like the calendar, talking about the weather, practicing common phrases like "how are you?" and singing. My class loves to sing - recently their favorites have been "You Are My Sunshine" and "Skidamarink A Dink A Dink I Love You." They're so stinkin' cute doing it, especially since the words go too fast for them so they end up singing English-like noises "swawawawa waaawaaa waaa swawawa woo I love youuuuuu"
Then they snack for 20ish minutes and I start teaching the curriculum. HESS writes all the curriculum so every small class teacher at every HESS school is teaching the same lesson on the same day. We have a teacher's guide book that tells us which vocabulary words and sentence patterns to teach that week. We're given some materials, like flash cards, story books, and songs related to the theme. The HESS written songs are mostly awful and get stuck in my head and end up getting sung on friends facebook walls at 4am (sorry Adam). Two of my coworkers made a death metal remix to one of the songs called "where is the motorboat?" which unfortunately has not been written into the curriculum yet.
The last unit I taught to my babies was family. The last week of the unit I had to teach "tall", "short", "fat", "thin", "cute", "pretty", "handsome", and "cool". The sentence pattern was "Is your ____ (family member) _____ (adjective). I got quite the kick out of asking my students "Is your mom fat?" "Is your grandma cool?" In phonics, we practiced E-E eh eh eh This is an egg, This is an Elephant F-F ff-ff-ff This is a fish, This is a flower (yes, I repeat that over and over and over. Every. Damn. Day.)
Although they tell me what to teach, I have a huge amount of flexibility to teach it, especially compared to the TreeHouse and Step Ahead classes I teach that I'll talk about later. For example, the teachers guide will say that I have one month to teach the number 6. Welp, WTF am I supposed to do with that? I play tons of games because 3 year olds have a very short attention span. Sometimes my best games are the stupidest ones; for example, one day I had a balloon and started whacking my kids on the head with it and making a weird noise. They couldn't handle how hilarious it was, so I made them say the sentence pattern before they can get smacked by the balloon. Another game I created was "sleeping monster", where I ask the kids the pattern and pick the ones who said it the loudest. I lay on the floor and snore (BEST PART! SOMETIMES I DO THIS FOR 20 MINUTES!) and the kids count how many steps they take to reach me. Once they reach me, the "sleeping monster" wakes up and chases them around the room and they scream and laugh. Except for one kid, he cries whenever I do it; I'm not quite sure if he realizes Teacher Robin doesn't actually turn into a monster.
We end the day with a craft, which is probably the hardest part to think of because 3-4 year olds can barely cut and get sick of coloring. Sometimes we do stuff during this time that has nothing to do with the curriculum. One time I attempted to teach them how to play duck, duck, goose instead of the craft. However, I only got up to the "duck, duck, duck" part after about 20 minutes. They thought "duck, duck, duck" was one of the greatest games ever invented though, no joke.
Before I came to Taiwan, I studied to be a high school (or middle school) teacher because I thought I'd enjoy that age more and that I wouldn't have enough patience to teach young students. Actually, I disliked student teaching, which I did at 2 different high schools, but I ADORE working with young children. I would never have picked teaching preschool-aged children, and being forced into something I didn't initially want to do turned out to be something great. My kids are fucking adorable and I wish I could post pictures and videos of them online, but my work won't let me :( Skype me and I can show you though.
What else about kindy? Hmmm. I've got 17 kids now, 12 of which I've taught from the beginning, the other 5 are new and are harder to work with. They sometimes still pee their pants. No, I don't wipe butts, but some teachers do (I'll wipe their noses, but I draw the line at poop. I didn't fly half way around the world to wipe your kid's ass, sorry). They worship me and it's a great self-esteem booster, hehe. When I walk into the room they light up and have huge smiles and yell, "Teacher Robin!" (or Teacher Rabbit, for the ones who don't know my name). We're doing a mother's day performance and I'm teaching them the Beatles song "All My Loving" to sing to their parents. They pick up on a lot of the things I do and like to copy me. Their favorite expression is "sooo crazy!", so if I'm teaching and the flashcard is upside down, they'll laugh, "Teacher Robin! SO CRAZY!" There are some tough days, like when they cry THE ENTIRE FUCKING LESSON, but all in all it's the best and most rewarding aspect of my teaching in Taiwan.
Treehouse
Treehouse is the second type of class I teach. It's also at the kindy branch, but these kids have graduated kindergarten. I have the youngest of all the treehouse kids, TH2, so they are only one year above the big class of kindergarten and are about 7 years old. I teach them MWF from around 4-7. Their conversational skills are fantastic because they've had 3 years of practice with foreigners, but their grammar usually isn't good yet. My TH kids will say stuff to me like, "Teacher! He is look me!" which translated means, "Teacher! He is cheating / He is looking at my quiz!". They loooooove to nark on their friends. They aren't allowed to say a word of Chinese in my class so if anyone speaks it they'll always yell "Oooooh! Kenny say Chinese! Kenny say Chinese!" These kids are my second favorite to teach because I still teach them 3 times a week and it's MY class. I have a Chinese teacher in the back to help grade their quizzes they take daily and talk with parents, because clearly I can't speak to their parents in Chinese, unless they want me to say "Good morning! 1, 2, 3, CHICKEN!!" to them, since that's what my Chinese is limited to.
The curriculum is much less flexible than kindergarten's and they practice spelling, grammar, songs, conversations, phonics, reading, and writing. I still play some games, which they LOVE, although the balloon one won't quite work on the 7 year old crowd. Their favorite things to talk about are: how many boyfriends does Teacher Robin have (usually around 900,000), toilets, bum-bums (what they call butts), and poo-poo. I actually had to make a rule that you weren't allowed to say the word "poo poo" in class or you would get a triangle by your name, which means you write your spelling words one more time. Now I get, "TEACH-UH ROBIN! BRIAN SAY POO POO!" all the time. Unfortunately, some of their fart and poop jokes are kind of funny and it's hard to keep a straight face. Last week, when I was in the middle of teaching "do" versus "does", my student Miki raised his hand and informed me, "My dad like to read a book when he is sit on the toilet!" How can I not chuckle at that random outburst, especially when spoken in an Asian accent?
The kids still worship me in this class because they're young, but the "magic of learning" is starting to fade away. My kindy kids love learning English for the sake of it - they don't understand why it's useful but they think it's cool nonetheless. Treehouse kids study so they can be "number one" (they're craaazy competitive) and so their parents will buy them a wii if they get a 98 in English class, but don't actually like learning English.
Step Ahead
Step Ahead is the curriculum I teach at the Buxiban, which is Chinese for cram school. I've explained what a cram school is before, but as a refresher, it's a non-government school parents pay to send their kids to study outside of their regular school. These aren't uncommon either - lots of Taiwanese kids go to school from 9 am to 9pm everyday, sometimes on Saturdays. Study, study, study - it's what the Taiwanese culture is all about...
The buxiban I work at is only a 5 minute walk from my house. I work there on Tuesdays and Thursday nights (on non-treehouse days, basically) and Saturday morning/afternoon. Step Ahead is for kids who didn't go to an English kindergarten, so they've started learning much later. SA classes meet twice a week and is taught once by a Chinese teacher and once by an NST (Native Speaking Teacher, remember?). These classes have the oldest kids - the oldest I teach are probably around 12, though some NSTs teach kids older than that.
SA has the same approach as treehouse but is a different curriculum - reading, writing, phonics, spelling, etc with as many games as you can cram in 2 hours. I don't enjoy teaching these as much because I feel like a babysitter who comes in once a week - more like a gimmick for the parents to brag to their friends, "Well, MY kid has a REAL white person teaching them English!"
SA students write some pretty hilarious homework answers though, and us NSTs like to make copies of their homework to share. My recent one was a student who misspelled "hungry" as "hung" and wrote, "Are you hung? Yes, I am hung." Another student misspelled "cut" and added an extra "n" in there. Really, the kids say and write hilarious things all the time. I've got one student who simply cannot say the word "cake" and says "cock" every time, which makes me laugh every time she talks about wanting to eat cake.
So that's what it's life in the life of Teacher Robin. I hope I didn't underwhelm you too much.
In non-teaching business, a few weeks back I went to Hualien, which is home to a famous park called Taroko Gorge. It was pretty sweet, or as the joke of the weekend was, it was "gorge-ous"
Here are some pics.
Look! Over yonder!
Also, last night I attended one of the most Asian parties EVER. One of my Taiwanese coworkers was going to have a Hello Kitty themed kareoke party. She changed it to a dinner, but it was still Hello Kitty themed. Oh, and my coworker happened to be turning 26. Yuppp.
I went ALL out :D
Hello Kitty necklace, Hello Kitty headband, fake pink glasses (they LOVE glasses here) and the typical Asian pose. I've basically converted.
Sorry to leave you hanging about how I got kicked out of India. It all started when I got super drunk on the airplane. I was playing a drinking game where I took a shot every time the "fasten seat belt" light when on, a baby cried, or the person behind me kicked my seat. Needless to say, I got shhhwasted. In my drunken stupor, I thought it'd be a good idea to go through customs without wearing pants. Well, to me, it was pretty hilarious, but the customs officer did not approve of my lack of pants or my sharpie marker mustache. Then the drug dogs found the cocaine stash in my underwear and it just all went downhill from there.
Actually none of that is true at all. The real story is pretty boring - apparently you need a visa to enter India, which I didn't have. Whoops. Clearly I do an excellent job on researching the countries I plan on visiting. The Indian customs people were jerks about it too and I ended up crying in the middle of an airport with 100s of people watching me. Patrick (the guy I was traveling with) was still in Malaysia at the time because we bought tickets from Kuala Lumpur to New Delhi on different days because of price differences. Here I am, sobbing in the airport, begging to be let in the country, while these Indian dudes are yelling at me telling me how stupid I was (thanks, because I couldn't figure that out myself). I got a couple of "just because you're American doesn't mean you can do whatever you want" speeches. After an hour of me crying and shaking and feeling like an idiot, a group of officials come out and tell me they're going to ship me off to Kathmandu.
KATHMANDU?!? WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT? [Nepal, I found out later] I convinced them to send me back to Kuala Lumpur since I had a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei (we were supposed to fly from New Delhi back to KL and from KL back to Taipei). They had to delay the flight for me to get on, a fact the airport workers were intent on criticizing me for, because, you know, I didn't feel bad enough already.
So after one traumatic, awful, sleepless night, I found myself back in Kuala Lumpur. I went back to the hostel and woke an extremely confused Patrick up with a "heyyy, so about that flight to India..."
Although extremely terrible for my pride and wallet, all in all, getting kicked out of the country of India is kind of hilarious.
Robin's updated bucket list
get my masters degree
write a novel
get kicked out of a country
I'm 1/3 of the way there!!
In about 2 hours, Patrick and I whipped up a plan B. KL was cool and all, but we saw all we wanted to see and had no desire to stay there another week. Plan B included a bus ride to Singapore, 2 nights in Singapore, then a ferry to Bintu island in Indonesia.
Singapore, if you didn't know, is located on the same island as Malaysia and Thailand. It's a tiny city-state. Here are some more fun facts: English is the main language. It's pretty expensive compared to the rest of Asia. Chewing gum is illegal (I know, wtf? I wish I could have brought some in the country to see if I could sneak it in, it's not sold anywhere on the island). Spitting in public is also illegal. If you want to know more, JFGI.
The Eiffel tower is to Paris as the statue of a half-lion, half-mermaid/pineapple spitting is to Singapore. Here I am with the "Merlion"
We also visited Sentosa, an island connected to Singapore via suspension bridge, making it the southern-most point of continental Asia. The park was pretty sweet.
As Singapore isn't huge, we saw everything we wanted to see in one day. We jumped on a ferry for 2 hours and went to a small Indonesian island called Bintan. We booked our hostel in, get this, a fucking bungalow. Hells to the yes!
Apparently we came to Indonesia during the off season, because there was hardly anybody at our hostel. We basically had a private beach and hotel staff to ourselves. All that for about 20$/night!
The exchange rate is something crazy like 8000 Indonesian rupia to one US $, so I took a picture of myself holding *one million dollars*
Yeah, ok, so this is really not much more than 100 US$, but it felt cool nonetheless.
The beaches were beautiful and straight out of a Corona commercial. I don't really feel like I got to know what real Indonesia is like though because we didn't sight see at all (there wasn't anything TO sightsee because it was a smaller island) and basically stayed at our resort-y hostel. Outside of our bungalow hostel, the island was quite poor. I'd like to go back and see Jakarta and/or some other islands before I really make a good impression about Indonesia.
I probably never would have gone to Singapore, and maybe not Indonesia, had the whole India fiasco never happened, so I definitely recommend getting kicked out of countries if you want to expand your horizons.
All in all, an awesome trip. Hit a huge road block, but we made the best of it with an impromptu backpacking trip through southeast Asia. Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia - check, check, check. My bank account is depleted so it'll be a while before my next trip, but I'll probably do another one before 2011 ends, assuming I stay in Taiwan another year, which I haven't officially decided on yet.
