Juvenile delinquents

AdriAnne and I were sitting on the steps to the fort when she said, “Hey, those kids are smoking." If you look close enough, you can see that she's right. They must be 11 tops. 

無話可説

 

A picture that I took at Taida

after I finished taking the GRE. I'm not sure why I like it, but I do. 

And slowly my life returns to normal

This was the last day of summer vacation in Taiwan. Everyone goes back to school tomorrow. Today I spent from 9:30-8:00 at school. A healthy or perhaps not too healthy part of that time was teaching. If you've been wondering why I haven't posted much in the last couple months, it's been that I'm either sleeping, at school teaching, or somewhere in transit between the two.

I've even really given up eating. For example, today consisted of breakfast: 1 rice ball (musubi) filled with tuna, lunch: 涼麵 from Family Mart 全家 the small size, and dinner was a bowl of beef noodles. The noodles I kind of forced myself to eat, because otherwise, I wouldn't have really eaten anything all day. And I'm never hungry.

Anyway, I'm free. On the upside, I've seen my summertime intensive class, in their new slot at 5:00 on Tuesdays and Fridays, and I ended up in a pile of little girls once again. I guess some things never change.

More pictures of students

Justin and Kevin (not mine) and in the back, Bess, Hubert's sister. 

I just liked this

 

Sisters

In one of my classes, I have three pairs of sisters. And it's always interesting to me how something the older sister does within 1-5 minutes will be imitated by the younger sister. It's kind of amazing. I guess I forgot how closely sisters imitate each other.

Speaking of that class, they're a very touchy class. During the break, I'll usually be in the middle of a pile of children, with one sitting on my lap, two on either side and usually someone behind me too. It's like having 9 little sisters.

Student pictures

Hubert (choker) Douglas (chokee) Cherry (in the back) 

CSI Taiwan

So I've been looking for a new roommate and briefly found one. He moved in and lasted four days. A couple days ago, I came home totally beat after a marathon of teaching and studying Chinese ready to collapse. My new roommate told me our apartment had been broken into and his savings (which he had in cash for some weird reason) had been taken out of a locked drawer. Now, this apartment was supposed to be fairly safe, and I had never had any problems. I never locked up my stuff, so my first thought, selfishly, was Shit, my stuff must have been taken too. I go into my room and my laptop, money, passport and anything else of dubious value was still there.

That seemed really weird, who goes into a house and only burgles a locked drawer and doesn't take anything else? Also how would anyone know it was there? My roommate decided to go to the police, and eventually I went over there too, with my Chinese teacher and her husband. The police then went to my house, and it became a sort of strange CSI like moment. There were all these policemen in the house. A CSI made fun of my room for being messy. It was all very surreal. And the next day my roommate left.

Some (not so) amusing things about teaching

1) One day during break I ran into a kindergarten student at my school named Eric Li coming out of the bathroom. He did this double take and then ran out to the front desk anonouncing “老師上了廁所。" The teacher went to the bathroom! I forgot that at the age of six, you don't know your teachers are real people who sometimes use the bathroom.

2) Hiccoughs in class. It's ok if you're a student and you hiccough. But a teacher isn't supposed to get them. I've had them in class. It's not fun.

Tianxiang

 

Little girls

The author of one of my favorite books once described someone as having "the cow-like face of a girl who's always told she's beautiful."

I have lots of little girls as students. And it's always sort of disturbing to see how some of their parents dress them. They dress them like little models or something. It's just weird to see a kindergartner wearing hot pants. Just the other day, one of my students was swivling her hips and shoulders, except that she doesn't have much of anything to swivel.

Also a lot of them are dressed up like dolls. I think people sometimes expect their daughters to cute and that's about it. This happens particularly when the little girls really are pretty.