stir fry and schedules

I cooked for myself today!! Isn't that exciting?
There isn't a ton of variety to food in Yuli, you have your pick of noodles and rice, and then a few other things like Jaotze or Shway Jao as we discovered might be the correct name for it, which is little dumplings with pork and vegetables inside that are boiled. We have a couple of regular restaurants now that we know are safe. But anyways, realizing we've been lacking in the vegetable department I decided to do a little stir fry for supper! It did end up costing more than eating out, depending on where we go (simple things like Jaotze and Yuli Mein are usually less than between 50 and 80 NT, a nicer restaurant could be 100-200. By the way, 100NT is about $3.60 Canadian so in any case it was less than $10 to feed two people), but it was healthier. I came home from the supermarket and was asking Jeff if they were cooking today and told them that I would be making some food. He told me they were going out, which i soon discovered was because they were out of gas (to run the burner!). But before I could say anything, he had already called the gas person who was there within 5 minutes.. now that's fast service! Anyways, my canadian style chinese food (aka stir fry) turned out alright after all.

These last few days have been kind of slow since we're not actually teaching yet, but we have gone for a bike ride for the last 3 days in a row, and have been preparing to teach. Today I made a sample lesson plan which was kind of fun. It will be interesting to see how this goes since we will only be teaching once a week for a couple of hours. We have to make sure our lessons are memorable since they are not very frequent. In some of the schools we will have a much larger class size than I would consider ideal (36 students is the most I think).

Our meeting with Ivy and Carolyn was really good, it clarified many things. Although it did kind of scare us when they gave us a paper and the first point read "Main Jobs: Teaching English conversation in schools - Yuli Junior High, Yu Dong Junior High, Sun-Min Junior High, and Yuli High School and in Elementary schools (12 in total)
Now this came as a bit of a shock since we had until that point only heard about three schools... but further down the sheet was kind of our year schedule (which as always is subject to change with little notice) which kind of goes something like this:

• November - start book club (English Bible study) in church
• Dec-Jan - (note: in addition to what has already been started) Teach at 3 Jr high schools (starting Dec 6)
• March - June (i'm not really sure what happened to February except that we get 9 days off for Chinese New Year, so if anyone wants to come visit, that would be the ideal time... meet you halfway??)
  Teach in High school, Start working with English teachers, Help in elementary schools (reading stories), "character education" (don't ask)
• June-August - They have the same school break as us, so we will be doing some summer camps and probably some summer English programs. It seems like the summer will be pretty open but of course, i'm sure tons of stuff will be planned once it arrives
• August-Oct - Basically a continuation of what we were doing at the end of the school year
  

And then, well who knows...