moon
I wasn't sure this picture would turn out, since it was getting dark, but there was a beautiful full moon on the night of Zhuo Feng's graduation. I really like the blue tint I ended up with.
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San Min 9.
When I saw this picture I said "Wow, it looks like I'm an old grandma surrounded by all my grandchildren" LOL
eeeewwwww
A spider that showed up on our balcony last week. It's dead here. I'm not sure if its carcass somehow fell onto the floor or if this is after Hope sprayed raid on it.
Dukarel
Today we were invited to go to Dukarel (possibly Tokar) church. The service was in Amis and Chinese. It was very interesting to listen to the Amis language. It sounds very different from Chinese. I was suprised at how much of the Chinese I understood, though not enough to totally understand the sermon yet. Close to the end of the service they had us come to the front and said thank you (I taught there all semester). Two of my students gave us Amis hats. We sang "I've got the joy" and then Hope and I sang "All in All" in English and Chinese. Afterward we went for lunch with my co-teacher, Lucia, her husband, and their three-year-old daughter, who is so cute! Lucia is going to have her second child in September, how exciting! Speaking of children, our dog, Xiao Guai had 6 puppies today! Here's the picture for today: My Dukarel students on the last night of class.
Since I'm not doing much these days, AND I just got a bunch of photos from the past few weeks (on a friend's camera), I want to post a new photo every day instead of putting them all up at once. This is from the dragon boat races in Taitung. Remember, you can click on the photo to see the full size.
Zhuo Feng Graduation
Well, this week has been nice and slow so far, just plugging away at camp stuff. Yesterday we mass-produced emotion cards to use in our classes. Most of them we just used previously drawn cards, since we have taught this topic in the semester. But we added two new emotions that presented quite a challenge to us, especially since neither of us is that talented when it comes to art... anyways, take out a pen and some paper, and draw a cartoon face to depict "grumpy" and "nervous" or "embarrassed" for that matter! Anyways, they're done now, save for the laminating. Yesterday afternoon we got to go see my 6th grade students graduate from Zhuo Feng. It was pretty fun, and the speeches weren't too long or unbearable. When we first got there, we got to look at some picture books that the students made of their time at Zhuo Feng, and one of the books had their grade 1 class picture. It was SO adorable! I enjoyed trying to figure out who was who. S
Top 5 reasons why my dad is cool
In honor of Father's Day, which isn't celebrated here until August (since the word for August is "ba ue" and the word for father is "ba ba" rather clever if you ask me), here are the top 5 reasons why my dad is cool: 1. He reads my blog faithfully and occasionally leaves witty comments 2. I can have interesting discussions with him about political and current events 3. He listens to "cool" music 4. He knows everything about cars, and can fix or build almost anything (hehe a daughter's exaggeration perhaps) 5. He is hard-working, honest, and intelligent, and has always given us everything we need (and a lot of things we wanted) Love you Dad
The skies have opened up and deluged their contents upon Taiwan. Fortunately, I now have in my possession a raincoat, so I can ride my bike without too much misery. The sun peeked out for a little while today, like a long lost friend. The floodwaters on our balcony have begun receeding, though who knows what tomorrow will hold... Now that you are all rolling your eyes at my penchant for the dramatic, let me fill you in on my not-so-exciting week... Only 4 classes this week, it was a pretty easy time. The first and last day of a class are sometimes the best ones though... Anyways, this week I gained a new appreciation for my students, and the fact that even the smallest love, kindness, or attention I can show them can be huge in their lives. In my Tuesday night class after I said goodbye and dismissed the students, one girl (about 10 or 11) came and hugged me and began to sob. I just hugged her and let her cry into my shoulder for a long time, wishing to show her that she was importa
miscellaneous
well i must say this is an interesting job.... for someone who gets bored easily, even though i dislike the instability at times, it is a pretty good match for me i think. our schedule is changing, yet again. After this week we have two weeks where we are not teaching, but will be madly trying to prepare for summer camp which will be upon us on July 4. This consists of adapting some books into dramas, making and laminating materials for four classes, and planning our training sessions. Time does fly though... i seem to remember thinking not so long ago that camp was still ages away. we've been watching a lot of movies lately - 3 a week actually... definitely a lot more than my usual quota (more like 3 a month), but i guess it's our fix of american culture? anyways, we've been watching some creepy movies like The Manchurian Candidate , The Mothman Prophecies , and Conspiracy Theory , as well as The Little Mermaid , and Finding Neverland which just arrived in Blockbuster
random, but interesting
http://www.paulsadowski.com/birthday.asp You entered: 4/27/1982 You were born on a Tuesday under the astrological sign Taurus. Your Life path number is 6 . The Julian calendar date of your birth is 2445086.5. The golden number for 1982 is 7. The epact number for 1982 is 5. The year 1982 was not a leap year. As of 6/9/2005 12:56:12 AM CDT You are 23 years old. You are 278 months old. You are 1,206 weeks old. You are 8,444 days old. You are 202,656 hours old. You are 12,159,416 minutes old. You are 729,564,972 seconds old. There are 322 days till your next birthday on which your cake will have 24 candles on it. Those 24 candles produce 24 BTU's, or 6,048 calories of heat (that's only 6.0480 food Calories) . You can boil 2.74 US ounces of water with that many candles.
books!
Johanna tagged me to do this, and it's interesting, so I shall participate. I'm not going to tag anyone else, but if you want to share your answers you can leave a comment. 1. Total number of books I've owned: I don't think I can count! Let's see on my little shelf above my desk there are around 35 books, a couple on the floor, and a stack on my bedside table.... then of course are the boxes of books at home... which I'm told will be a great feat to access.... I have a lot of books, but not as many as my grandma... 2. Last book I bought: I was going to say Desiring God by John Piper, but then I rememered that I bought an ESL book called something like the Taiwan English Teacher's Handbook (I don't have the exact title since Hope has it right now). It's quite a fascinating book since it so accurately describes the learning systems and situations we're dealing with! 3. Last book I read: The Scarlet Pimpernel, a classic borrowed from (and higl
Bats in the belfry
Whew another week has gone by... There have been some interesting moments this week. On Tuesday evening, I had my worst class EVER... It started of quite well actually, but I didn't have a teacher helper, and by the end of the class the kids were going wild... We were doing "my body" and some of the boys felt they needed to be ah.. physiologically accurate in their pictures. I took a really strict approach to the first boy that did this, but it didn't really work.... by the end I was feeling rather frustrated with the class, and decided it wasn't worth it to try and get them through any more activities. As I was trying to get their attention back from the activity they were finishing, a bat flew into the classroom. It started flying wildly in circles.. kind of swooping up and dowoon. Now, I was slightly terrified, but tried to stay calm, ducking when it came past my head, the girls were all ducking and a few were screaming. The boys started chasing it and try
Sun, snorkeling, scooters, and seaweed ice cream
Sunday morning, 5:30am, we woke up and quietly exited our friend Faith's apartment to get breakfast and wait for our taxi. The taxi conveyed us to the boat launch maybe 20 minutes away. We heard that we were liable to get sick on the ride so we both took some medicine. The boat was pretty fun (though we almost got on the wrong one), but I did feel a little nauseous by the end of the hour long ride to Green Island. When we got off the boat we looked for someone carrying a placard with our name on it, but no one was there for us yet, after a few uncertain moments, a man drove up in a van and apologized. What followed was perhaps a more turbulent ride than the boat itself as our host expertly maneuvered around tour buses, hordes of tourists on scooters, and pedestrians while going around curves on the narrow island road. When we got to the hotel, there were a group of guys who ended up translating for us that we couldn't rent scooters from the hotel because we don't have a sco
