Weekly Mandarin: 18

18th edition: Jai you

This is a word that I am quite certain will be a part of my spoken vocabulary from now on. It even slipped out accidentally during one of my third grade classes (the students are supposed to think I don't know any Chinese).

Jai you is something along the lines of "go go GO!" like a cheer. I hear it a lot: like from the soccer fields 13 floors down from my window, like during yoga class when we'd really all prefer to curl up into child's pose but instead get coaxed into bridges. It's also nearly impossible to say without doing a shoulder wiggle or full out air punches.

So when I'm home in America watching a frisbee game, now Brian will know when I'm cheering. Because it'll be in Mandarin.

Lotto, baby

Ok, so apparently, the Taiwanese government wasn't getting taxes from stores like they felt they should be getting, so they developed a system of standardized receipts to somehow facilitate their getting accurate records from the stores. To motivate people to go to the stores with the receipts, they made up a lottery where people check the standardized numbers on their receipts.

And that, my friends, is how I won a whopping 400 NT tonight. ($12 USD)

Typhoon Mitag

Another typhoon. This one's very very late in the season and not terribly strong, but they aren't cancelling anything because of it, so I still get the full experience. I just hope the predictions are all right about it veering away from Taiwan...

Weekly Mandarin: 17

17th edition: Pongyou

So, this week was full of Thanksgiving festivities. My personal favorite was having the second graders write things they were thankful for on turkey feathers, and then making paper turkeys out of them.

But, as you might imagine, I was a little extra homesick during the holiday. Luckily, I have more than one outstanding "pongyou" or "friend" here. My co-teacher wrote me a really sweet Thanksgiving note, and another co-teacher took us all out to tea. And my fellow Fellows here are all gathering for a makeshift Thanksgiving on Sunday. My family of "pongyoumen" (friends) here make life bearable... though they're of course, no replacement for the family and friends I have at home. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

At provisional Thanksgiving, I gave part of my thanks in Mandarin. I feel like a rockstar. I am thankful for my friends and, of course, for my reflective bumblebee raincoat.

Weekly Mandarin:16

16th edition: Re

(Sorry, sorry, I know it's late)

Re means "hot," which is no longer a good descriptor for the weather, but is a good adjective for the type of tea we consume every minute of every day here....

And it's also the name of the new dance class Kate and I found. Thanks to "hot dance" class, Kate and I are now dancing again... and we are, as Justin Timberlake would say, "bringing sexy back."

Medicine in Taiwan

So, I got quite sick this past week, and got to know a bit more about medicine here in Taiwan. To be fair, my host dad happens to be a doctor who owns his own practice, but I think the point remains: It's better to have a cold in Taiwan than in the US.

Host dad scheduled two appointments for me and a fellow sick fellow, and my wonderful host mom drove us to the office. Host dad listened to my story and took a quick look at my tonsils, then shot me up with some penecillin and wrote out a prescription... which he then handed to my host mom at the front of the office, who doled out the drugs. Then they don't only give you the drugs with the instructions, right there in the office, but they also wrap the drugs up in tiny little papers, so you eat all the pills in one bundle of paper, no thought required. And the whole thing should have cost me about 12 USD, I'm told (though, host parents wouldn't hear of me paying). Two appointments took twenty minutes, from sitting down in the waiting room to leaving with drugs.

Then there's also the soft medicine here: Moms! Like my host mommy who lept out of the car yielding an ear thermometer (which read in celcius, so I had no concept of what my temperature was!), insisted that we take 3 liters of sports drink each and some traditional Taiwanese pancakes, and then... this is a little overwhelmingly sweet... after sending me back to bed after the doctor's appointment, dropped by with a whole pot of freshly made chicken soup from scratch. Being sick has its perks.

Hot Springs!

This is the real reason I took the Fulbright: Not for the glory of being a Fulbrighter for the rest of my life, not to help people, but to be within a half hours drive of hot and cold natural springs.

Katie and I took our first trip to the hot springs this weekend! Like the cold springs, they weren't what I expected. For one thing, it was clearly an all-day event for most of the people there. They were complete with a concession stand, saunas, a gigantic slide, and about 25 different pools. Some of the pools had different herbs added to them that were supposed to help the body, but really all Katie and I could pick up without Chinese was that... they were all different colors! So, naturally, we needed to visit each of them, in reverse rainbow order. The weirdest one, however, was the one that was clear, with live fish in it. You sat, the fish swam, oh, and they nibbled dead skin off your body. Very. very. strange.

Weekly Mandarin: 15

15th edition: Liu bi shwei

Ok, the cursed "real Chinese" wins. After learning how to say running nose (liu bi shwei), the running nose turned into a chest cold, a fever, and a need to stay in bed for 72 hours. I've recovered; but man, that was a bad cold. I'll have to be even better at observing the first commandment of teaching: Thou shalt use antibacterial gel. Every six seconds.

Things I Forgot to Mention About School

So, I kind of forgot to write about school in general, and how it compares to the U.S. for better and for worse and some other reflections. Thanks for the reminder, Loraine!

I was very very confused by the introduction to Taiwanese schools that we got during orientation. They explained that we (meaning Fulbright English Teaching Assistants and our coteachers) teach with "learning through play" but that the rest of the school teaches in a drill-and-grill approach. Most classes (core subjects like math and Chinese) are taught by "homeroom teachers" and then we are some of the special subject teachers. Sometimes I feel bad playing some crazy game and getting the kids all wild, and then turning them back over to their homeroom teachers to do sit-down-and-listen class.

As far as class hours, the structure is actually really fascinating! Kids begin public school at first grade, and in first grade, they take classes 4 half days and one full day per week, with full days running from 7:40 to 4:10. The second graders have 3 half days and two full days, etc, etc. I think it's pretty developmentally sensitive-- although teaching those second graders on one of the few afternoons they're at school is tough! I should also mention that these are only the hours that the students are in public schools, about 70% of my students also attend afterschool "cram schools," sometimes for 5 hours again after public school. It's pretty intense stuff and causes some painful gaps in the classroom, unfortunately along socio-economic lines.

The actual structure of individual days include 10 minute breaks between each class when the kids are supposed to go outside and run around, and one twenty minute morning break for the school's exercise dance. There are also twenty minute periods for cleaning time, when the students are responsible for many aspects of the school's upkeep, like sweeping, window washing, picking up litter, etc. It could be interpreted as child labor, but I think it gives them a sense of belonging to and responsibility for the school grounds and community. My favorite bit of the schedule is that lunch time also includes a 40 minute nap time period for students and teachers alike!

Weekly Mandarin: 14

14th edition: Jiao

This is what Weekly Mandarin is supposed to be like... I have learned about twenty traditional characters by now, all in the greetings and introductions chapter. But I actually got to use one of them yesterday.

I stopped by my favorite tea shop (the one where the lady already knows that I want honey green tea, so instead of having me butcher "fung me liu cha," she just asks if I want one or two cups). And the shop was all lit up, but the lady was no where to be found. So I looked around and found a piece of paper with some writing on it (at which point I think... uh-oh, I can't read). But I looked down, and I recognized what it said! It had the character "jiao," which means "call." So I called out "hello!" and the lady appeared. I couldn't have been happier. Not only did I get two cups of positively ambrosial tea, I actually got to use some of the Chinese I'm learning.

The Commies Are Coming... or not.

As opposed to my last apartment, where all planes heading into Reagan or Dulles flew over head, there are never ever any airplanes or helicopters over my apartment in Yilan. So, you can imagine my surprise when there were helicopters directly above my apartment the other day. And I was convinced it was because China was deciding they wanted the Renegade Province back and I was going to have to escape. My co-teacher thought that was funny.