We attended a local church today… I knew the tunes for a bunch of the songs, but probably only knew about five of the words in Chinese. God, Jesus, me, you, and heart. But when it comes down to it, isn’t that pretty much the core of it all anyway??
Chicken feet for lunch today. Unfortunately, they came chopped up so we didn’t get the whole talon experience. Better pictures next time, but here’s Jessica eating a toe. It doesn’t taste bad, though some people might not like having to suck the skin and flesh off the knuckles before spitting out the bones. Click the images to see them full size.
The people investing in the school welcomed us with dinner at a famous restaurant downtown. The menu listed “God steamed” and “Srnorked goose,” though we didn’t try them. Most of what we ate we couldn’t recognize, but it was really good. Lots of fresh seafood, too, including jellyfish served in enough wasabi to knock you off your chair. It was really good… in small bites.
Pretty much every meal we eat things we’ve never seen before, so we’ll just post about the most exotic.
I’m (Joel) on the lookout for duck feet and chicken feet. I (Jessica) am on the lookout for them as well, but not with quite as much fervor as Joel. There’s also this (in)famous dish called “stinky dofu” that is stinkier than whatever you’re imagining. Our Canadian boss calls it “the south end of a pig going north.” I have to try it, but it really is repulsive. The first time I smelled it I literally started looking around to see where the open sewer was.
We’ve had lots of wonderful things to eat as well. We’ve tried bubble tea (tea with tapioca bubbles that are about the size of a small bubble), duck, and several local specialties that I think will become favorites. Maybe we’ll have to post pictures, since they are somewhat difficult to describe. One is called a “fan tuan” which is some kind of crunchy spicy/sweet meat surrounded by sticky rice. And we also had this great stuffed pancake thing yesterday…it had a crispy dough skin that surrounded a mixture of yummy vegetables. And, there is a plethora of Thai food as well…we found a great place the other night right next to the stinky dofu stand.
We left the airport in Taipei around 7am. It was a foggy/smoggy morning. One of the first things we noticed was the population density. One of our sources describes Taiwan as the 2nd most densely populated country on earth. The streets and sidewalks are packed with cars, trucks, and motor-scooters, while every city block is packed to capacity with various businesses. Virtually impenetrable rows of parked scooters line the sidewalks – parking space is precious. The smallest buildings are 5 stories, and most are much higher. It seems every block shoves as much neon and otherwise lighted advertising Mingdaw (“ming-dao”) calls all this the “suburbs.” We have yet to see an actual house. The undeveloped hills outside the city were thick, solid green, like a jungle.
For those of you who have seen the 1980′s movie Gung-ho, about the Japanese company that takes over a Michigan auto plant and tries to make the Americans work like Japanese… that company dedication stuff is for real. One of the first things we saw driving away from the airport during the start of the business day was a Japanese car dealership with all their employees lined up facing the street behind the big display windows, bowing repeatedly in unison to the public. No yelling and screaming or ribbons of shame though.
We arrived on one of the days in the lunar calendar when people — especially merchants — offer meals, incense, and spirit-money to their ancestors. Little stands of nicely set meals with a handful of burning incense sticks dotted the sidewalks everywhere, along with special buckets for burning piles of spirit money.
Traffic here has been likened to river water flowing around rocks and trees. For every car or truck there must be 20 motor-scooters; all the road-space not used by cars is filled in with scooters. At red lights all the scooters weave up to the front and surround the first few cars before they take off in a pack race-like on the green light. A lot of people wear surgical-type masks if they are driving scooters or working outside (like in the SARS pictures). It’s also apparently a courtesy to wear one if you’re sick when out in public. They come in lots of different styles, too (including designer knockoffs from Burberry, Yves St. Laurent and others) – kind of like a clothing accessory.
Like the ice-cream trucks in North America, certain trucks here drive around with that kind of music, too, (Beethoven’s Fur Elise today) only they carry garbage, not ice cream. Also, the garbage truck music is quite a bit louder than the ice cream truck music – it’s to let people in their apartments know that it is time to bring down the trash.
Two competing schools down the street are called “Chocolate America Style School” and “Brown Sugar.” Our Taiwanese boss wanted to know if their elementary school was trying to make a reference to the Rolling Stones.
We’ve already frightened some little kids and made them cry. Three mothers and their children play in the downstairs reading room in our apartment building every morning, and we have to walk through to get to the street. We walked up and introduced ourselves the first day, and one of the little girls started wailing and wouldn’t stop ’til we left. The mothers got some good laughs out of our mangled Mandarin greeting attempt, though.
Hello friends and family! Sorry we’ve taken so long to post – we were waiting for our computers to arrive.
It’s been busy so far. We began working the day we got off the plane, getting the school ready for the first students, and haven’t had much time to go exploring yet – but there sure is a lot to explore! Last night we did an open house presentation for the parents of prospective students. The school contains a downstairs reception area and two upstairs classrooms, right across the street from a big park where people do everything from ballroom dancing lessongs to karaoke to tai-chi. It seems like the ballroom dancing lessons go on all day long, as we’ve seen people dancing at 9 am, noon, and 9 pm. Perhaps we’ll try to join them sometime and see if we can learn to dance… our permanent apartment (which we should move into sometime in the next few weeks) is two minutes away from both the school and the park – very, very convenient. We’ve also seen people taking a mid-afternoon nap on the cement benches in the park.
This weekend we’ll take a break and run around the city, Monday we start teaching, and the week after next is Chinese New Years. That means we’ll have a ton of pictures and hopefully some video to post really soon.
Jessica’s not having a birthday this year. We leave on the 13th, fly 20 or so hours, and arrive on the 15th. The 14th gets gobbled up by the International Date Line. I’ll be 6 months older than her when we arrive in Taiwan, rather than the other way around. Apparently she sees this as a good deal.
I can see why everyone wants to live in Southern California and the land value is unbelievably high… it’s like a Vancouver summer minus the rain all the time – you can be comfortable in t-shirts and shorts all day but not sweat.
There’s a beardless short-hair picture in the hair memories gallery.
We just got off the phone with the guy in Taiwan who’s setting up the school. He’s beginning to market it to parents and is really liking our whole live-video-converstation-over-the-internet-with-real-English-speakers idea. He wants to do it once a week. Apparently the competition hasn’t done this yet, and the parents’ #1 interest was developing their child’s English conversation abilities (#2 was good grades on exams, #3 was written English).
We’ll have high speed internet, webcams, and data projectors with screens in each classroom. We’re looking for people to beam into a class period to have a live conversation with the kids for 10 minutes or so. You’ll see and hear them, and they’ll see and hear you. We’ll record it and make them do all kinds of dialogue studies and practice.
We won’t have the technical details until we get there, but there are numerous free downloadable Skype-type programs that can do this. All you’ll need is a highspeed internet connection, a webcam with a microphone, and to install a free program from the internet. We’ll want the kids to speak with all kinds of different people: young, older, grandparents, kids, families, Sunday school classes, etc. If any of you are interested in doing this, just let us know! It will probably be several weeks before we actually set it up.
Also, while I’m thinking of it… if you have a website, please let me know so we can link to it. If we’ve already linked to you and you’d rather we didn’t, just let us know.
