I don’t see any big nose foreigners. Do you see any big nose foreigners?

No, there hasn’t been an outbreak of bird flu or SARS. But today we were sick with bad coughs and colds, and in Taiwan when you’re sick you wear a mask as a courtesy to everyone else. You don’t want people coughing and sneezing in crowded subways cars or all over their students in class. It’s not uncommon for people to wear masks while working, playing piano in church, driving, or just about anything. We don’t really notice them anymore when friends or co-workers wear them. I wasn’t sure how people would react with foreigners wearing masks, since I assume most foreigners don’t. But my students didn’t even seem to notice, and I was looking for a reaction from them.

Tomorrow morning we’re having one of our regularly scheduled practicum meetings, and Mingdaw has decided to combine it with a trip to a really big wet market that apparently has something distinguishing about it. It’ll sure be nice to get out!
 

The folks in Texas want a video asap, so I’ve gotta figure out how to do video. Recently realized we have editing software that came with the camera. Also figured out YouTube today. So the video stuff around here is all re-done; videos aren’t unedited anymore and you don’t have to download them. Just click the box.
Of the dozens of sword dancers we see every morning, these guys weren’t the flashiest, but this is a typical daily sight in our neighbourhood. That one older guy seems about 3 seconds behind though.

There’s new stuff on the video page, including some Chou-chou, and we have a YouTube channel. I’m still learning with the editing… I reduced the video quality too much on these ones but it was my first try. The next ones will be better, and they should be coming soon since we’re supposed to be sending something to Texas asap.

Once of the coolest things we ever did was live with a Taiwanese family for two weeks (when we were in Baton Rouge). That is such a good way to get to know people and learn. But this is not about one of the more important things we learned.

They showed us around their house when we first got there, and in the process showed us the bed in the master bedroom: plywood on cinder blocks covered with a sheet. We tried to get them to take some free mattress sets that we had access to (we were doing some hurricane relief work at the time). They were polite but seemed resistant, and we eventually gave up. I remember thinking, “Man, they must be in some tough financial times.”

But now, I don’t think it had anything to do with finances; I think they just like it that way. Why spend hundreds of dollars on mattresses when you could just cover a piece of plywood with a sheet and lay it on cinderblocks?

In Taiwan, hard is good. Hard is healthy. Spend the afternoon reading in the park… on a boulder. Better yet, take a nap on some rocks. We stayed in a furnished, temporary apartment our first two weeks here, and I thought we were sleeping on a boxspring. I was wrong – that was a mattress, and that’s how they like them. When we went to Ikea to get a bed for our apartment we tried lots of mattresses, and they were basically fabric-covered boxes. They had a few token soft ones – I guess for the wài guó rén.

It’s not like everyone sits on rocks all day. It’s just one of the little differences that pop up every once in a while – like drinking warmed water (and avoiding cold water) even on hot days or having soup with every single meal.

熱 (热) means hot. The heat index today was 42 (that’s 107 for you Americans). We leave here for the airport Wednedsay morning and arrive in Canada… Wednedsay morning, but 5 hours earlier. We’ll be teaching more Asian kids English in Canada for a month, have three weeks off, and then return to Taiwan. We’ll miss a lot of people and things, but not the heat!

It’s a small world, after all. Imagine a painting of “The Lost Son” parable set in Africa with African characters, and the text of the story pasted on top in Chinese. And your translator is Taiwanese but speaks English with a heavy Australian accent. Such was our night: We were N.Americans speaking partly through a Taiwanese guy educated in Australia to Asians about Africa (using a parable originally told by an Aramaic-speaking Jew but later recorded in Greek). I’m not sure what to think about all that, but it was a great night. Africa is about the most foreign place on earth for Chinese, so we had fun humanizing and spiritualizing it a bit for them.

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There’s an election coming up. That means the loudspeaker trucks have multiplied and we get free political toilet paper. It comes in plastic with the candidate’s face and name on it – almost enough for one trip to the can. We’ve got it twice in as many days, from different candidates. Mingdaw explained that many public restrooms in Taiwan just aren’t well-stocked, so it’s a very practical, cheap gift. I guess they don’t put much stock in associational conditioning (I made that term up for Pavlov’s dog and all that).

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In case anyone thinks we’ve been exaggerating about our first stinky doufu experience, here’s some supporting testimony from EatingChina.com:

Deliciously Malodorous
Chinese stinky tofu: love it or hate it, there’s no ignoring it.

…as we walked down the street …my father stopped in his tracks, spun around, mildly frantic, as if searching for the source of some impending disaster.

…smelly hardly seems an adequate adjective to describe the reeking power of this fermented bean curd. … It is roughly comparable to the smell of a fetid, open sewer anywhere on the planet, (though I have a friend who disputes this: he reckons you would never notice the smell of the sewer with a sticky tofu stall nearby).

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Steven Curtis Chapman – and his three adopted Chinese daughters – just sold out the Shanghai debut in his first Asian tour.

For almost every song he sang, the audience stood, sang and applauded. The concert was turned into a place of joy; a group of orphans from all over China also attended.

It turns out that he’s heavily involved in helping fund adoptions for orphans all over the world, especially China. Interesting how they first got involved with adoption.

Chou-chou here.

The big cats have gone to bed. I overheard them snickering and laughing a few minutes ago. When I got into their computer, I found… THIS!

I’m not sure whether to laugh, or cry, or go throw up now. In any case, I’ll be on my best behaviour for the next few days!

Hopefully we’ll have some info on this soon.

You can read about this surprise parade here:

• We thought it’d been dull lately…

There’s a video below the photo gallery. Scroll down to read or write comments!

 

… but the video we took today has a dancer outside the small temple where the parade stopped, standing over piles of burning spirit money and waving a battle axe.

Just when it seemed like nothing interesting had happened in a while, guess who comes parading down the street in a swarm of firecrackers while we were out buying toilet paper?

Uh, we’re still guessing. I asked Mr. Ling the security guard (literally): “Have two big person – their name?” but all we got out of him and his friend was that it’s called 八家将. I found a Wikipedia page on it – in Chinese – and also found out that those translation sites aren’t worth much for stuff like this.

But maybe you not getting an instant explanation to go with the pictures and video is good. No one hands them to us right away when we see stuff like this! We’ll post the Who’s Who when we find out.

For now, check out these pictures.

The cat bit and/or licked me around 5:30, 5:45, 6, and 6:15 this morning. My alarm clock went off at 6:45 for me to go exercise, and then the obnoxious carbon monoxide sensor went off again at 6:50. To make things better, it also started playing “You Are My Sunshine” at the same time because Mr. Ling and Mr. He at the security desk were calling to help us turn it off (in Chinese). Last time they said (through a bilingual passerby) just crack a window. Well, it’s been raining this week and we’ve had all the windows and the sliding door open for a few days. We can’t help it if the air outside is poisonous, too.

Anyway, it went off on its own even though I was aiming a fan at the alarm, which Jessica pointed out actually isn’t the sensor… that’s on the ceiling in the kitchen.

On the way back in from exercising I stopped to attempt a conversation about it with Mr. Ling and Mr. He. Through a not-so-subtle yet potent integration of limited vocab, horrendous accent, desperate grammar, alarm noise imitations, and charades I deduced that they were saying there’s an off switch on the sensor. Lo, and behold! I have now neutralized the previously ever-present threat of air-raid+You Are My Sunshine. Now if we can just muzzle the cat…

Yesterday, we finally received our ARCs (Alien Resident Certificates)…which means that our status as Alien Residents is now official (as if Philippians 3:20 wasn’t confirmation enough).

This means that we can now come and go without having to apply and reapply for visas, open bank accounts, be employed (we were legally employed prior to this, but this makes it legal for the school to directly hire us, rather than through the school in Canada), get a Blockbuster membership (so we can watch all of the “classics” that our boss recommends to us) and…..most importantly, get a LIBRARY CARD!

(Yes, we are Alien Resident NERDS…and completely unashamed of it.) :D

Other news tidbits:

This morning, we had a Mother’s Day brunch at the school….complete with North American breakfast foods such as muffins, pancakes, and a nice ham and egg breakfast casserole (Joel’s mom’s recipe). It was tiring, preparing all of that…but my experience as the Morris Dorm director with our “Dead Day Breakfasts” served me well! The kids sang songs for their moms, served them breakfast, and gave them flowers. Lots of fun…hopefully we’ll have some cute pictures and/or video to post soon.

We’re getting more chances to explore now that Joel’s classes are over and mine is winding down. Joel combines his MWF exercise with language lessons from the older people that use the chin up bars, and our local “fish soup” restaurant owners are turning out to be good friends and great cultural informants. I hope we can keep it up even when we start new classes in another few weeks!

The typhoon we thought we were going to get tomorrow changed directions and wound up in the Phillipines instead. Talking to our co-workers at the school about it, it seems like people here kind of view typhoons in the same way that North American kids and teachers view “snow days.” During a typhoon, you can’t go out….which means no school, and no work. For the hard-working adults and hard-studying kids here, a day off is a nice change. We’ll let you know if/when more typhoons come our way…