the second star to the right

today i found out that the other side of my window opens and it was cracked half an inch! that explains my mosquito issue. hopefully now that it's closed, my room won't be mosquito haven. naturally, as i wrote that, one flew right by my face.
these are pictures of cookie day that were on bobo's camera.

i take back what i said yesterday about wishing every day was monday. my tuesday classes are also pretty awesome. in my older kid class, they were learning 'lovely' and i had them make sentences and they said 'megan is lovely! ... and pretty and smart and funny' because that's what i always say to them. you can train kids to say anything if you say it enough times.
we also learned 'smarty' and 'frosting'. apparently there's no word for frosting in chinese. they just call it cream.

we played a really fun review game today where they had to unscramble pieces of paper with QAs written on them and then write the answer on a piece of paper. but some cards had 'cha cha cha x 20' or 'draw 50 stars' on them. my tiniest boy, kevin 2, got cha cha cha 20 times and he just stood up and shook his booty back and forth as fast as he could move his hips. it was hilarious. but his table got first place that round.
this week has been awesome because i've hit my 9 month mark, which is when they give you half of the money they withheld at the beginning. you aren't paid for the first 2 weeks and you get the first week back at 9 months and the 2nd week back at 1 year. so this week i'm being paid double for all of my classes. tonight when i went to the kuo's, mr. kuo was cutting a cake and i asked what it was for and he said mr. chen bought it for me. i asked why and he said because he loves me :P then he cut me a GIANT piece. old men. gotta love em.

i'm wondering what i should do to repay them though. i can't just give them cash. what do you give people who buy you cake and coffee all the time? or people who make you dinner for free 4x a week? they don't seem to be really into decorations or possessions.

p.s. look how cool these prints are
this is austin's. the text says.. SPEAK english • FLY 1,957 miles • EAT queso flameado • DRINK tasty margaritas • spend the whole evening listening, dancing and singing-along

so you think you're lonely

exciting news for anyone who remembers the best part of the '90s. american apparel brought hypercolor shirts back.
they're the ones that change color in different temperatures. they have about 5 or 6 different colors for $34 and it's exciting because you could sort of find them online before, but they always had stupid prints/logos on them.
exhibit A:
they're all over the blogs right now. apparently most people don't remember them as fondly as i do. this afternoon in the dorm we were discussing how it would be kind of embarrassing to wear them now that we aren't 13 because under your arms and your boobs will always be a different color.
exhibit B:
we had the most fun in my first class tonight. they're the perfect age where they're old enough that you can be sarcastic with them but they don't think you're lame. and jasmine is a lot of fun and she doesn't try to control my lesson but she helps me when i need it.and in my little kid class we had to help them with these little stories they're going to recite at our demo in a few months and we were telling them the words they didn't know. my kids were shocked and delighted to find out which chinese words i knew, which was fun for me.
we were playing a game where theyre standing in a circle drawn on the ground and if they lose the rock paper scissor, they have to ask a QA and their circle gets smaller. if you step out of the circle or if you touch the desk or whatever to keep your balance, you lose. carol and i played with the last 2 kids and when our circles got too small, we picked up the kids so their feet wouldn't touch the ground. it was a lot of fun. i wish every day was monday.

we found a wood, we unfound a wood

the classrooms at school are divided into two sections and they compete against each other a lot. when one team loses, the other team has some kind of punishment.
this can include..
-ask a QA (they memorize all of these prescribed questions & answers)
-cha cha cha which involved sticking your hands over your head and shaking your booty. they roll the dice and that's how many times they have to do it
-several variations on cha cha cha include 'kiss', 'monkey', or 'sexy cha cha cha'
-model show.. which is usually them walking like normal down the center aisle and then striking some kind of lame pose at the end

-pegouman pegou means 'hips' in chinese.. so they have to spell a word using their butts. it is so cute.

this week is backwards week so i wore my pajamas to class. it was really good until vivian dropped a dry erase marker from the whiteboard and the top flew off and black ink splattered all over my jammies.
none of my kids dressed up or anything so i had them all take off their shoes and switch and put on their jackets backwards or turn their shirts around. it was cute in my baby classes.

other than that.. mr. kuo was gone so it was just mrs. chan and i. she gave me another one of those sticky rice things on a banana leaf.. i don't think i mentioned that the other day actually. they gave me a traditional taiwanese food the other day that was sticky stuff that i later found out is made out of ground up grass of some kind, and then there's bamboo and meat filling.
today was the dessert version though. the sticky part on the outside was hot pink and it was filled with red bean and ginger or something. the sticky stuff had the consistency of like.. silly putty.

on the way home i went to a japanese place i had gone to with bobo a long time ago that i've been wanting to revisit. no one was there but the owners and their little boy.
we had a cute conversation. i'll put the chinese parts in italics
me: do you speak english?
kid: no
me: what's your name?
kid: my name is ben
then his mom and i spent 5 minutes figuring out what i wanted to order and i got to use my new vegetable words! ben sat down with me while i waited for my [delicious] soup.
ben: are you american?
me: yep. i'm from texas, you know?
ben: no, but dora is from america.
me: yeah that's right. does she speak english or chinese?
ben: she speaks a little english but mostly chinese because taiwanese kids wouldn't understand if she didn't. doraemon is from japan, do you like him?
me: i kind of like him. what language does he speak?
ben: chinese. i have lots of doraemon videos

and then my food came. i like ben. his dad kept telling him to leave me alone but he stopped once he saw that we had the kid/teacher connection going on.

ruby rises at dawn

i'm having a hell of a time concentrating to write this while i'm rocking out to the slumdog millionaire soundtrack. i've listened to it 4 times today. so good.
i think part of me might love it so much because it reminds me of this bollywood song on youtube where someone wrote what they thought it sounded like in english, though i think it's sung in hindi, and it is sooo funny.

well dawn and i went to the buddhist restaurant down the street to pick up lunch today. we went yesterday too. i'm not sure what you know about buddhist restaurants. i had never heard of them before i got here. but it's all vegetarian and it's pretty delicious. you can tell its a buddhist restaurant because it has a swastika on its side.
i'm addicted to the deep fried sweet potatoes and fried mushrooms. the sushi is the only kind i've found in taiwan without meat floss or pieces of hot dog or corn or tunafish in it. who thought it would be so impossible to find appetizing sushi in asia? i'm dying for the sushi off of 24th street in austin!
although my beloved japanese restaurant in taoyuan will be open again in 2 weeks. can't wait.
(i bought a bunch of new flashcards.)
jerry and i learned the rest of the vegetables in chinese today.. as well as meat, drinks and actions such as.. fall flat on your face, lie down, sit down, squat, cartwheel, handstand. you know, really useful stuff.

the best part of chinese was bobo teaching us this game taiwanese kids play where you each pick a kind of carrot. i was white carrot, she was red, jerry was purple. then one person says 'red carrot (hong luo bo), red carrot, red carrot, white carrot! and the white carrot does it with another color and you get faster and faster as you go. we played 3 times. her apartment complex has a blood pressure machine. my heart rate was kind of high because i had just been walking around.

class went alright. oh! i had to check over some essays they wrote for this contest that's coming up and i wrote down what one girl wrote about me. it's about lessons they've learned.
My foreign teacher - Megan. She is gentle and soft but she don't like when we say Chinese, so I study "respect". And Megan teaches QA and the New Century book. Although New Century is very difficult, but Megan is patient. I study "tolerant". Megan is a good teacher.

AWWWWWWW.
and my favorite girl, jane, asked about the carpenters song top of the world a few weeks ago so i printed out the lyrics for her today and made a CD with it and a bunch of my other favorite songs and gave it to her tonight.
that class can be really fun when they want to be. at least i can understand more of what they say since i'm learning more and more chinese. i just wish they would tryyy to speak english.

run so fast they can't even touch me

today was really good for no real reason other than the weather was beautiful and i felt really productive. this morning jerry woke me up after he came back from chinese at 11 and i felt rested and nice. headed to ali baba's to pick up mutton briyani for lunch which was soo good.
then i went to blockbuster to rent a movie for my movie day on thursday. i decided on big daddy. i've watched ratatouille in 2 classes now and i think it's kind of babyish for them. there were 2 women working there and one of them was literally crouched down behind the counter so i couldn't see her ... it was weird.
i tried to ask this little shop if they had green tea. they didn't.. but thenn i saw a tea shop across the street so i went over there to order iced green tea with a little sugar and a little ice and the woman said my chinese was very good! that makes my whole day.

came home and colored my stickers and then i had 2 really good classes with my fun kids who i enjoy so much. the kids in my first class were trying to gauge my chinese skills before class started, asking me all sorts of random words. in my second class, kevin 1 was testing me on fruit during the break and then he tried to teach me some animals.
tonight i headed to jerrys and made mom's crepes. we filled them with whipped cream and butter or apricot jam or sliced up nectarines. they were pretty yummy. alex had never even had a crepe before which is beyond my comprehension.
at my house, they're what we have for breakfast on special occasions. my friends were always excited for my sleepover birthdays because they knew we'd have crepes in the morning. and we have them on christmas and lazy sundays. so easy.
i followed the recipe i posted yesterday but without upping the measurements and it needed more than a cup of milk.. although i eyeballed it so maybe i just didn't initially add a cup. it should be thinner than normal pancake batter so you can swirl it around the pan after you ladel some in.

ps i just downloaded the slumdog millionaire soundtrack and even if you haven't seen the movie, you should check out the soundtrack. it is so good.

pps game of the week (straight from jerry): writing their QAs in acronym form and then giving them 5 minutes to figure them out without their QA books (2 pts each) and then 5 minutes when they get to look at their books (1 pt each)
WIT? .. where is taiwan?
WCSYB? .. what color suits you best?
WDYUASF? .. what do you use a spoon for?

ok ONE MORE thing. look at how cute tastespotting is today with st. patrick's day everything. i totally skipped it this year. i don't even own any green stuff.

he's a tramp, but they love him

i woke up to it being pretty warm in here at 27 C. what is that? somewhere in the high 70s? 80. then it was lovely all day until i got done teaching my first class at 6 and i walked by an open door and it was FREEEEZING. my thermostat says it's 18 in my room right now but it's reaaally cold outside. wunderground says 11 (52) right now and a high of 14 (57) tomorrow. BRRR.

i'm in a slump this week. i've been contemplating what to do after my contract is up in july and there seem to be too many options with no clear frontrunner.
be an au pair in europe
teach in taoyuan another year
teach in another city in taiwan
teach in another country
go to grad school for something environmental
try to find a job in austin
go back and get a teaching certificate and teach at a real school in the US
the problem is that i think i realized where my teaching limits lie. yesterday when my kids couldn't read and i didn't know how to help them, i remembered that i'm not a real teacher. we aren't trained, we don't know effective teaching strategies, and any success we have is pretty much based on luck and natural gifts and talents. ..so the idea of "teaching" more kids doesn't sound reaaaally good.

although today my classes were really good in terms of the level of fun. my first class had a lesson that involved some kids making a snow man, so i brought in this little blow up snowman we had in the dorm and had them write a new vocab word on a piece of paper, make a ball out of it and then they had to hit the snowman, pick up a ball and make a sentence with the word inside. it was fun/crazy.
in my second class, we're learning how to describe people and things so i gave them each a page of a magazine with someone on it and they had to describe their person while the class guessed which one it was. i think we were all excited to use materials that didn't come from the red book. it can get really old.
the lesson tonight is..
tom: who is that new boy?
sandy: which boy, tom?
tom: that fat boy
sandy: oh, that's billy briggs.
teacher: open your desk and give me that apple, billy!
billy: i'm sorry, miss williams. i am hungry.

awful!

so far, we are so close

a couple of stories.
i'm always starving halfway through jr. high class so today i went and got the usual green tea and then i also picked up some cut up bell fruit from family mart. their sushi triangles don't have pictures like 7-11's do, so i didn't get one.
anyway then as i was on my way to my scooter i saw a little stand where i thought i could get a plain white rice, but it was a sushi place and they didn't have any boxes so i just decided to get a sushi roll. i was all excited that i knew the name for the japanese stuff i like.. but the girl talked me into getting some kimchi too and it ruined it. we communicated pretty well though. victory there.
my lesson was supposed to be about food and restaurants today, and i didn't really know how i was going to fill 2 hours so i made up an 'identify the mystery substance' game for them. i was feeling pretty good about my lesson actually until i showed up to class and they all had the lesson 4 work sheets printed (that's supposed to be for next week) since they had lesson 3 last week but we did a review so i had them hold onto them for this week.
so i ended up teaching a lesson i had never read or looked at or anything. it was all about drinks so it kind of worked out. i just tweaked it.
then i gave a test in my first regular class and i was eaten aliiiive by a swarm of mosquitoes for 2 hours. the kids had a hard time concentrating because i was swatting randomly with my book.

my second class is really, really bad. the coteacher has them recite the lessons even though they can't read so today i had them read some words on the white board and they couldn't identify 'the' or 'way'. i need to figure out how to catch them up. one kid was looking at the word 'matter' and said some 1 syllable word that started with D. HELLOOOO!
the lessons are always the same more or less but you have to think of a new game every week. this week they have to ask a question and then i put a ping pong ball on the lip of the white board and they have 10 seconds to blow it to the edge of their opponents side.

and i've been playing a reading game where i read a sentence in their book like normal and they race to find it and read it backwards. since they do so much reciting, they can all just recite every sentence in the book so having them read backwards makes them actually read the words.

emil and derek had a going away party tonight so i'm behind schedule. time to dry my hair and get going.
natalie, me, emil, bobo, anisa and alex

you'll be wed in a dilly dilly dress

i've listened to the following artists/CDs at least 10 times each in the last 2 weeks.
oren lavie/the opposite side of the sea
andrew bird/armchair apochrypha
eisley/room noises
kate havnevik/melankton
loveeee them.

almost as much as i love my jr high class. they may be 13/14/15 but they seem just like my friends. the teacher moved their chairs around so they wouldn't be as apt to talk.. that didn't reaaaally work. the worst part is that i used to have their names down based on location and now i have to start over again! this week i picked up willie, amy, robbie, jim and amy. i keep forgetting my favorite girl's name. she sits right up front now though, so it won't be too long.

they asked interesting things over the break. amy 2 wanted to know if they think hair color 'is more important' in america. and they wanted to know how i order the tea i bring to class.. do i point? do i look at the english menu? no. chinese! [wo xiang yao yi zhong bei bing de lu cha. yi dian dian tang]. my favorite girl observed that i always get green tea.

today was a review day so we did some little plays and then the second half was a pub quiz with facts we've learned the last 2 weeks. it was hard but lots of fun. i love that they all say hi and goodbye to me and they say 'megan' a lot which is so much better than 'teacher, teacher!'. i feel like i was just their age, it's weird that i'm 10 years older.

tonight we had a demo in my second class so i didn't get to hang out with the kuos but i did go say hi and they had food on the table waiting for me, so i took it to go and ate it quickly before my second class. they take good care of me, i'm really lucky to have them in my circle here.

the demo went so well. a few things went wrong (like asking them to spell umbrella. duh! they can't even spell 'dogs') but the whole thing showed how much fun we have in class and i was wearing my power teacher shoes so i felt like i was representing myself well.

then when we got out, it was raining cats and dogs but luckily i remembered to bring a change of shoes so i wouldn't ruin my pretty shoes/wouldn't have to wear them for all 4 hours that night and i had my rain pants. when you're properly equipped, it's actually kind of fun to drive in the rain. crazy trying to keep your balance while you wipe your visor with your left and and steer/accelerate with your right hand.

stopped at the thai place to pick up panang curry on the way home and i was drenched because it's at the halfway point. last time they charged me $150 and this time it was $130, so we're making progress.

2 things to think about:
free rice added categories to their website. now you can do the traditional vocab or math, periodic table, a bunch of foreign languages (unfortunately no zhongwen), and my favorite, countries on a map. good practice for the pub quiz. i'm at 2,730 grains today. lots of free time..

Let us assume you met a rudimentary magician. Let us assume he can do five simple tricks--he can pull a rabbit out of his hat, he can make a coin disappear, he can turn the ace of spades into the Joker card, and two others in a similar vein. These are his only tricks and he can't learn any more; he can only do these five. HOWEVER, it turns out he's doing these five tricks with real magic. It's not an illusion; he can actually conjure the bunny out of the ether and he can move the coin through space. He's legitimately magical, but extremely limited in scope and influence. Would this person be more impressive than Albert Einstein?

beautiful things spring from these rows

random pictures for an otherwise pictureless day.
brother jeff and i rockin' out on his guitars. we called everyone we could think of so they could listen to me play the beginning of smoke on the water. it must have been more than 20 people.

when i went down to the basement to get my scooter to go to chinese this morning, who was there waiting for me? jerry. funny how things work out. when i first got back from tx and he was living in the dorm, i had to guilt him into giving me a ride. i guess it's no secret that he has a little crush on me. i didn't even mention the love poem to you. there's the card, 3 poems and the cd.
this is my living room in my old apartment. i miss curling up on that chair.

it's always been interesting to me how guys court girls differently based on the girl. jerry isn't really a good example because he's a writer, so the poems are sweet but not out of character. but nearly everyone i've dated has made construction paper cards and done the cutest, most personalized things for my own personality. it's been really sweet.
anyway i guess jerry is wearing me down because i'm thinking twice about the sparkle. how many times can someone tell you you look pretty that day before it starts to get to you? and he's just genuinely a nice, creative, good person.
christmas cookie decorating party 2007. that was a fun time. our kitchen counters were filled to capacity with cookies, it had to overflow to the living room.

so it's been really humid outside and my naturally wavy hair was just feeling gross and too long, so i got a hair cut today. only one woman at this teeny little beauty salon spoke english, so she translated to the woman who was cutting my hair and then left us to pantomime. the woman did a pretty good job but it just ended up a lot shorter than i had envisioned. she kept cutting off half an inch and then layering and then thinning with this razor and then cutting again. i think i lost something like 3 inches total and now it falls around my collar bones.
an approximation.. this was june 08 but it's close. that was an unusually good hair day. oh texas, how i miss your lack of humidity.

it was kind of funny though because they kept passing me around. one woman cut my hair, one woman washed it, then one woman dried it a little, #1 dried it a little more, #2 dried it a lot more and then #3 came over and fluffed it up and gave me miss america bangs. what is it about hair dressers feeling the need to tease the heck out of your hair?
bec and i at the lake in our sun hats circa 2006 or 7.

class was crazy tonight. we learned.. khaki, gold, silver, teal, periwinkle, maroon, baby blue, neon orange/green/yellow/pink, dark, light and brights.. in my first class. they were just going insane the whole time. they were also learning words for rooms in a house, which i learned in chinese today, so we did megan speaks chinese, they speak english. they were reaaaally excited to hear my chinese since i've never used it with them.

in my second class, we played a fun game with flashlights since the lesson was about things in the night sky and i wanted a reason to turn the lights off. they were screaming so loud at one point that someone came to make sure we were ok.
this book was on some food blog and i just think it's funny that it's called Megan Hearts Baking and the girl looks like me. you'd be surprised how many fictional Megan's have brown hair. look how multicultural my friends are.

time to read!

with musical names and musical sounds

i'm using too much brain power arguing with jerry about how intelligent people should use their intelligence to write this right now. i couldn't explain the outcome of that argument if i wanted to.

well today was really good on all accounts. is it 'in' or 'on' all accounts? waitttt, it's actually 'by' all accounts.. i think being an english teacher in a foreign country actually makes you worse at your native language. i've learned to only use words my kids have learned and phrases like 'bye bye your books' even though i guess i've held on to 'put away your books, please and take out your...'. i've caved with things like 'one time' which means 'someone already asked that, ask a different question' and .. there are millions of them, i just can't think of any right now. i'll work on that.

anyway my little kid classes went by super quickly without a hitch and we even had fun in my horrible, no good, very bad jr. high class. i had them unscramble sentences and write them with pieces of spaghetti and they actually got into it. that class is usually so challenging. i tried to play a game last week where they ask a question and then toss a marker and try to get it to catch on the lip of the white board.. but the kids would just throw all 4 markers at once or throw them at the middle of the board.
when it's a choice between having a small amount of fun or being totally lame and not participating, why do teenagers choose to be lame? groupthink is so powerful. when i was their age, i just humored the teacher because i was quiet and i'm a goodie two shoes, what can i say.

today i had 2 boys in there who just flat out said no to me when i asked them to do something. i felt completely helpless at that point, as i have no real punishment to dole out. i just held up the rest of class and stood there until they did what i had asked.

then tonight, a whole bunch of us went out to this bar down the street. carly, steph, chris, danille, jerry, jon, josh, katie, mike and steve and i went. so much fun. i was the first one to walk through the door and the entire club stopped talking and looked over at us as we paraded in. we played dice games, sang along with the bad renditions of english songs, and mingled with a group of reeaaaally drunk taiwanese people. we had a great time. now it's 5am, i've argued with jerry for 2 hours (and won, i'd say), and it's time for bed.

breeze driftin' on by

let's do the bad news first.
jerry and i went to the tax office this morning and we fill out this big complicated form while this woman with a lazy eye barks directions at us in limited english, and i made the mistake of saying one word in chinese and then she switched to chinese for most of the rest of it. anyway she comes back with one thing for me to sign and a whole bunch of stuff for jerry and she just says 'you, no refund,' to me and then gives jerry all this stuff.

let's backtrack. we're taxed 20% of our income all year and then we file taxes at the end of the year. if you're in the country for at least 183 days of the calendar year, you get it all refunded. if you're not, you don't get any of it back.
i calculated my vacation so i'd be in the country exactly 183 days. what they didn't tell me is that the day you arrive in the country doesn't count. so i was really 181 in the taiwanese government's eyes. so i lost all of that money :(
i think it only amounts to like.. let's see. $606 US. which is less than i would have paid at home, i suppose. but i was/am still a little bummed.

all of my good news is chinese related.
-this morning jerry and i went to chinese and i really retained what we had learned a week ago before vacation. i spoke chinese all day to everyone and it was great. and joyce has no school for 2 weeks while she's on new year's vacation, so she sat in my lap for half the class and just hung out.

-in my first class, i played colors of the wind from pocahontas for them and had them write down the words they recognized. jennifer won with 22.
i never realized how tacky and overdone disney songs could seem if you hadn't seen the movies. my kids cracked up through all of the dramatic parts.

they wanted one more try so i played michael buble's version of 'feelin good' which is easier because he sings the words really clearly and relatively slowly, and jennifer won again, this time with 37.
i couldn't find any working links to that song on youtube, but you should go search for it. that's the best song. they thought all of the really big jazzy band parts were pretty funny.

-in my little kid class, they were learning 'koala, bear, giraffe, tiger, lion and panda' and i said english and they had to say chinese. after that, carol said 'ok megan will say chinese and you say english' and she remembered that i don't speak chinese when she saw the look of horror on my face. so she decided to go with it anyway and whispered the chinese in my ear and then i repeated it.

the thing is that chinese is hard enough at full volume, but it's nearly impossible in a whisper. so at one point i was trying to say 'bear' and ended up with 'comb' [same words, different tones] which sent my class into 3 minutes of unstoppable giggling. it was sooo funny.

-i stopped by the japanese restaurant on the way home. they were closed basically, but they still made me tempura shrimp and mushrooms to go and it was soo good. the chef asked me a bazillion things in chinese but i only caught about half of them.

i asked sara how to say 'full' when i'm at the gas station, and she filled me in. i need to think of a thank you for them staying open late.

we got new people in the dorm tonight. kaylie/caylie? and stephano, who introduced himself as 'steph' the second time around. she has purple hair and he wears skinny jeans. i only talked to them for 2 seconds so we'll see how it goes later in the week.

3-in-1

it wont let me change around the order of my photos so here's the back of my new (old) scooter..

here's the side.. notice the new basket they put on it for me
it's only 50 cc's so it's pretty tiny, but it works. it has a lot of get up and go.

this is my new coat.. this is just the outside part
this is just the lining. the downy part..
and this is both of them, all poofy and warm

we went to japanese for dinner and i think 2 glasses of sake really warmed me up. it's still pretty chilly outside and in my room, but i feel really warm.

taught my outside class this morning. it was a review day so we played a bunch of games. we played a dating game that was pretty fun. i came up with lots of 'either-or' questions, they all had to write down their answer and then someone got up in front and read theirs one by one and everyone sat down as their lists differed. so it was like cat/dog, pizza/chicken, cake/ice cream, hot/cold. it was fun. i was pretending to be a game show host with my hand as a microphone until someone pointed out that we had a real microphone, but it freaked me out to hear my own voice radiating from the ceiling, so that didn't last long.

time to dry my hair, mingle, and go to sleep. i have to get up early tomorrow to register my scooter at the govt office.