Places I've Been 9: Kenting

This past weekend was the Dragon Boat Festival. Holiday traditions include watching or competing in dragon boat races and eating sticky rice dumplings or zong zi. The story goes that a famous poet Qu Yuan was upset with a change in politics during the Zhou Dynasty and committing suicide by throwing himself in the river. The local townspeople who admired him threw food into the river so fish would not eat his body. This is why we eat zong zi. Many people supposedly raced out to retrieve his body or scare away schools of fish, which is the reason for the dragon boat races. While the reasons are lovely, the best part is that we had a four-day weekend!

Three friends and I decided to hop on a train and head down to Kenting and Kaoshiung for the weekend. We boarded the high-speed rail at 8am, and one and a half hours later were on the southern side of the island in Kaoshiung. It is the second largest city in Taiwan. From there, we hopped on a bus for the three-hour drive to Kenting National Park. The park covers the entire southern tip of the island. It a very popular beach destination, mostly I believe because it is warm year-round.

By 1pm, we were in Kenting. We jumped off the bus and rented our scooter. It’s bring your own transportation in Kenting, so I finally got my chance to drive a scooter!I think all skip over the part about my jumping on a scooter without knowing how to drive one and the antics that followed.

After some relaxation and night market snacks, we drove out to the lighthouse, which is the southernmost part of the island. I was just proud that I made it form one edge to the other in a day. We drove out there the next morning, and driving back on an empty highway along the coast might be my new definition of happiness. I even had a little pink helmet!

We spend an afternoon on the beach where I learned some new things. Many Taiwanese people don't know how to swim. I have found this curious because it is an island. As westerners, we had to explain our summer being dropped off at the neighborhood to endure a morning of swimming lessons taught by some teenage life guard. I did however see one father pick his kid up and throw him into the ocean, and I thought "See that's how you learn to swim!" Your dad throws you unwillingly off the deck. It might be cruel, but it worked.


Trip to the lighthouse in the dark.



Oh yeah..looking cool!






Jealous yet?



At the lighthouse!

Side Note on the Chinese Language

I saw two interesting articles on the Chinese language I thought I would share.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/world/asia/21china.htmlThe first is about trying to restrict unique family names in China. One Interesting fact, "By some estimates, 100 surnames cover 85 percent of China’s citizens. Laobaixing, or “old hundred names,” is a colloquial term for the masses. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans."

I even have two students with the same English name, so I have Big Gary Chen and Little Gary Chen.

The second article discusses simplified versus traditional characters. I live in Taiwan where we only use traditional characters.

Episode 9: A Day in the Life

Currently, I am in the midst of about three months of subbing kindergarten. I thought I might give you an idea what a typical day is like.

7am: Sleep through three alarms before finally admitting I do indeed have to go work.

8am: I walk to work through the day market, which is already in full swing at 8am. I pass and wave at certain vendors. People drive up on scooters buying cong chua bing, a breakfast pancake, or drive up to the meat vendor who has every part of the animal hanging from hooks on his cart. I pass by the fish vendor who has fish on ice in baskets on the road and the fruit stand selling types of fruit that I didn't know existed six months ago. I pass the cages full of chickens, which you can purchase and have plucked fresh. While crossing the street, I zig and zag, and I am almost hit by 2 – 4 scooters. You enter a zen like state when crossing the road or walking in the street.

I walk by at least four 7-11 stores on the way to work even while walking in the back alleys (to unsuccessfully avoid scooters and buses). Have I mentioned that I can do everything at 7-11? Even pay all my bills.

8:30am: Clock in at work and run around the corner to the breakfast shop. There are perhaps three to four breakfast shops on any street. There are four within about 50 feet of my building. I pass about 8 on my way to work. I get a breakfast sandwich and a drink for $1. (Why wouldn't I eat out?) I collect my thoughts and experience the last few moments of calm before walking up to kindergarten.

9-11:30am: I spend the morning teaching kindergarten This includes exercise time, snack time, teaching English and some other activities. When I do exercise time, I use French songs. Seeing about 100 kids sing in French always makes me happy. They don’t even understand it’s not English. We go over the basics like ABCs, numbers and spelling. However, the kids learn fairly advanced sentence patterns about different themes, Growing, Performing Arts, Foreign Countries.

Kindergarten also includes breaking up fights, crying, disciplining, and finding my “happy place.” Kindergarteners like to ask a lot of questions. I really wish we had never taught them the phrase, “What are you doing?”

Eric: Teacher Beth, look at me!
Me: Do I really have to?

Frank: Teacher, may I blow my nose?
Me: You’re almost six years old Frank, you don’t really need to ask at this point.

Teren: Teacher, may I go to the bathroom?
Me: No you’ve asked four times in 45 minutes.
This child will then pout, cry, and not speak to me for the next 2 hours.

I like kindergarten because I find them a bit more interesting than students who take English only twice a week. The kids are very confident and love to converse unlike my shy students who are in elementary school. Plus there is the unconditional love, which is great.

11:30am: I grade the previous nights homework while yet again trying to decide what I want for lunch. Should I eat out of 7-11? No, that’s probably not a good idea again. Fried rice? Again? Dumplings? Again? Mostly we eat street food, which can be better than anything you would find on the streets in the states.

12:30pm: At this point, I’m done for a while, and either I grade all afternoon and run errands or head home for some rest, to study Chinese, or a possible nap.

3:30pm: Head back to the school. The breakfast vendors and shops are now all closed, and new lunch and dinner vendors are open. Many times they just share the same space and put away their carts. Scads of Taiwanese children walk along the streets in their sweat suit uniforms. It’s like seeing 1,000 children all on the same basketball team in their sweatshirts and sweat pants. They all head to the tea shops and vendors who sell fried chicken and custard cakes.

4pm: Plan for two more classes that night as tons of kids start to flood into the building, kindergarteners leaving and the elementary students arriving. I run and grab my own snack from the market behind the school. It's hard to get things ton as lots of kids try to get your attention. I can't even imagine the number of times a child yells "Teacher Beth" at me in one day.

5-7pm: Teach for two hours, usually a younger class.

7-9pm: After a twenty-minute break, I teach another class of slightly older students.

9pm: Grade a few workbooks and leave. I stop at the grocery for supplies, then walk through the market by my house. It is now a full-fledged night market with vendors selling soups, noodles, meat, and vegetables. Everything is much cheaper than the supermarket and usually looks better. If I’m really tired, I just buy a dinner to go from a street vendor for about 2 dollars.

9:45pm: Get home, eat dinner, relax, and prepare to do it all over again the next day.


This is what the market looks like on my way home.

(Oh yeah, then I have to be at work at 8am on Saturday mornings.)

Episode 8: On Chinese--Ni hao ma?

Now that I've been here awhile, life really isn't all that different form back home. I go to work, get dinner with friends, go shopping, normal stuff. The one major difference is it all happens in Chinese. While things look very familiar, every once in a while I am reminded that I am illiterate in this country. I can now fill out my bank deposit form, but it is a bit humiliating to walk into a bank or any office and realize someone has to help you fill out the form. Sometimes large official notices, stamped with red ink, go up in my apartment building. I look and think, "Huh, I wonder if that is important, meh oh well." The vocabulary needed to live in a country is not included at the beginning of a language course. I could say "I want a bank transfer" before I could say "My name is Beth."

I have now been learning Chinese seriously for about three months. For many months I just sort of got buy with an awkward system of pointing and saying that, not that, no don’t want that, yes that! Not knowing Chinese is most difficult when it comes to ordering food, as there are few English menus in Xin Zhuang. (Although, god bless whoever thought picture menus were a good idea!) I also tend to favor brands that put pictures on their products. Hmmm, there is a picture of a window, so this must be glass cleaner. There is a picture of clothes, I wonder if this is detergent or bleach…let’s find out!

So now I take Chinese from a friend of mine at a nearby Subway. My greatest accomplishment is that I can now adequately order at Subway. At first, you walk in thinking great western food this will be easy. But do you know all the words for Italian bread, honey wheat, turkey, ham, tuna, lettuce, tomatoes, olives etc… No you don’t. That’s when the panic sets in. Subway is supposed to be easy! (IKEA was supposed to be easy to, but everything was in Swedish or Chinese.)

So for those of you who don’t know Chinese has four tones—one is high pitched and flat, the next goes from low to high, the third high to low to high, and the last from high to low. One word can be said four different ways and therefore have for different meanings. When first starting out, I heard simply, ma, ma, ma, ma. No difference. I’m getting a little better, but it’s still really confusing.

Of course then there are the characters. Now, we already have one sound “ma” four tones and four characters. Depending on the tone it could be horse, mother, or the question particle. Well then add the fact that one sound can have two characters with different meanings. This is when I usually cry “No fair!”

Learning Chinese however, has made me much more understanding of why my students make the mistakes that they do. There is no be verb before adjectives, so in Chinese I simply say “I hungry.” There is only one word to refer to the notion of “I.” However, in English, we have I, me, my, mine. There are no articles such as a, an, and the. The syntax is also every different. In Chinese, you would say “ni qu na li?” – “you go where?” However we say, ‘Where are you going?’ (Well an the present continuous tense is really quite silly but that’s a whole different discussion.) The same is true for ‘this is what’ instead of “what is this.” Unfortunately, I now speak more like the kids, which I think is in fact the opposite of what should be happening.

Me: “Karen?”
Kids: “Karen no here.”
Me: “Why Karen no here?” Oops… “Why is Karen not present?”

Trying to string a sentence together is Chinese is still difficult because as soon as I’m not looking at a book I forget every tone. However I do really like the puzzle aspect of Chinese. It seems quite logical (minus the characters with 10+ strokes.) Each character is like a syllable while some function as words.

Fragrant + water = perfume
Safety + hat = helmet
Hit + fire + machine = lighter
Mouth + water = spit
Early + food = breakfast
Outside + country + person = foreigner
Fire + chicken = turkey (Okay, so not all of them make sense.)

So I'll keep working at it. I'm at the point where I can ask lots of questions, but won't have a clue what someone says when the respond.

Places I've Been 8: Tainan--Don't Mess with Matsu

About a month ago, I jumped on the High Speed Rail and headed down to Tainan with a friend. Tainan is on the other side of the island but the HSR allows us to get there in 2 hours. Tainan is the fourth largest city in Taiwan and the oldest. The Chinese first settled there at the end of the 16th Century, and the Dutch soon followed. It's mostly known as the land of temples. However, we discovered it was the land of temples, hair salons, and wedding photography studios. I think we saw roughly 75 wedding photo studios. (They are a big deal in Taiwan apparently.) In short, if you need wedding photos head to Tainan, there are plenty of places to get your hair done before hand.

We mostly bummed around in the sunshine looking a big temples and forts. We did walk over to see the Taiwan straight, which might be ask close as I get to China.












Really, all I need is information or a place to complain.



At the Anping Matsu Temple. It has one of the oldest statutes of Matsu in Taiwan.



Carnival type market outside of the largest Matsu temple.







Classroom at the first Confucius temple in Taiwan.

Just the Facts or Just the Maps.....

So if I'm going to talk about different places on the island, I might as well put up a map to help you guys out. First, Taiwan in comparison to the rest of Asia. Second, a close up of the island. I live just southwest of Taipei in Taipei County. Taipei is still very close to the ocean. We can be at the coast in about an hour of hour and a half.



So I live on a tiny island in the middle of Asia in the South China Sea.



Taiwan is apparently slightly smaller than Maryland and Delaware combined. There are also 23 million people, so you know things get crowded. It is technically a part of the Republic of China (R.O.C.). I live in Xin Zhuang, which is somewhere between Taipei and the CKS Airport. I've been to Haulien on the east coast and Tainan and Anping on the West coast.




So there's Xin Zhuang or Sinjhuang, however you want to spell it. All of the districts are Taipei city. It's pretty easy to get into town. I hop a bus and take the MRT from Banciao.

I'm going to try to post a few more things about Taiwan. I didn't know anything about Taiwan before I came, so I'll try to share what I've learned.

Six-Month Anniversary

As of today, I've been living in Taiwan for 6 months. (The picture is from my first week before I headed out to Xin Zhuang.) There was a time when I did not see myself making it to 6 months. A friend was exactly right, when they said if you get past 5 months, things just start to go okay. Have I changed at all? Maybe. Have I learned a lot? Definitely.

The contrasts were much more stark at the beginning. Now, the night market and food stalls are normal. A family of four on a scooter isn't surprising. Seeing a dog riding a scooter isn't shocking. Okay, it's still a little shocking. Yesterday, one was riding on the scooter without a leash. How does the tiny dog have such good balance? I don't even have that good of balance. (Although I should stay away from scooters altogether. A few weeks ago, and I managed to barely brush by one of the street, which is where the park, knocked it down. It then knocked over the one next to it. So yes I knocked over two scooters while walking home.)

I speak more Chinese than I did before, which isn't saying much since I arrived with zero. I didn't even have a guidebook. I was a little ill-prepared actually. My chinese is so limited, I still can't tell the difference between Taiwanese and Chinese, but I'm okay with that. When I got back from Japan, it was actually comforting to be around Chinese. I don't speak Chinese or Japanese, but at least Chinese sounds familiar.

My tiny apartment does feel like home as I discovered returning after the Chinese New Year holiday. I'm used to my neighborhood, but that didn't stop the surreal moment I had last week when I thought, "Wait I live where?" While I have my moments, it surprises me how quickly a place can start to feel familiar.

That's all for now, I'll keep future posts a little less me-centric.