Day In The Life

Ok, so I've realized that is all I really ever write about is our saweet weekend trips, never about my actual teaching and life here. Which is what we spend the majority of our time doing! So, luckily we are EXTREMELY busy..... probably the busiest i've ever been in my whole life. Which is really a blessing if I was bored out of my gored all the time life wouldn't be nearly as grand. But for the most part i'm at the school from 9:30 to 6:45 everyday. I've never worked this much in my whole life, and let me tell ya I get tired. Kudos goes out to you Mom and Dad, I can really appreciate and understand your hard life now. When we get done with school we usually go to the track and do some running. We're running a 10k in October and a half marathon in November which should be rather interesting.... But I'm super excited for it!

But as for my teaching it is so fabulous! Some days I would really like to strangle the children but then..... they pull out something absolutely ridiculous and I can't help but love them!

Example A: These children decided to start throwing water at each other while I was busy, I was going to get ticked at them and then they pulled faces like this. This seriously is the real-deal I took no part in these poses. Take a look at the gray shirt kid (Kerry) he put some water in his hair and was lookin fine. This kid is definitely going to be a major stud in about 10 years.

Oh and take a look at this video of Jimmy, the kid in pink. This kid is SUPER smart and knows not only knows a lot of English, he knows a lot of American songs..... Like backstreet boys.... ya their back in Taiwan, he also loves to belt out 80's love songs quite frequently.... He makes me love my job every single day. check it out here (p.s. I couldn't get the video to upload here so click on, check it out here and it will take you to it.

Next up is my 3A class which is the equivalent to a 5th grade class in the U.S. Can I just say that I absolutely adore these children! I swear I was not as clever as these kids are when I was in 5th grade! These kids know what is up, PLUS they can all speak fluently in English. They also do the funniest things, one of my favorite moments with them was while I was reading in one of their journal entries it said, "My teacher is very unpleasant because she is so loud and crazy." Hmmm.... thanks?

P.S. Dad do you see what our subject lesson was about for that day? Oh yes, VOLCANOES! Those kids know all about strato, shield, and cone volcanoes baby.

Meet Harry. I don't think i've ever had a greater love/hate relationship with a child before. Let me tell ya a little background on this kid.... he's new to the school and knows very little English. It can be quite the challenge with him considering he still doesn't recognize his English name.... ya getting this kids attention and having him stay on task in class is a JOKE. Sometimes I have to practice my best patience now to scream at him and then I look over and he's doing something like this. It's his favorite pose. All the kids will be sitting coloring or something and I'll look over, what's Harry doing? Meditating! He's hilarious, and when he does decide to pay attention it's a little too good and he literally will repeat, EVERY. SINGLE. WORD. That I say, which also is pretty adorable.

Oh and not to mention that getting Harry's attention is hard enough already, oh don't worry we have TWO harry's in the same class. He only ignores me all the more now, he now responds to his name..... but usually for the wrong reason.

Recently we've been doing a lot of home visits with the kids. Can I just say that these are the GREATEST! It's so amazing to get to go into people's home and really experience and be FULLY submersed in the culture here. It definitely is interesting.... like the food at this place.... a full fish ladies and gentlemen. I took some and lets just say I may have had a full mouth full of bones. They looked like they thought nothing of it, so I just sneakily tried to spit them out.... (uh didn't work so well)It's really interesting and I've come to realize that the Taiwanese are a messy people. Everywhere you go is a mess, they love to pile! It's really odd, and closets here.... what the hail is a closet? But needless to say it's always an interesting experience to go on home visits.

As for this weekend around here, we decided just to stay in ChangHua since there is alot of things here we haven't seen. So we went up the mountain to explore. We ran into this health market of sorts on the side of the street, it was cool there were loads of ladies dancing to some sick beats and tons of ladies getting pedicures, facials, and massages. We saw one lady with what looked like a nice mask and another who looked like she was getting a good face massage. We decided to try it... (plus I was so dang sweaty, notice the shirt, that I didn't dare put a massage person through my wrath) Uhhhhhh this "facial" was NOT what I was expecting..... The lady started out all nice and cleaned my face and such then she pulled out that string of DEATH! The freaking lady pulled out ALL of my facial hair, it hurt like the dickens!! But needless to say my face does feel real smooth and nice now but, so help me if I grow back black hairs on my face i'm gonna be t-o'd!

So now that we've been here for 2 months I think we're finally starting to miss American food a little.... At some point someone mentioned cinnamon rolls..... I don't love cinnamon rolls or anything but ever since then I couldn't get my mind OFF of them. So we made them.... in our toaster oven. You know what?!? They worked..... who would have thought. So Grandma Lila no more just toasting english muffins.... heck you could make Thanksgiving dinner with that bad boy!