A Post for Monday

Oh man, sorry that it's Tuesday at lunch, but I was so tired when I got home last night, and I was going to still blog, but the internet wasn't working.

Anywho, Nancy and I went for our run in the morning, and then we went to get steamed buns for breakfast, sorry, we got "tsai bao" for breakfast and then pasted a vegetable stand so I could pick up some carrots so I would have something healthy in the house to snack on.

Teaching went okay. My alphabet hunt was fun for the kids, then we had to practice the plays for graduation. That is not going to be easy to get them ready by the 14th of June. But, it's got to be done and I'm the one to do it. Let's just see how it goes. My last class rocked though. I taught about the carnival, and I had a powerpoint with lots of pictures and then we played carnival games. During class, if they were good, they got a token to go to the carnival and then I set up a ball toss and the set up a mat so they could jump through a hoop and onto the padded mat. They LOVED it, of course. The funny thing is, for the first session of that class, I rushed through the powerpoint because I was running out of time and I wanted them to go to the carnival. So I hurried up, and we had 5 minutes to play carnival games. Then I said "thank you class" which is the cue that class is over. The kids lined up and it took Teacher Jane (the Chinese teacher) a while to tell me that I had ended 15 minutes early. Ooops! I had them sit down and answer questions about what we had just learned and handed out carnival tokens again and played carnival for 5 more minutes before I let them out for reals.

At lunch time Nancy and I went down town to check out camera prices. We've done a bunch of camera shopping, but we were focused on the one camera. We've now moved past the dream of owning the water proof, shock proof, klutz proof camera and now we were looking for just a small, cheap one with a big screen. It turns out that things in Taiwan aren't really that cheap. The cheapest camera we found was $75, but it looked pretty cheap too. I might just pick up one that is small, light, and has a big screen, but it's $120. I don't know, we'll see. I wonder if Thailand has cheap cameras and I should just wait, or if Thailand's cheap cameras would also be nock-offs and it's not worth it. Any thoughts on that one? Leave me a comment about it, I'd appreciate it!

After school I had tutoring, but the boy forgot his book so we had to go find him another one. The one we read was one with lots of repetition, and I think we should stick to those. He would get the hang of it being the same beginning sentence sometimes, but other times he would forget and struggle through the words. But on Friday we'll work in his school workbook, so it doesn't matter if he brings his book or not because we won't read it. I then had a tutoring class, and that went well. Except I came in late because Matthew was late to tutoring, and when I got there the kids were in the classroom playing. The lights were one and so I just walked in and got started. I didn't even notice that only one of the light switches was on. Yuilng comes in when there's only like 10 minutes left and tells me I need to always have it on because the parents think it's bad for their kids' eyes. Yeah, I most definitely knew that already, and I do turn on all the lights. Just, I wasn't the one to turn the lights on and it didn't occur to me that the kids would only turn on one light switch.

Nancy and I didn't go to dinner until 8:30 because we were meeting up with Adam. He was a teacher at the school last semester (before Nancy) and he's in Taiwan for a few weeks before he goes to Korea on an internship. We'd had a chance to talk to him a little bit last week when he came to the school, and we talked to him at church on Sunday, but since him and Nancy had emailed a lot when she first got here, she wanted to hang out with him more. He's a really neat guy. We met him for dinner at 8:30, but then he didn't go until 10:30. So yeah, a 2 hour dinner conversation- that's pretty good.

But the reason I was so tired when I got home was not because we had a 2 hour dinner, it was because after dinner we went to the juice stand and talked to Ronald for another 2 hours. I was so tired and did not want to be there all night, but every time I would try to get Nancy to leave, she would come up with something else to say, or Ronald would start apologizing for not knowing enough English, and we would keep talking. During our conversation, Nancy just happened to mention that " I sleep with many boys!!!!" She spoke very slowly and very clearly. Don't even ask what that was about, just know that it's not true! And we're pretty sure that Ronald does not sleep with many girls either. Again, don't ask. So yeah, that was pretty interesting conversation with Ronald last night, but I wish it would have only lasted 2 minutes, not 2 hours.