Just Today

Boy, I'm not looking forward to catching everyone up on my last week and a half. So I'll work backward. This post will be just about today, my first day back teaching. Then I will write a post about the 4 days I spent in Taipei. And then I will write a post about my trip to Thailand. Everything is going to have to be stunted, but seeing as my stunted is everyone elses 50 page thesis, I think you'll all survive with the abridged addition.

There are a lot of preschoolers who are on summer vacation, and so the class sizes are a lot smaller. Because of that, they combined the 3 and 4 year olds into one class. That means that there are only two rotations. So instead of having three 20 minute lessons and then three 30 minutes lessons and then two 45 minute lessons, today (and for the next month or two) we will teach two 30 minute lessons, two 45 minute lessons, and two 45 minute lessons. Oh don't worry about it, I learned about the change today, in the first class, as I was half way done with my first lesson and they wanted me to extend it by 10 minutes. Luckily it worked really well.

Not all of the new kids are starting yet and we only had one new 3 year old boy (Leo) and then a 3 year girl came in for the last 20 minutes of class (I think her name is Rennie). That makes it pretty nice that I don't have a whole bunch of new 3 year olds crying for their mommies.

At lunch time Yuling had to drive me to the train station so I could pick up my bike. It was raining too hard last night for me to get it home. When I got my bike back I showed Natalie (the new teacher) where the fruit stand was. The guy working there apparently doesn't only have a crush on Nancy, because he gave me free watermelon too. Nice! After that I had to rush back and prepare for my afternoon lesson. I thought that it was going to be pretty hard to teach for 45 minutes about apples, but it actually worked out well. The class was very fascinated by the fact that apples floated and also that the 5 seed pockets makes a star in the middle. Plus we did a craft, so that did suck up 10 minutes or so.

There is no tutoring this week (well, I will have Dar-sen on Wednesday, but other then that) and it was so weird to be done at 4:30pm instead of 6:30pm or 9pm. After class I tried to upload my pictures from my camera and it was a little bit of a hastle and took up a long time.

At 6:30pm Natalie and I went to the night market to get some dinner. I showed her around to the different booths I knew and she decided to start with ice cream and then get one of those tofu, bean sprout, pork, peanut dust wraps (that's what I got too). Apparently I should have directed her to a safer choice. That's not a food that you should start out with your first day in Taiwan. She really did not like it. I'll be more careful in my selections this first week and then I'll let her branch out a little. After the wrap thing I went to go get a juice, but Ronald wasn't there. The weird thing is that his booth was open, but there were other people manning the blenders. He did tell me that he had a friend coming to help him, but I didn't know that meant that his friend was taking over for the week. Oh well, no juice for me tonight- that saved 40 NT$.

We were trying to leave the night market and we ran into that little girl who likes to stop us and play hula-hoop. We talked to her for a little while, but when we said good-bye, she wouldn't let us leave. I finally got her off of my bike but Natalie stopped me and told me that her bike chain fell off. Okay, that happened to Nancy before. No big deal, you just have to get your hands dirty and put it back on. Um no.... not this time. My hands got so dirty, but there was no way that that chain was getting back on. Meanwhile, as I'm on the ground trying to fix the bike, the little girl is poking me and pulling my hair. Because I couldn't fix the bike, we had to walk them home. So my hands were filthy black, my hair was a mess (and I couldn't fix it because my hands were filthy black), and I'm walking my bike. It was a sad sad walk back.

I spent 5-10 minutes washing my hands once we got back and I hung up some laundry and now I'm writing this. I've had more productive days, but I've also had less productive days. Plus, the night's not over. If I can whip out two more entries that gets me all caught up with the last week and a half, I can call that pretty productive.