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Published: September 11th 2007
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Back Roads Through this Kind of Scenery...
...abound over here. Talk about roads make for a motorbike! We took advantage of a break in the rain (Saturday afternoon, evening, and night were a series of intermittent downpours) to go into the city on Sunday morning. We discovered a back road short cut to church. The route completely avoids Hwy 9 north of Hualien City, with its semi-trailers loaded with marble and its cement trucks hurtling by a top speed.
In the afternoon we bumped into my sidekick Paul Rowe from the workshop in Taipei County last August. He knows the city a lot better than we do, so we went to an exquisite Cantonese place for lunch. Afterwards we went to an art show that the wife of Lao-puo’s classmate was putting on. The location of the art show was as interesting as the display, because it was held in a restored Japanese colonial administration building. It was a shame that we had to leave, to get home in front of the dark and the rain. We did both.
It’s funny how history repeats itself. Tinkers (for want of a better word) drive around Taiwanese cities in home-made jury-rigged three-wheeled pickup trucks, with the salvaged front half of a motorcycle welded any old how on to
old car parts bringing up the rear. Needless to say, the motorbikes are crusher-bait by the time they get reborn as the front half of a tinkermobile—and consequently their exhaust would gag a moose. One old fellow rode by his rattletrap when we stepped out of the restaurant after lunch. To attract his customers, the old gaffer was swinging a rattle identical to the ones that WW1 soldiers used to warn of a poison gas attack.
Monday mornings always start with an outdoor assembly at the school, and a flag-raising ceremony with the national anthem. The top students of the previous week get called to the front to get a hongbao (red envelope with NTD 100 in it), a certificate, and a round of applause. “It’s the same little sucks every week”, I cynically say to myself--while beaming and applauding.
I’m on the home stretch of “The Sword in the Stone” play my drama class has been doing. Even if I do say so myself, it’s a good piece of work. I will attach it to an email to folk on my dist list.
We are settling into a life of quiet contentment here. It’s a funny
People Think I Make This Stuff Up!
Any teacher in Canada who promsied to make kids high would have no truancy problem, but a short-lived career nevertheless thing really—most adults look back on their lives with at least some measure of regret. Generally speaking, people tend regret the things they did not do more than the things they did. We are living in an opportunity to make up for lost time—all those years of nine-to-five, and whatever else kept us from full enjoyment of our lives. Canadian problems seem to be a long way away from here, as indeed they in fact are.
We are by no means elderly, but Lao-puo and I are beginning to get a sense of no longer having an unlimited amount of time in front of us to do all the things we want to do.
Yesterday was the Changing of the Guard, you might say, when the new executive of the parents’ association took over. There was a dinner party afterwards, to which Lao-puo and I were invited. It was the usual feast, but this time the bacchanalia was held in the eatery over by the old sugar refinery. I picked Lao-puo up at the train station at 5:08, and got to the dinner for the 5:30 start. We sat at big round tables, and feasted on:
· Raw salmon and raw tuna over shredded white radish, Japanese style
· Whole fish with cilantro and lemon grass, simmered at the table
· Pork stew
· Sweet and sour pork
· Fish soup
· Whole prawns
· Thousand-year-old eggs with snow peas and ground pork
· Seafood casserole
The idea is to help ourselves to drinks from the big fridge. “Keyi-ah!” That’s Chinese for “giddyup!” There was enough Taiwan Beer to sink a battleship, which was a good thing--we needed constant fill-ups for all the toasting.
Lao-puo had to go home for her 7:00 p.m. student, so I ran her home on the motorbike and went back—prudently on foot. Being smarter than I look, I stuck to beer for the rest of the evening, and politely declined all the offers of kaoliang and betel nut that came my way.
It was pleasant to walk home afterwards—only about .5 km along Zhongshan Lu with its lovely little bridge over Guangfu He. There are, by the way, nice little pagodas interspersed along the floodwall on either side of the river, with statues of the animals of the Chinese Zodiac.
I don’t exactly fire on all cylinders when it comes to understanding what’s going on around me here, but evidently next week looks something like this for me:
· Wednesday I will be in the city all day, for some do at the Hualien County Board of Education.
· Friday afternoon we present “The Sword in the Stone’ to the school, then I judge the singing contest. Don’t laugh. By the way, my kids sing like angels. I taught all my classes the English words to “Silent Night”—they get enough santa-jinglebells crap without me adding to it. The aboriginal kids, being Christian, sing it in church but in Ami or Taiwanese—and the Chinese kids know the music but not the English. I gave them the vocabulary in the form of opposites (silent-loud, calm-excited, bright-dark, etc). You have no idea how tempted I was to say virgin-Christine Keeler, but then I would have been dating myself. I’ll whip into Hualien City after school to meet Lao-puo for dinner. The school gave me two coupons for dinner at some swanky hotel. We will dine at a swanky hotel, and stay at an unswanky one.
· On Saturday, morning, I’ll be a judge at a composition competition. So are a gaggle of my colleagues from the workshop at Sansia last August, so we will have a nice get-together afterwards.
· For Saturday night, I will find another upscale hotel and that will be our Christmas dinner.
· Sunday night I’m Santa at the Christmas party for the children of imprisoned parents.
· Monday (Christmas) I’m Santa again, lugging around a big bag of candy and chocolate for all the kids in the school.
We are also having a small gathering of my colleagues and children at the house tonight (Saturday the 16th). With phone calls home, it all adds up to a full and fulfilling Christmas for us.
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