My Third Week - Taiwanese children sure know how to play the recorder

The following Monday I started biking around handing out my resume to potential employers. I got a nice surprise when a school called me for a job interview in Kaohsiung. Alas Tuesday was spent traveling there, doing a little shopping and trying to find where the school was. John and I discovered a nice little Mexican place near the MRT called Paco’s Tacos. While I was not sick of the Taiwanese food yet John definitely was. The interview went well and I found the place alright except I swear that night I would have lost my head if it wasn’t attached to my neck. I left my bicycle helmet sitting at the 7 eleven and my portfolio sitting who knows where. Luckily I thought of my helmet just as I was approaching the interview and John went back and found it. The rest of the week went fast, as many of them do when you are unemployed and it was spent looking for jobs online, visiting John and work for lunch, eating, and shopping. On a side note John’s school is very nice. It is all outdoors and you walk to each room outside. Although it is not air conditioned it is very breezy. On Friday I was asked back to Kaohsiung to do a teaching demonstration for the school I interviewed with. Basically I had to teach an actual class 4 vocabulary words. I was extremely nervous but met some nice Canadian teachers who helped me get some ideas. The teaching demonstration went alright although there were many things I could improve on. They said they would let me know by the beginning of next week and I never heard from them. It is alright though because I did not want to work there since they would not pay me for my 30 hours of mandatory training until the end of my contract.

The weekend, Halloween was spent at John’s school event and at the beach. The funny thing about the Taiwanese are that they like to leave planning or at least informing others of planning until the last second and often times the themes of things do not make any sense. For example, the school carnival event went from being something about foreigners and Salsa dancing to a political rally event as local elections are coming up. I should know this as a truck yelling advertisements for different candidates drives by my apartment every morning at 8:00 a.m. It was very hot sitting outside of a tent all day. However, there were many interesting things to see such as the pretty pink ballooned police tent with coordinating police cartoon character on the wall. It looked so intimidating (insert sarcasm). There was also lots of indigenous Taiwanese art and heritage. If I could read Chinese it would have been a very educational experience. While walking to one of the booths John saw that there was a space for people to practice writing in Chinese. He asked if he could give it a try and proceeded to write his name in Chinese that was already labeled on his water bottle. The mayor of Pingtung County, not just the city took notice of this and went over to see what one of the only foreigners was doing. Following him was a mob of cameras who proceeded to push me out of the way and take tons of pictures of John. Little did we know this was the mayor of Pingtung County until later, but John was still polite to him. His school also had a group of students who play the recorders and were going to perform. When they went on stage I was expecting a rendition of “Hot Crossed Buns” or some other child related recorder song. I was terribly wrong. Here I saw a rendition of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” and other classic songs which I can’t even remember the names let alone play flawlessly on a recorder! Children here work too hard ;). Following the hot school event was a dinner with all of the teachers at a Korean BBQ. The table had two grills and a stove top on it where you could put things into to make a soup hot pot or grill meat. There was also a delicious buffet of fresh vegetables and even salads, a rarity in Taiwan. The teachers we were sitting with were eating like crazy and I ate until I felt sick. At the end of the night came more pressure to eat as if the hot pot was not eaten fully we would be charged extra for wasting food. However, the teachers had thrown fish, pumpkin, and other unappetizing things into it earlier which I did not feel like eating. Everyone else managed to finish it and the principal picked up the tab.

On Sunday we went to Hsitzuwan beach in Kaohsiung. It was such a hot weekend that it felt nice to lay at the beach. The beach had nice lawn chairs and little over hang huts to lay in the shade but the water did not look clear enough to swim. It was nice to think that on November 1st we were laying at the beach. I thought, “life is good.”

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