On Earthquakes and Bureaucracy

This is a general update, just to let people know what’s going on, and to remind myself when I try to figure out where the time went. I’m settling into Danshui just fine. Right now, prepping for classes, and correcting homework is taking up most of my spare time. I’m told I’ll get faster. I keep trying to explore, but I’m still not used to the weather, and any exploration usually ends with me looking for something cold to drink and somewhere to hide from the heat. I’ve gone into Taipei a couple times, hung out with people from work, and mostly taken things easy.

The most exciting thing to happen was the earthquake. It was the first one I’ve been in that’s lasted long enough for me to try to think of what I should be doing. I checked the internet afterwards, and It was a 6.3, 24km down, 137 km sse of me. As far as I can tell, there was no damage at all. The strangest part was trying to figure out if I should get up and go downstairs afterwards. I thought about it for a while, but there were no alarms and no noise in the building so I went to sleep instead.

In less interesting news, last week I went Into Taipei to apply for my Alien Residence Card. Apparently I don’t have TB, or any other strange disease, and they’re going to let me stay. I’m glad. I think I like it here. I’m also going to have health insurance for the first time in three years. I can’t wait. I took the MRT into Taipei, and then a TAXI to the government office. Bureaucracy seems to be the same everywhere. I picked out a number, waited for a while, and then was told I needed more copies, and a different sized photo. Even so, it went pretty quickly. However, they were out of cards, so they’re going to mail it to me. I’m planning on worrying until it actually shows up. I took a bus back to the MRT, and the bus driver wasn’t having any of my broken Chinese. Fortunately, the world contains nice old Taiwanese men who have friends in Vancouver, and are perfectly happy to help lost American girls.

Is that my cow? No, it goes arrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggh. It is a hippopotamus. It is not my cow.

I was correcting papers today, reading the same sentence over and over again, trying not to skip to the end because, I guarantee you, these kids can copy a sentences correctly, copy it wrong, and then copy it correctly two more times. I’m not sure how. As I worked, the back of my mind began to read me Terry Pratchett’s book Is That My Cow, which is probably the most entertaining thing I know written in four word sentences. That is how most of my classes go. ‘What is it?’ ‘Is it a pig?’ ‘No it isn’t. It is a spider.’ Justin, my boss who’s taught English here for the last four years, says he catches himself talking to his parents in short declarative sentences.

I’ve started writing about teaching a couple of times: once half way through my training, and again after my first day. Both times I stopped about a paragraph in. It’s not that I didn’t have time to write. It’s only now that I’ve started to get piles of homework to correct that I’ve really started to feel the time disappearing. I mean, I only actually teach for 15 about hours a week. But I think I’m finally figuring out what I’m doing, and finally figuring out what I’ve got myself into.

I teach lots, and lots of kids. My class youngest kids are just barely learning to write Chinese, but they’re already expected to write in English. This is an interesting challenge, but it isn’t stressful because if they don’t, well, they’re little. So I play games, and if the only thing keeping the room from descending into complete chaos is my wonderful Taiwanese teaching assistant Anna who explains the games and helps me herd them into place, so what, they’re little, and they’ll learn. My oldest kids are in high school. Queue the ominous music. But, so far, I like my advanced classes. I have two of them. The bored, ‘I’d rather be anywhere but here’, and If I sit quietly and don’t do any work do you think the new teacher will notice?’ class, and the ‘I actually want to learn English and am willing to talk,’ class. The difference is that they are advanced enough to understand most of what I’m saying. And to make sentences more interesting than ‘is that a pink elephant’. And that is when new languages start being fun. It’ll be a challenge. Bored teenagers are hardly the most receptive audience, and, unlike the little kids, they can’t be bribed with fake money. But it could be really interesting, which is more than I can say for my last few jobs.

I’m having more trouble with the kids in the middle. They have so much material to get through. And on top of that, I’m expected to be entertaining. This isn’t that hard: races, ball games, anything to burn off a little energy and bonus if it helps them drill sentence patterns. ‘What is it, it is an Umbrella bird’ is slightly more interesting when scribbled on the board by a child who’s just run three times across the class room, and thrown a ball at a badly drawn picture of my TA, but not much. Not yet. I think it’ll get better when I actually know the kids. When I figure out which ones want to learn. There is a little girl who keeps coming into the Teacher’s room to talk with another of the foreign teachers. Her English still has a long way to go, but she keeps talking. It’s so fun listening to her trying talk about her day, and what she’s going to do. Not because she makes mistakes, but because she’s trying so hard to get it right, and it’s working.

There is so much going on here, and so much that I could write about that every time I think about posting I get overwhelmed and put it off. Maybe once I get settled in I’ll be better able to convey some of my impressions of this mad city but until then, I’ll just give an overview of what I’ve been doing for the last week and hope I get across some of what it’s like to be here.

I went into my school for the first time last week, and I’ve been training ever since. Mostly this means I sit and observe classes. This was interesting at first, but as time goes on I’ve found myself picking up all my habits from lecture classes: doodling in the margins of my notes and writing cryptic messages to myself in IPA. I’m going to be teaching kids ranging from about 7 to about 14 and I’ve had to observe all the levels, but all the classes have basically the same structure and after a while it gets really boring. It’s not that this isn’t important. I’m grateful for the training I’m getting, and watching the different teaching styles is actually very interesting, but the repetitive activities which are so important for language learners are really boring to watch. That said, I’m still a bit terrified of the actual teaching bit. I’m pretty sure that there is only so much I can learn from watching, and I’m not going to have any Idea of how I am at this until I’m stuck in a room with a pack of critical ten year olds.

Fortunately, everything outside of school is going really smoothly. I’ve found an apartment: A tiny studio in a new building about a 10 minute walk from my school. Sadly, I don’t get to move in until the first, so I’m stuck in the temporary housing just south of downtown and have to commute to work. My school and apartment are not in Taipei proper, but in Danshui, a town on the coast to the North of Taipei, but the commute is incredibly easy thanks to the Metro here. Danshui seems to be a cross between a college town and a tourist trap. The water front is lined with shops and stands selling snacks. If it weren’t for some of the stranger snacks, it’d be your classic overcrowded water front complete with arcade games. Further up the coast there are supposed to be nice and coming into Danshui, along the River, there’s a nice boardwalk trail through marsh land with lots of birds and little one clawed crabs. I’ll do more exploring once I move.

Exploring Taipei is proving more than a little daunting. Even just sticking to the metro lines, there is so much to see. I went to the zoo at the end of one of the metro, lines and saw a baby Formosan brown bear among lots and lots of other things. But according to my guide book from the Taipei Zoo metro stop, I could have caught a gondola up into the hills of Maokong which is a tea growing area south of Taipei. I went to the botanical garden where I saw the most amazing water lilies, but I completely missed the National History Museum which is right next to it. I can get to hiking trails, museums, temples and even hot springs without leaving the city’s metro system. It’s amazing, and I’m looking forward to discovering all of it.

Note: I wrote this about a week ago, and then my apartment opened up and I had to go a few days without the Internet. Then my training started getting intense, or possibly I just got lazy. I do have photos now. They are posted in my facebook: Pictures At some point I'll try to get labels on things, until then you can enjoy the jumble which is, after all, my first impression of Taiwan.