From scuba to square dance it seems like the past month I’ve covered it all.
Following my pool scuba class where I learned how to put together my gear and perform simple skills underwater, I joined a large group to complete my certification. We traveled to Xiao Liu Qiu (小琉球) a small island off the coast of Kaohsiung known for its sea turtles. Most of the other scuba divers accompanying Sean and I were foreigners. Along with Anna, the woman from Sweden I originally took the pool class with, we were joined with her friends from Sweden and Taipei, a couple from Ireland, two people from South Africa, a Canadian, and many more. It was was like every continent was represented in our traveling group of divers. What surprised me most was that most of the foreigners, having lived in Taiwan for some time, still had very limited Mandarin competency. I think my living in Taitung has bolstered my own language competency because I am in an environment that forces me to use it daily. Without the basics my daily life would be severely limited in Taitung while in Taipei you can live a perfectly normal life without ever learning the native language.
After taking a short ferry ride to the island we all piled onto different scooter and motored through the small streets of the island. If I thought Guanshan was remote, it doesn’t even hold a candle to the island. The streets were small, almost like alleys, with one street that wrapped the entire island. Not driving particularly fast you could probably circle the island in 30 minutes.
Our bed and breakfast doubled as our dive shop. We had time to drop our bags in our room and change before we all met up for our “orientation.” Anna and I reviewed the hand signals and different skills we would cover during the four dives of the weekend. Sean was going to join us as well on our dives as a refresher course having gotten his certification years ago. Although he might say he needed a refresher it was more that he knew I was nervous and wanted to do what he could to make it an enjoyable experience for me. After the larger group of experienced divers got on a truck to board their boat, we geared up. The first time I was setting up gear it was a little nerve wracking trying to remember all the details, but with the three following dives each one became a little easier till I easily was able to gear up.
Diving from the beach, we spent the beginning getting acclimated to swimming around, testing our buoyancy and weight systems. After we finished each dive’s allotted skills we were free as a group to explore. There were countless sea turtles that would come so close, a sting ray, even 2 different kinds of manta shrimp. Manta shrimp are very small, but pack a serious punch. I believe when scientists tested their power, they were able to generate the equivalent of the gunshot. I was introduced to fish I’d only read about and some that I had never even heard of. Did you know there is such thing as a Rock Fish? Its poisonous and venomous. On top of the danger involved with the fish, they are hard to spot. They literally blend in as a rock on the bottom. I only even spotted it because our scuba teacher pointed it out. The ocean was definitely better than the pool. The skills I have found so difficult in the pool were now more second nature to me and I was able to find the beauty in the underwater world.
With multiple dives you can’t continue to constantly dive at depth without a break. During breaks we would walk around the tide pools and share snacks. While waiting for the boat dive group, Sean and I took a scooter ride down the coast and happened upon a tourist cave of coral and Vase Rock (a rock shaped as you guessed it a vase that has become famous across Taiwan). We celebrated the beginning of our diving in the ocean as a large group at a BBQ. It was fun to talk about different experiences and what brought us all to Taiwan. We followed BBQ with drinks at a very inappropriate bus themed bar before driving home. I had so much fun with the group and thanks to my friends, Amanda and Kendra, I am already booked on my next dive. This one in Green Island off a boat!!
The two weekends of travel for scuba diving left me wanting to spend time at home. The long weekend for Tomb Sweeping, a holiday that sounds similar to the Day of the Dead where family members travel to their hometowns to clean the graves of their ancestors and remember them, seemed like the best opportunity. The warmer weather opened so many opportunities for potential activities. Sean and I settled on spending our first day outside getting smoothies from Smoothie Auntie, a stand which makes the best fresh fruit smoothies that just reopened at the beginning of spring, and then driving up the coast. We stopped for the famous bao on our way. The plan was to drive to a fishing spot that Sean’s boss had shown him. I thought it would be doable to drive there despite the distance. However, I always forget how draining riding a scooter is compared to driving a car the same distance. I got little more than halfway and when I asked Sean for how much we had left, I balked at the time remaining. Sean caught on to my dread and changed our destination to a nearby beach instead.
While Sean “attempted” to fish off the rocks, I lounged around on a towel taking pictures and looking at the tide pools. I really hope that Sean can catch at least one fish while he is in Taiwan because for the amount of effort he makes, he still has a big 0 by number of fish caught.
After the day that Sean chose the activity, I decided we were going to take a ride up to GuanShan for the Slow Food Festival which also happened to have the students at my old school performing. We set off really early, ready for the hour long drive. Five minutes away from the house my scooter started wobbling. At first, I just thought it was Sean shifting his weight back and forth, but then it only got worse. Luckily I was able to safely pull to the side of the road (mind you I definitely did not put on my turn signal, too nervous to take my hands off of the handle bars). Once Sean was off and I attempted to scoot the scooter into a better parking space I realized something was wrong. Moving the scooter is relatively easy other than making sure when you push it that it doesn’t fall to one side or another. When pushing the scooter that morning it was like I was back in the weight room at Villanova. I parked the scooter and checked the wheel. You guessed it! It was flat.
I was so upset. Not only did I have a flat tire on a holiday that most shops weren’t open, but there wasn’t much time to make it to GuanShan before the performance. As I was fretting over my scooter, Sean was able to walk to the nearest 7/11 and call a not so cheap taxi to drive the hour to GuanShan instead just to make sure we got there in time. As much of a hassle the flat tire was that morning, it worked out for the best because halfway to GuanShan the sky changed and started to drizzle, not the great driving weather I had pictured.
We made it to the GuanShan waterpark, an old water park that looks more like a child hazard of concrete structures that once had water flowing through them, with only 10 minutes to spare before the performance. I hadn’t told my students and had only briefly told my old director I might come to the event. My nerves of whether my students would remember me died the second they caught sight of me. Julia started waving like crazy as they did the mic check on the instruments. The bright smiles from not only my past students, but even the new students that I hadn’t taught before made the hectic morning worth it.
Following the performance, I helped load up the instruments in a truck and talk with my students. It was exciting to see how much they recalled. Even more noticeable was the fact that my Mandarin has improved enough that I was able to help translate what they wanted to say into English for them. I truly do miss that school. After almost a half a year away from the school, when I come back and visit it's like I never left and am still an integral part of their school community. The friendships and memories I made there are the highlight of my time in Taiwan.
It wouldn’t be a slow food festival without good food to accompany the entertainment of the Dian Guang Elementary School Band. In Taiwan, slow food refers to many different kinds of food. One of the main focuses is locally sourced produce and ingredients, highlighting the different farms from Taitung. The term also applies to indigenous cuisine as well as food that requires a long time to prepare such as foods consistent with a feast. Keeping with the idea of locally sourced foods, the festival has a “bring your own utensils and plate” rule along with rentable utensils and plates to be more sustainable.
Sean and I did a quick walk through passing different quiches, whole pigs roasting, and stinky tofu stands before we decided on a pineapple, passion fruit ice and a curry like dish made in Singapore. Our choices were so good that we went back and bought seconds. The only thing I wish we could’ve also gotten were the pork. When we first made the rounds the pork wasn’t done cooking and by the time we checked again it was almost gone. No surprise for how good the food from that stand smelled.
Wanting to make the best of our trip to GuanShan we rented bikes with the intention to ride through the rice field path. What Sean didn’t take into account was the fact I was wearing a very short skirt and the weather was getting colder, a potential sign for another rain storm to come. Our bike lasted at best 30 minutes before we turned around, too nervous to go farther in case the skies opened up.
Here’s the part of the blog where I praise the woman who helped me with my scooter. After taking a train home we got a taxi to the location I left my scooter that morning. There was a slim chance the scooter shop across the way might be open now that it was mid-afternoon. It wasn’t, but our timing was impeccable because the woman across the street saw me fussing over the back tire and asked if we needed assistance. Her husband happened to own the scooter shop and although it was closed for the holiday, we could roll my scooter over and he could look at it the next day. I know there are stories from the US of people helping others with their flat tires on the side of the road, but this instance took it a step further. Not only did I get help to change my tire, but they opened the store just for me even on a holiday so that I could leave the scooter in the shop where it was safer. I got a call at 10am the next day telling me my scooter was completely fixed and ready for me. The whole exchange only cost me 30 USD.
Enough about all my adventures. I swear I still teach 17 classes a week and my primary job is as an English teacher despite the impression I only seem to travel. The lessons in the book have given me a chance to change up my activities and be more creative with amazing results. The 8th graders are focused on learning new food vocabulary. They are stepping away from hot dog and apple pie to learn food like hamburger, steak, and even the difference between bun, bread, and toast. With all the freedom of my solo English morning class, I have begun a new project “Make your own Restaurant.” So far the students are in week 3 of the project. The first week we split into groups and I showed them some of the more unique restaurants in Taiwan. Restaurants themed like bears, beaches, all the way to a restaurant that’s toilet themed called the Modern Toilet and a airplane restaurant where you literally are sitting in an airplane. The students then had to come up with a name for their restaurant, a theme, and identify what kind of restaurant they wanted to have (fast food, casual, fine dining). The next step in the project was to make a menu. We brainstormed together adding the different seafood options they might include and words like seared, baked, skewered to describe their dishes. The students seemed surprised to be asked these questions. I don’t think they are normally given as much freedom to create something and be hands-on in this manner. The LET that assists me in class kept making rounds pushing the students to think deeper. Asking why they wanted a restaurant themed “Conan”, a Japanese cartoon not after Conan O’Brien- I did check, or why did they name the restaurant “Beautiful Girls” with the theme being only purple.
Now into week 3, we are turning our focus on the restaurant logo and marketing. A story in their textbook allowed me to address the meaning behind different colors. I was surprised that my lesson actually was understood by the students and they seemed to enjoy it. After reading about the importance of a restaurant sign, I introduced different logos and had them identify what the color meant. The Green Bank sign represents money, white is commonly used in cleaning supplies because it's clean, while black is used for luxury goods. I am interested to see what colors they use as they create marketing campaigns for their new restaurant to pitch to the rest of the grade.
Accompanying our project on restaurants, the 8th graders are also learning the sentence structure “it tastes/ sounds/looks/feels like ____.” A usually stoic group of students broke into smiles when they had to stick their hand in a mystery bag and guess what the item was they were feeling. After pulling the item out they would then have to use the looks like sentence structure to accurately describe the item. I used random objects like water bottles and pens to more complicated objects like tiny stone bricks from an art set and a kid sized camera. I don’t think even my sounds like guessing game could hold a candle to the happiness when I revealed each student would get a piece of candy as long as they could accurately say “it tastes like …” and add the flavor of the candy. Out of all the lessons food and clothing have been the most fun for me to develop activities for.
I try to make the best of the textbook material, but it is my classes that aren’t textbook based that allow for more creativity. As a way to tie in American culture and games into morning English class, I taught the 9th graders the Cha Cha Slide. I even surprised the 7th graders by teaching Kickball in English and spending the morning keeping score as the two classes competed against each other.
Morning English isn’t the only time I am responsible for the curriculum, but also a course called International Communication. Despite teaching both 8th grade and 7th grade versions of the class, they couldn’t be more different. In 7th grade we focus only on American and Taiwanese holidays. Sometimes holidays they already know. Moving away from Christmas and Thanksgiving I was able to introduce Easter and St. Patrick’s Day, two holidays a little off the beaten path. I didn’t go into the religious side of Easter and instead highlighted the similarities of Easter with Christmas and how the holiday differs between different countries. The students were stunned with the pictures of kids at malls sitting on the Easter Bunny’s lap. It took quite a lot of explaining as to why that was a part of the holiday. We colored eggs, with some of the students thinking out of the box. My favorite part of the lesson was hiding the Easter eggs in the library for them to find. The kids were scrambling around getting on chairs to check on top of bookshelves, and getting on the ground to check under tables.
The 8th grade version of International Communication Class also teaches holidays and festivals, but looks at internationally not just at the US and Taiwan. We also attempt to work on the students’ research abilities giving them opportunities to research a festival and present it to the class. These are some of their first class presentations they need to prepare. Looking back at my own school time, we began class presentations back in 3rd grade with talking about Mayan, Aztec, and Incan culture and religion. I wish I was able to travel to other counties, specifically more urban counties, to observe their classrooms. I wonder if it's common for students of their age to not present or write essays in junior high school or it's a result of the disparity of schooling available.
Learning about different festivals can get monotonous. Most holidays have many similarities. To combat the class getting bored, we also teach some more “culture” in class. When I say American culture what comes to mind? Baseball, BBQs, maybe our movies? Would you ever think of Square dancing because my LET did. I had a weekend to reteach myself how to square dance enough that I would be able to teach a class of students. Notice how I said “reteach.” I like many American students had to learn square dancing as part of the curriculum. Surprisingly the dance is still the state dance of many states including Illinois. Despite the dance’s inclusion in many schools’ curriculum the free resources to learn it are hard to find.
While researching for class I found that the dance it less about knowing an entire routine, but just listening to the announcer. Each dance is different, the move you do next isn’t always going to be the same. This detail made the classes fun because I would get the students used to two moves following each other and then switch it up to see who was really listening. They couldn’t even use the excuse that they didn’t hear me, because I was talking so loud to be heard over the music that I actually lost my voice during one of the class periods.
What shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did was the students’ aversion of dancing with opposite gender partners. My LET thought the girls would love the excuse to dance with the boys, but she couldn’t be farther than the truth. The boys were the ones open to dancing with the girls, while the girls acted like the boys had cooties. I guess cooties are international because we ended up with a group of girls and a group of boys.
Maybe it is time to bring square dancing into use at clubs again. It is a fun bonding activity working with an entire group of 7 other dancers.
Only a few more months left to make the most of my life in Taiwan.