Odd Juices

Going along with absolutely disgusting things, here is a video of Phil and another teacher, Cory, drinking, well what else.

Asparagus Juice?!

When in Rome...

Heather also participated, but refused to appear on camera. Here's a closer look at this tasty treat.

Hong Kong! (Part I)

My wife happens to be one of the privileged few who has her very own Alien Resident Card (ARC) and work permit. My legal status, however, is still uhhhh, how shall I say it... "under construction". My single entry visa expired upon leaving Taiwan for Chinese New Year and was replaced with a 30 day tourist visa when I returned. The temporary solution to my dilemma? Go to Hong Kong!

Generally our school will send people in this situation to Hong Kong or Macau for one night, which is generally enough time to take care of business. Heather and I decided that we might as well make a mini vacation out of it, so we added one wife and two nights to the standard itinerary.

Some history -
As a member of the Anderson family, I was initiated into a long standing tradition of heavy packing at the tender age of five (or somewhere around there). Although I can't remember it, I'm guessing it started with a family camping trip to somewhere like Moosehead Lake in Maine. We probably packed the car with everything you could possibly image to be useful on a family camping trip. Then we packed a few things that couldn't possibly be useful "just in case".

So now that you have a bit of background on my travel packing tendencies, you'll probably be very impressed to find that I packed everything into one standard size backpack. Including all my camera gear. While this rash act could be construed as moderate insanity by some (like my mother) I must tell you, it was a rush of liberation. The mobility was amazing. The speed was unmatched. Seriously, you gotta try this.

Now I know what some of you are thinking... you travelers out there who like to "be prepared for anything" by bringing everything, you're saying to yourselves, "I bet he got there and needed something really, really bad, and he didn't have it". Nope. Shockingly, I was fine. Turns out that most of that extra junk I normally bring just sits there. It remains in my suitcase for the entire trip just weighing me down. What a waste.

Day one started with me taking my first solo international trip. It was interesting wandering around, but seeing as my Cantonese is rather limited*, it was a pretty introspective day. Upon her arrival the next day, Heather commented that I was "rather talkative". My wanderings started in a night market searching for food and sweet deals, neither of which I found. I then headed to the camera/electronics district in an unsuccessful search for photo gear. (I really miss real photo stores like B&H). After several hours of wandering, I was exhausted. Hong Kong is so intense, just being there is tiring. The sheer mass of people is incredible. One of the areas I was exploring has one of the highest population densities in the world - 130,000/km² at one point.

*I know absolutely no Cantonese - it's a very different dialect of Chinese from what we are learning, which is Mandarin. The writing is all the same, so I could read a little, but unlike English dialects like American English and British English, the spoken language is so different that speakers of each dialect cannot understand each other.

Photo Blog

I recently assigned my photography students to set up photo blogs and post two images every week. I decided that I should give myself this same assignment. Here's my blog:

http://philandersonphoto.wordpress.com/

As always comments are welcome and appreciated.

KTV

In November, we had a retreat with several different organizations in Taiwan. While there, our director rented a bus to take us to some tourist attractions in the area. The bus had one additional feature. It was a karaoke bus. Yeah! Here is a video of Phil, singing. Enjoy!

Update on us

Phil and I are doing well, just really busy. We started this semester off with a very different schedule. Last semester I was teaching 8 different classes, 3 of which I am not really trained to teach. (Biology, Chemistry and 8th grade Science) This semester, I lost 4 classes (Chemistry, Algebra 2, SAT Math and Precalculus) but added 2 others. (7th grade Math and Algebra 1A) Phil was a little more unlucky and got stuck teaching yearbook along with Health and Photography. He is a little stressed because you are supposed to do most of your work for Yearkbook the first semester and we have sort of passed that marker. It should be interesting.

We are doing well. There was an English Church Retreat on campus this weekend and we got to see some friends from Taipei and meet some new people. It was a lot of fun and nice to have church in English. (Something is lost when we get the sermon translated)

Because my schedule is a little easier, Phil and I have been attending a Chinese class offered by a parent of an elementary student. We are finding ourselves understanding more of the language. I am confident that I will never have a deep conversation with someone in Chinese, but I can at least sort of understand someone without using hand gestures at several stores.

Pictures

I think that this may be the last of the blogs we do about our trip to Malaysia and the Philippines. Currently, Phil and I are really busy trying to get things together for an accreditation meeting happening on Monday for our school. Nothing to be scared about because it is our first meeting and our first year operating. We are just really busy. Phil and I got to go to Hong Kong last weekend because, well, Phil couldn't really stay in Taiwan any longer. He had to go early to get another visa and I joined him Friday afternoon. I would post pictures of our trip, but Phil took all the pictures and they are with him currently. We did go here, but these are not our pictures. Instead, enjoy more pictures of our Chinese New Year Trip. :)

World's Largest Flower. That is a large fly on the petal. This is about 3/4 of a meter across.

I am pretty confidant that the baby is the newest addition to the reserve.

Just so you can see who else was around.

We had the opportunity to go to Mount Kinabalu National Park, where you can hike to the tallest peak in the area. It was pretty neat to go to and the above picture was taken leaving our hotel. Those are clouds. The following pictures are the view of Mount Kinabalu from our hotel room. We would have climbed the mountain, but it takes 2 days and, well, you really need to be in shape, so we decided to just hike below the summit. (Walking for half a mile a day the week before does not define "being in shape",



This is the visitor center and the next few pictures are from our walk through the park. Also, you can see how messy it really was. It was really amazing!

Amazing!

More wildlife!

Here is some more wildlife from our trip. At some point we will actually begin posting about some things that we have been doing more recently...

While the orangutan was very exciting to see, we could also see it if we wanted to go to Indonesia. There is another primate that we can only see in Borneo. Because of this, we decided to splurge and headed to the proboscis monkey reserve located in the palm tree plantations surrounding Sandakan in Borneo. It was incredible and I am extremely glad we got to see these rare primates. While there, I got this video of an oriental pied hornbill.



And why we actually went:




There is one dominate male (The largest in the family) and he has a harem of women. This is one of the families.

Here are some pictures so you can see the proboscis monkey more clearly.