Voting, Pictures and a Science Fair Project

My sister in law recently entered the National Geographic "World in Focus" Photo Contest. It is a great picture and I was wondering if the few people who read our site would be willing to vote for her picture. (Trust me it is worth it) To vote for the picture, go to her picture site. You will have to give an email address and they will then send you a link. You click on the link and you can then finally "actually" vote for the picture. Again, it is a great picture!


Speaking of pictures, here are some random fun pictures around Taiwan.

The next picture is what happens when you want to order something from a restaurant. Usually you look at the menu and you can't decided what wonderful thing to order and this menu is no exception. (On this menu, you can see such amazing selections, such as "Powder Bowel", "Flower Twig", "Shark Smoke", "Very hot green vegetables", "Burn meat" and many items that are absolutely fabulous. We ordered the "very hot green vegetables" and bean curd to get this picture. You may have to double click on the menu to see these items.)


Near Taipei 101, this guy was selling lemon tea by Nestea. I didn't get a picture of him face on, but that would have been wonderful.


I kind of wish it was from the Salt Lick, but it is the closest thing to Texan barbecue sauce I will ever get in Taiwan. (I didn't buy it though.)

Oh, Taiwan.

A closeup.

My students have been working on a science fair project this past semester and, needless to say, I am glad that we are done with it. (excitement does not even come close) This coming Thursday and Friday (next week), they will actually be showing their parents, other teachers and staff their fabulous projects. I will try to post pictures of the projects in the future. Right now, I have to write my last "lecture" for my science class. I think it is ok to say YES!

2 weeks and 1 hour and 40 minutes from now, we will be on a plane. and only 6 more days of school. (not that I am counting or anything)

Things I wish I had blogged about

Phil and I are looking at the next few weeks and realize that the year is really coming to an end. We are ready to go home but there are some things that we will always remember, but I won't post about that for now. I will just post on some blogs that we wish we had blogged about but never got around to it.

National Concert Hall
My student is a talented violinist and won a competition to play at the National Concert Hall located at the Chang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall with other musicians. Unfortunately, her concert was on Wednesday at 7:30. Because of this, we could not go. Several other staff were going but we could not go because we would have school at 8:00 the next morning. (Taipei is around 3-4 hours from where we are currently at and the concert would have gotten out at 9:30 getting us home around 2:00. I don't do well without sleep) Tuesday evening, I realized that we could possibly take all of our students and go and see her perform. (And Jeremy said yes) So we put together a field trip (last minute) and went. Because we took all of the students, we did not have class until later in the day (Yeah) and I got to see my student perform in the National Concert Hall! If you click here, you can see some pictures of what this place looks like.

Reading Chinese
Phil and I have gotten pretty good at speaking Chinese (Only if you want to order something from the drink stand or why we are where we are. We have those down.) and can recognize a few words in Chinese. This is a good skill and is very helpful, for well, communicating with people we interact with every day. One thing you notice as you drive around, though, is that all of the signs have the "English" version of the Chinese written on them. Even though they have the English and it is helpful, you also notice the multiple ways to spell the same word. For example:

中: Means middle, center

Ways to pronounce it in Taiwan (What you see on the signs in Taiwan):
jhong, jong, jeung, jung, jhung, jheung, chong, cong, ceung, cung, chung, cheung, zhong, zong, zeung, zung, zhung, zheung

We have pretty much seen all of those. Many times a city will have the same road spelled 3 or 4 different ways within a few blocks of each other. (If you don't know the previous fact, it can get REALLY confusing.)

The reason why there are so many versions of the same word is that in China they use the Pinyin, but in Taiwan, they use pinyin along with 2 or 3 other differences. If you want to know about the romanization of Chinese in Taiwan, go here.

Lift Off!

For the past few months, we have been hearing about a rocket that Roger, an English teacher at the college, has been putting together. As opposed to getting a kit from a toy department, Roger decided to create his own rocket, from scratch. His idea is to heat a pipe with an aerosol can in it. The heat would come from a fire at the base of the long pipe. The aerosol can would ignite, causing an explosion, which would launch a rocket which was attached to the top of the pipe. Phil and I went, partly because we wanted to see his creation, but also partly to be prepared if we had to take Roger to the hospital. Needless to say, the pictures say it all. It was definitely the highlight of the weekend.

The rocket was named after Roger's daughter's Chinese name.

This reminds us of Jay Gould's work.

Preparing the site for "launch".

Roger, helping the process out.

Take off.

Another launch. (There were three in total)

What was left over...

From Roger_Stahl-Inventor

From Roger_Stahl-Inventor

Mowing the lawn in Taiwan

A few weeks ago, I watched outside my classroom as the landscapers were mowing the lawn. (I know, we must be pretty bored because we are watching people mow the lawn.) There was another reason why I was watching the lawn being mowed the other day. I sort of got a video.

Quote of the Week

Phil and I are doing our taxes and came across the following on the online DOR for Massachusetts:

"Embezzled or other income from illegal activities is taxable and should be reported."

We will keep this in mind.

Mundane Things

Phil and I have been posting things that we have been eating lately because our life is pretty mundane at the moment. Here are what we consider some exciting things that are occurring at the moment:

Phil and I are currently in the process of filing our taxes. It looks like we will owe MA about 100 dollars in taxes, mainly due to Phil not having proper insurance for the last 4 months. We are still working on our 1040. We can fill out a Foreign Tax credit, but we both just realized it is another publication. So far, this year has consisted of at least 4 different publications, each more complex then the previous. We have only had to call the IRS one time so far. Hopefully that is it.

I did our laundry today, including our sheets. Doing our laundry here means that we have to worry whether it is going to rain, at all, during the day. We do not have a drier and so we hang everything. Pretty exciting. (Remember, the post is titled "Mundane Things")

Phil and I went to bed at 10 pm last night (Yeah, party animals. I know) and I got up at 7:45 this morning, on my own. I haven't done that since first getting here and dealing with jet lag.

I hope you have had a relaxing weekend. To brighten your day, Phil has been teaching his class using an interesting strategy. When he wants the kids to do something, he creates a picture which shows the tool on the camera, or shows the proper technique. Here are some of the funnier pics:




I married this guy:

I hope you had a good weekend.

Odd Juices

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

Asparagus Juice?!

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!

We were here today

Malapascua Island, Philippines

umm, ok

All I can say is that when I have children, I want this to be one of my top hospitals.

If you thought that was weird, there is a mini-van/car that is also themed in a similar way. We will try to get some pictures soon.

Things that are commonly found in Taiwan

Road construction that sort of makes sense.


(They are setting up for a funeral. This is on a MAIN road, such as Route 9 in Shrewsbury or 290 in Austin, Tx. This was set up for the funeral and it is blocking half the road. This is REALLY common here)

Taiwan is basically mountains.


It wouldn't be a home without a ridiculously big spider in it.

We work with these people

That would be Moriah, the 4-6th grade teacher wearing the way awesome helmet and Jeremy, our fearless leader on the right with the amazing shades.

A dog for Christmas?

The Monday before Christmas, Daniel, an elementary school student knocked on our door, mumbled something that we sort of understood and then handed us a white dog. We think he mentioned its name, which is Japanese for white. So, for one evening, we "owned" a dog. (It actually belongs to one of our students who houses it on the other side of campus. We were heading that way later in the evening, so we decided to let it stay with us for a little bit.) She peed 3 times, got lost multiple times in our monstrosity of a house and also fell asleep on us. We enjoyed having the dog for the evening, but were glad to see it leave. Here are some pictures of that evening. Enjoy