Banquet

In my opinion, I believe that the banquet my school put on 2 weeks ago was way better than any other banquet I have ever attended. They actually had great entertainment which is a must (Our students presented!) and they also had great food! (Before I show you the pictures, many times in Taiwan, you see a mixture of styles in places considered fancy or posh. It makes for some amazing pictures.) Here are some pictures from our banquet:

The entrance to the place. What you don't see is that the road in front of this can only fit 1 1/2 cars on it. The bus couldn't make it all the way.

The place was called the castle or something like that. Here are pictures of the prince and princess. Amazing!

The theme was masquerade and the sisters ended up making a lot of masques for everyone to wear, including our trusty leader.

Moriah and Joseph. She ended up making her dress. It looked amazing.

Some decorations on the landing up to the second floor. As I said, they mix styles here.

Where we ate looked similar to this.

Outside heading to the talent show!

Megan.

Daphne works in our office and is amazing. My students actually loaned me the dress and the mask, meaning I didn't have to spend much money for the clothes. Very nice of them.

I would have put a great picture of both of us up, but this was one of the better ones...

Phil made his own mask.

Phil and me at the end. We had a great time, but are exhausted. And we have school tomorrow morning.

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.

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.

Christmas Party

Monday evening we had a Christmas party. It included a talent show, large quantities of sugary deserts, a secret santa gift swap and a surprise appearance by none other than Santa Claus. It was pretty awesome.






I had an awesome secret santa. Some of the gifts I received over the last week include:

• X-Max Dancing Palace - Traditional Christmas songs put to techno beats.
• Dried mangos
• A bag of toy dinosaurs. They are now guarding my office.
• Nunchakus

Awesome!