What's in the mail?

Taiwanese people are easily the most honest people I ever met.

Sometimes that can be brutal — like when your students tell you you're fat even though you're pretty comfortable with your weight — and sometimes that can be the best gift ever.

She understands Chinese?

Today is probably the most successful Saturday I have had since I've been in Taiwan.

Four months of crappy Saturdays... yuck.

I actually had zero trouble waking up this morning even though I didn't go to bed until 1 a.m. I just jumped right out of bed and had plenty of time to take a shower, make coffee at home and stop to get some dan bing on the way to class.

I know you're probably wondering when the heck I'm going to get tired of dan bing. My current answer to that is "never," but I know that is probably not true. For now, it's the only local breakfast cuisine that I know of meaning my only other option of breakfast on the go is McDonald's.

Well, I suppose I could cook... Ew, 7 a.m. cooking.

We had a movie day in my first class. I went to Blockbuster last night and my brain was swirling with ideas of what movie I should pick for the kids. Obviously it had to be age appropriate; it had to be in English with Chinese subtitles; and it had to be something that would win me points with these kids.

Since our class is so early in the morning, we generally don't have much fun and so I always get this feeling that they kind of hate me.

Turns out, that's not it. Or if it was it's not anymore because the second they figured out that I picked Night at the Museum 2 they were all clapping and super excited.

Cool points for Teacher Jimmie.

I got a little homesick watching the movie though. OK, less "homesick" and more "last summer" sick. The majority of the movie takes place in Washington D.C. at the Federal Archives and in the Smithsonian Museums.

Well, if you don't know already, I had an internship in D.C. last summer and although I never saw myself as a D.C. person, it turns out that I really am.

I fell in love with that city.

Also, I definitely spent the majority of my weekends last summer visiting the Smithsonian Museums — they're free so what else is an intern living on $1000/month supposed to do. I went to the Air and Space Museum on multiple occasions because I just kind of love planes and all things aerospace.

Point is: They would show these awesome panoramic shots of the city or these cool parts of the museums and I just kind of felt really sad all of a sudden.

It seems D.C. still holds a piece of my heart.

That said, this blog is supposed to be about Taiwan where it's still raining. That stupid typhoon — Typhoon Lupit — turned northeast and so we're just getting all of the rain that's on the outer edges of the storm. Granted at least we're not getting the actual typhoon, but I still hate driving in the rain.

I don't care where you are, people drive like idiots in the rain! It's universal and I simply don't understand it. It's like no one has ever seen a raindrop in their lives.

Add in a million scooters, flimsy helmets and worthless rain gear and you've got road rash up to your eyeballs. At least one of other teachers does after getting hit by a car a couple of days ago. I'm just glad she's OK. A few big scrapes be she made it out OK.

So many of the teachers at our school have gotten into accidents since I've been here. It's so scary!

Back to my successful Saturday, the rest of my classes went off without a hitch.

Lately I've been describing Saturdays as a pattern of coffee, crappy class, great class, food, crappy class, great class, food, sleep.

I think I'm finally getting to that point where things really aren't so crappy anymore. I still wouldn't describe them all as "great" but I think I'm starting to get somewhere. Maybe it's my new no-nonsense attitude.

In my third class, the kids generally misbehave. One of the kids kept going "Laoshrrrrrrrrr." (Chinese for teacher.)

Finally I just looked at him and said, "Sam! Say 'teacher' not 'laoshr' or you're gonna get double homework!"

Sam looked at my co-teacher and was like... "Uh, she understands Chinese?"

Then we talked about how I am learning Chinese but still know infinitely less Chinese than they know English. And they asked if I know Spanish and I told them I started learning when I was really young. They decided that it's my background speaking Spanish that makes me speak English so fast.

Maybe I should slow down for these kids, eh?

I also gave a girl double homework because she had her cell phone out in class after me telling her multiple times to put it away. She and the other kids in class kept calling each other so their phones would go off and interrupt class. I already told them last week no cell phones in class.

That's just a general respect thing, but it made me feel like a real teacher not necessarily in a good way though.

We have to write how many stories?

Saturday wasn't the worst day ever.

In fact, it was a pretty good day. I got up with plenty of time to get ready and go to Starbucks.

I order my Venti non-fat iced vanilla latte in Chinese.

I got to school with plenty of time to finish my coffee and my scone before class started.

I really don't mind mornings so much as long as they go smoothly. I usually feel rushed in the morning, though, which is why I'm usually pretty cranky (take last Wednesday for example).

I was working downtown again and I managed to find a parking spot that I knew would be OK, so I didn't get towed again.

I was absolutely goofy in all of my classes though. I think it was the extreme amounts of caffeine. I had that Venti coffee from Starbucks and then one of the mom's in my brand new, first-thing-Saturday-morning class brought me another small iced coffee.

I couldn't say no.

By the time I got to my second class at 11 a.m. (I had already been awake for four hours at this point) I was bouncing off the walls. I was being goofy, dancing around the room and singing, "Take out your Woooowwww booookkkkksssss."

All the kids could do was laugh at me. It was good.

My news camp even went really well! I'm actually really proud of my kids. We wrote four "stories."

I made a compromise with them so that helped with productivity.

Kids: Teacher, we don't want to write anything.
Me: Well, you each have to read two stories in the demo in a couple of weeks and we've only written four so far so we have a lot of work to do.
Andy: TWO STORIES EACH!
Me: OK, guys, I'll make a deal with you. We will write a story, then play a game, write a story, then play a game. But we have to write four stories today and four stories next week.

They were OK with this plan. They tried to put one over on me by making a game take a really long time. Luckily, these kids are actually super smart and write pretty quickly once you give them some direction.

I didn't feel too bad about letting the game take an hour. Of course, they thought that meant we would only have time for one more story (making three) instead of two more stories. I finally convinced them a one-hour game is the equivalent of two games and so we had to write two stories back-to-back.

My last class is probably becoming my favorite class out of all of them. They're smart. They participate. They're old enough that we can joke around — this is the class where we were talking about all the boys being "yellow" a couple weeks ago.

It's funny because we only have an hour-and-a-half to do just as much as we do in my class earlier in the day when I have two hours.

Otherwise, I feel like I talked a lot yesterday.

I mean, I have to talk a lot for school, but after classes I talked Megan's ear off at Tina Coffee while we were waiting for Allen. Then I talked both of their ears off while we were eating dinner at TGI Fridays. (I know... Don't hate me for eating American food; I felt gross afterward.)

Even after that, I came home to talk Katie's ear off.

Since Justin (Katie's boyfriend) went home yesterday we had a girls' night last night. We grabbed a bottle of wine from the Family Mart across the street (high class wine, I assure you) and killed that while I talked incessantly, first about things I was reading on the BBC news Website and then about anything that popped into my head every 12 seconds.

I'm not sure if that helped or not. But at least my brain has calmed down a little since.

I'm so glad it's Sunday though. I have another long week ahead with more split shifts and two demos.

Tonight, we're going to Taipei for Megan's farewell dinner. She doesn't actually leave until Thursday, but this will be the last time we can really get everyone together for her. So sad!