Middle Moon 3

Part of the middle moon festival includes a parade, that just happened to run right by our house, or we probably wouldn't have seen it. There is a temple right behind our apartment building that a lot of people had gathered at to watch the parade. We decided to ride through it with our scooter and here is what we saw.

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 We had to track this down to get a picture of it. There are three pink VW truck/things

with poles on the back so that scantily clad women can dance on them. Did I mention this 

parade went to temples?

Middle Moon Festival 2

Our ward had a barbeque for the holiday. People were really friendly and wanted to feed us all the food that they could. Unfortunately, most of what they wanted to feed us was fish soup and chicken patty things. The only vegetables they had were green peppers and mushrooms. Boy did we eat a lot of mushrooms. It was fun to go and socialize with our ward. They are really good people.

On the left, with glasses, is Ichung who sometime translates for us in church.  In the middle is
Jason. He has taken us out to eat a couple of times and likes to practice English with Rob. 

Chatting around the grill. 

Middle Moon Festival 1

Middle moon festival is a holiday celebrating the changing of the seasons or lunar cycles I guess because there really isn't much of seasons here. There are a lot of family reunions at this time and we've been told it is comparable to Thanksgiving in America. At work all of the employees were given a lovely gift of moon cakes. I did not get this treat because I'm sort of not an employee. Instead, I got apples. Jokes on you guys!! The apples were a million times better.

The apple is HUGE! It tasted like pure honey. 

This is a moon cake. The center part is black licorice flavored that feels like chalky jelly.
Oh, and there is a salted duck egg in the middle. The cake part is really tasty though haha. 

Spiders

Spiders deserve a whole blog post of their own. Before this past week Rob and I have not really seen a lot of spiders anywhere really, but especially not in our apartment. I have been really happy about this because I had heard the spiders were really big here. What I had heard was correct. We found this little monster in Rob's pants that we had hung out to dry. I picked up the pants and put them on the coffee table when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. Immediately, I threw the pants outside where I then yelled at Rob for his camera. When we went to church last week there just happened to be this spider's baby brother crawling on the wall. No one even seemed to notice and they just let it crawl around. This is a new thing for me for sure. I guess they don't bite, but they did saw that if they crawled on you they would leave a rash. I think I'd be left with an unnatural fear of all of those mysterious hairs that rub against your arm.

Earthquake!

On September 21, 1999 there was a huge earthquake in Taiwan that claimed over 2000 lives and injured many more, and because of this earthquake schools all over Taiwan do an earthquake drill on this day. It was fun to watch the kids all running out to the track field with their book bags over their head. Many did not take it seriously and were very unhappy to have to stand out in the sun for a half hour in ninety degree weather. Have I mentioned they wear sweats for their unifrom? Crazy! I was laughing and having a good time as well, never considering the possibility that we would really be effected by an earthquake while we were here.

This morning I was proved wrong. Haha that sounded dreadful. I just mean that we felt an earthquake this morning. It was about six in the morning and our apartment started shaking. At first I was really confused. Was I still sleeping? Was I dreaming? What was going on? Oh yeah, this is earthquake territory. When we got into the office no one else had felt it and our Taiwanese boss said that they are just used to the little shakings now. This is the first time I've ever really felt an earthquake and I thought it was pretty cool. However, I don't want to be around when it does any real damage.

Emma

This is a little video of Emma, the girl I tutor, singing the ABCs. It is more of me singing and her getting distracted but we are practicing. She even says hello Emma and good morning Emma if you listen closely at the beginning. She is really cute but doesn't have half the personality of my nieces and nephews. I miss those little guys. I hope you enjoy and that the video turns out.

Our First Week

We have completed our first week of teaching. It has been a lot of the same thing for all of our classes. The school is set up to where we have a schedule more like a professor than a regular high school teacher. We have a lot of different classes all over the campus so we pretty much taught the same lesson all week. Introduce yourself have the kids introduce themselves etc. We didn't have textbooks all week so we just had to wing it. Rob is really good at that and I think I am getting better. Honestly, I really enjoyed it this week. I still have a ton of questions and it feels like no one is there to answer them. I get frustrated sometimes with the lack of organization at the school, but Rob is always there to calm me down and work it out.

We were able to go to an activity with the English office on Saturday at an art museum. The school forgot to call ahead (organization) so there was not an English tour guide available for all of us so Rob and I got a personal tour. The whole point was to listen to a English tour guide so it was sad that it didn't work out for the Chinese teachers. It was fun for us though and we got to go to lunch with the office as well. It has been nice for us to meet new people.

This was a river in front of the museum and I thought it was just a lovely view. I love the
palm trees on the left. 

This is inside the museum and behind Rob is a painting of a panoramic  view of Kaohsiung.