Culture Presentation & Health

Be proud of me people! Andrea went out on her own to the unknown and ordered breakfast completely in Chinese! Muhahahaha! At the school cafeteria, I ventured to find a food like is like a corn-egg-pancake. It's soft and a tad oily but it is very yummy and slightly more nutritious than just plain bread. I am quite proud of myself for ordering without any help. The next step is to learn more food names in Chinese and even more so in written Chinese characters.

 Tuesday morning the students must gather in the field for a flag raising ceremony/speech whatnot. The exchange students don't attend so instead I just waited in my home classroom in the dark while eating my breakfast. Since no one was around, I snapped a quite picture of what my classroom currently looks like. It'll change because the decorations haven't been finished but you can at least see the layout. FYI, the chairs are placed on top of the desks at the end of the day for cleaning purposes.

 Remember how on Monday afternoon we had a culture exchange session? Well Tuesday morning during English class, we make a small presentation with an overview of the previous day. I realized a culture difference within the presentation because Taiwanese students don't have the opportunity to give reports to the class very often. So the four girls today were very quiet and nervous while talking, sometimes inaudible because they didn't have the microphone close enough to their mouths. In America, we frequently have socratic seminars, reports, projects, presentations, etc. so I had much more experience with this sort of thing, especially when I give many speeches through Rotary. Look at me though, don't I just radiant as the foreign one? XD In this picture you can also see the contrast of the BRIGHT ORANGE P.E. uniform and the subtler formal uniform. This is why I say I stick out like a sore thumb when my class must wear the formal uniform for military education.

From 10:00-12:00 the exchange students got together to prepare our song for Teacher's Day. I ended up writing half the English lyrics. At first we were told to have a 5 minute performance. No biggie right? Then they changed it to 10 minutes. That's a bit harder. Now it's 10-15 minutes. Woah, we have our work cut out for us. XD

 Before we started working, we had ourselves a frighting situation because the exchange student from France (blonde chica to the right) fainted. Don't worry she's fine now. Most likely she was dehydrated or feeling stressed but it was amazing how all of a sudden a third of the school was gathering around to see us carry her to the school infirmary. Before they brought out a wheelchair, Eric had to carry her in his arms but he was loosing his grip. As I was helping him out, all of a sudden, a Taiwanese male student that's my size or smaller started carrying her. I was terrified he was going to drop her but thankfully that was when a wheelchair was delivered. It definitely was a reminder to take care of our own health as well as each other.

I would like to point out the lovely Asian woman in the picture. She is one of the two women who look after the exchange students at Tatung High School. More like a second-in-command, she oversees our signing in/out, shows us around, gives us a ton of information, arranges class/club opportunities and more. We wouldn't survive without her. Therefore, she has my whole-hearted appreciation.

On a yummier note, I tried another type of moon cake. This one was a rectangular block with dry pineapple filling inside. Yummy-yummy! There was one other type of moon cake my family bought, an egg one, but they already disappeared. Apparently they are that good. Amazing. I might have to venture a journey to find and try one. ;)