The last few weeks of my life may have disappeared into an un-bloggable vacuum. After Kenting, which is my most recent update, my teaching went unremarkably well and I continue to love and enjoy my students.
The weekend after Kenting, I went to Taichung, which is in the middle of Taiwan's West coast. Winnie and I took the High Speed Rail together and stayed with a friend of hers from high school. He, his wife, and son, Anson, showed us around a bit and treated us to a delicious curry lunch. Winnie and I stopped by a local jazz festival and enjoyed some surprisingly smooth English jazz and beer. Then we visited a local university's beautiful campus and walked around their night market.
The next day I met up with my friend Elly, my close friend from London whose hometown is just outside Taichung, and we went for brunch at an American diner. Every foreigner in Taichung was there! It was worth it to have blueberry pancakes and bacon, though. After that, we visited the art museum, which I loved. It had some really interesting Taiwanese and Korean artists ranging from impressionist to modern styles. The architecture of the building itself and the surrounding sculptures were also noteworthy.
Finally, we went to Taichung park and I saw Elly's church. Grace Church is a small red brick building in the corner of this massive park; a bilingual place welcoming of locals and foreigners. The park itself is gorgeous with a lake, gazebo, a few bridges, and on that particular day, a Cantonese concert. Winnie and I had planned to head home that afternoon, as I had much work to prepare for the next week at school, but she stayed longer with a group of friends from college. I enjoyed the solitary train ride home, though it wasn't exactly peaceful. A man across the aisle from me was snoring ridiculously loud and all of the children in our train car were cracking up. They were thrilled to look at me and see that I was laughing too!
That Monday I started a new story-telling tactic for the 5th and 6th graders. I decided to tell James and the Giant Peach and scrap the Power Point idea. I bought a costume, turning myself into James, made stick puppets of the main characters, and put together a few background slides with English countryside, the inside of a peach, and an ocean. I acted out the story and had students come up and pretend to be the puppet characters. They loved it! Finally they were engaged and the story lasted the entire period.
Teaching that week started off well, as I recall, and I also tried a new tactic with my Free Talk class. We did a pseudo English Village enactment of taxi rides. They had a blast pretending to be my rowdy customers and practicing the typical English dialogue.
Unfortunately, that Wednesday after classes, I was in an accident on my scooter. Though I intentionally neglected to mention it, for the past two months I've been driving a scooter to various places in Kaohsiung. That day, I was driving to meet Winnie for lunch, about ten minutes away from Fushan. It was an unavoidable situation caused by incorrect assumptions on my part and that of the bus driver.
The bus was rather small, more like a van, but the driver made an illegal U-turn and I couldn't get out of the way. He hit me as I was trying to go around him, so luckily we were both going quite slow. I was wearing my helmet, but flew off of my bike, which then slid down the road.
I will continue with the grimy details later, as I am back at work today after taking a week to rest.
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