Life here has been fairly interesting. I’ve been to a number of school events, and a full account of even one of them would run to several pages. These events never cease to blow my mind. There has been a fair amount of drama connected with them, too. One foreigner freelancer, some dude named Cameron, never showed up at all for a speech contest and a series of frantic phone calls led to someone filling in, though 40 minutes late. Then someone else ditched a class completely. Not sure what happened there. So he had to do a make-up class, which conflicted with another class, which meant that I had to step in to teach three hours at a school way out in Sanxia. I was going to go there with another coworker, but this guy was a complete no-show. He never showed up at work at all. So, there was another frantic series of phone calls to recruit a last-minute replacement teacher from the pool of editors at the office.

So, this poor replacement teacher spends a frantic morning pulling together the material to teach these three hours, and then makes the long trek to Yongning MRT station. She’s there exactly on time at 12:20. I, of course, was there twenty minutes early. So we wait for the sales rep to pick us up. And we wait, and we wait, and we wait. Nobody shows up. Time is getting late, and I get on the phone to the company. No one answers the phone since it is lunch time. I call the sales rep next, and he says he is coming. So we wait. But he never shows up. So then I have no choice but to call the big boss. The big boss calls the sales rep and the sales rep company. FORTY minutes late, the sales rep finally shows up. And he drives like a demon, risking all our lives, to get us to the school. I was hoping the whole disaster would be cancelled at this point, but no such luck. We show up at the school and we are rushed into our respective classrooms where the kids have been waiting for nearly an hour.

Oddly enough, my classes went very well. In the past, teaching (as opposed to judging a contest) was always a disaster because I was generally asked to teach an article from the magazines, and I have no idea what to do with them. Plus, the classrooms are poorly designed for an interactive ESL type of class. In this case, however, the subject was storytelling using pictures, and I was able to create my own material and lesson plan for that. Plus, I was assigned this wonderful AV room. It was extremely quiet with several round tables. The students grouped themselves nicely around each table and everything worked well.

It was still exhausting, though, and I was quite glad when it was over. The sales rep was under instructions to be nice to us and drive us all the way back to the Fuxing MRT station in Taipei. I talked my poor coworker’s ear off the whole way back. She had had a regular classroom at the school, and it sounded like things didn’t go quite as swimmingly. Not surprising, since it was sprung on her at the last minute.

On Friday (yesterday), I went to Chiayi for another speech contest. It was an early one, and I had to catch the 6:30 High Speed Rail (HSR) train out of Taipei. It was a bit rough because I’ve been absolutely flattened by a cold this past week. I don’t know what it is, but the cold virus just kicks my butt these days. It’s no joke when I get a cold now. It about does me in, so I’ve been a wreck lately. I’ve actually called in sick for all the half days preceding or following these school events. I take a sick morning and then do the contest in the afternoon. Same thing for the classes I taught. I took a sick morning and then taught the classes in the afternoon and then collapsed into bed at night. (Unable to sleep, unfortunately, coughing and wheezing and blowing my nose.) On Friday, the speech contest was from 9 to 11 in the morning. In theory, I could have been back in Taipei and at the office by late afternoon, but I just went straight home. I could barely think or see straight by that point. After all, I’d been up since 5 in the morning to catch the 6:30 train.

It was a pretty cool day, though. Being so early, I had practically the entire train to myself. I’ve been reading the Dexter books on my Kindle and enjoying them very much. I had a hot cup of coffee and just settled back and relaxed for the 1.5 hour train trip. The sales reps in Chiayi are great. I’ve met them before. It’s a team of a man and a woman. The man is the driver and has almost no facial expressions at all. He looks exactly like the sidekick from the movie “Kung Fu Hustle” – kind of tubby with a shaved head and thick droopy eyelids. He looks barely awake at all times, but he’s the best driver I’ve ever seen in Taiwan. The woman is very friendly and this time she walked up to me with a big cup of fresh 7-11 coffee for me. They also gave me a big box of Chiayi tea as a present.

At the school, I was given a box of special Chiayi cookies. They rarely see foreigners down there, so my presence at the school was a big deal. There were only two judges for the speech contest – myself and one teacher from the school. That put a lot of pressure on me to judge accurately. Luckily, out of the 22 contestants, 19 were about the same, and 3 were really, really good. Picking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place was, therefore, very easy. Then we needed 3 honorable mentions. It worked out very well, though we did have to discuss one of the honorable mentions. Our scores differed drastically when it came to one student, and, for some reason, the other judge wanted to make a fight out of it. I wasn’t about to argue the point, and I good-naturedly adjusted my score for that student upward and made her one of the honorable mentions. I didn’t see her speech as being that noteworthy, but this judge and the other teachers thought otherwise. Who am I to argue? So the fix was in for honorable mention #3.

The whole thing makes me smile even thinking about it now. The topic was “My Favorite Food or Spot in Chiayi.” When they told me the topic, I nearly fell over with shock. How would students manage that topic? How? Well, pretty easily as it turned out. Eleven of them wrote a speech about Alishan (My Favorite Spot) and eleven of them wrote about Turkey Rice (My Favorite Food). You have not lived until you have heard eleven speeches about the wonders and glories of turkey rice and eleven speeches about the sunrise on Alishan.

 

Today was the first sunny weekend day in ages, and I hopped on my scooter and drove out to Shenkeng. I’d never actually stopped off there and explored the old street and whatnot before even though I’d driven by it dozens of times. I brought my Olympus with me and took some pictures. That camera is such a joy – especially for portraits. There are lots of kinks I haven’t worked out about the camera, but I really like the pictures it takes. And there is no way I would have gotten these pictures with a regular SLR. I love just standing in the street and snapping pictures as the crowd moves past me. I have trouble focusing, unfortunately, but I end up with group shots and every single person has the most amazing expression on their face. It’s a lot of fun to see the pictures afterwards.

After Shenkeng, I hopped on my scooter and picked a road at random that led south into the mountains. It was a very lucky choice. The road was wonderful and climbed higher and higher into the mountains and brought me to all kinds of areas I hadn’t seen before. There were tons of hiking trails up there. The road eventually came steeply down into a valley, and it got narrower and rougher until I thought it would just dead end. However, it ended up linking with the Maokong area and I spent a happy hour driving around that area. I’d only ever gone up there on the gondola and on foot before. It was really beautiful to just drive around. At one point, I found myself at one of the gondola stations, and I knew there was a great coffee shop there. I stopped off and had a coffee and checked over the pictures on my camera.

From there, I had no idea how to get back to Taipei. I just kept heading roughly west and north and hoped that things would start to look familiar. The sun was fairly low at this point, so I knew where west was and that helped. It took some time, but I slowly made my way through some unknown suburbs and then recognized some streets and zoomed home.

 

 

Tags: scooter, Shenkeng Old Street, Taipei, train