Way Cute

My co-teacher and I were headed to lunch at my school. We passed a Kindergarten classroom. (Incidentally, this is the kindergarten classroom from which the kindergartner who appeared in my second installment of "cute" originated). This time, two kindergarten boys were standing outside the classroom discussing something very somberly in Chinese.
My co-teacher chuckled. She told me "what those two boys were talking about was very cute. The first boy said to the second boy 'guess what cartoon is on my underwear today' and the second boy guessed. And then the first boy said 'yes, you are right.'"
Really, really cute.

bugs make good stories

A few weeks ago I was at my host family’s house for dinner. Their little girl noticed that there was a mosquito in the room and their son scampered off to get what I like to call “the magic wand of destruction.” The magic wand looks like a tennis racket. Except instead of tennis strings there is a metal mesh. By pressing a button on the handle of the racket and waving the metal mesh in the direction of the mosquito, it magically dies. There is a blue light. It is wonderful. I commented to my host mother that I had never seen this magical object before and she told me that almost everyone in Taiwan has one.
At first I thought I didn’t need one myself. And then last week, in the space of an hour, I was bitten 7 times on my leg. Things were getting out of hand. On the weekend, I bought a magic wand of destruction for my own apartment. However, I wasn’t entirely sure how the magic wand worked. I knew a blue light was supposed to come. But after unpacking the wand from its packaging and pressing the button I saw no blue light. “Is it working?” I wondered. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to investigate this question by touching the metal mesh. It was working. The “magic” that I speak of is more scientifically known as electricity. And the “blue light” only appears after a bug is blasted into hot dust by the electric current running through the metal. So that hurt.
But it was a valuable discovery. Later that night, Shiela, Billy and I saw a mosquito. We made Billy kill it. I was wary of the wand after the above incident. Shiela and I moved across the room just to be safe. We weren’t sure how we would know that the mosquito had been finished. Then there was a loud “zap!” and a flash of blue light (the color I had been waiting for all along). Billy expressed surprise. He asked how we knew that the bug was really dead. I said if the wand caused me pain, we could probably conclude that the mosquito was a gonner.
The first mosquito going up into a magical poof of electric blue light was followed by a lot of “We shoulds” and “Better Nots.” You know: “We should keep a tally of how many mosquito’s we’ve zapped.” “We should use that thing to wake up Shiela and Rebekah in the morning “ (Shiela objected to that one). “We should press the button and throw it out into the rainstorm” “Better not press that button and drop it in my bathtub.” “We should press the button and drop it into the fish pond in the courtyard” (can you imagine all of those goldfish simultaneously flipping over??).
The magic wand is a good toy. Here is Billy daring a mosquito to come close. (Note: another thing that people in Taiwan do that we’ve started doing as well is wearing face masks when we’re sick and don’t want to infect others).

Oh. That's cute. Part 2.

I think this might have to be a weekly thing. Or bi-weekly. Or monthly. Depending on how long my motivation holds up. In any case. I have more examples of cute:

I have an office in one of my schools which is huge. Like a room. For me and one other American English teacher. Thus, this room serves other purposes. For example, during the school wide naptime (after lunch) 3 or 4 girls from the student government come into my office to do work. They are my friends. One day they kept coming in the room and sneaking up behind me. They thought this was funny. Once I jumped rather violently. I used one of my not-actually-so-useless vocabulary words that I’ve picked up: “creepy.” It took them a while to figure out what I had said because I’m pretty sure my accent/tones are unintelligible. Eventually Shirley figured out what I meant. She said “Ohhhhhh” and mimed a Frankenstein walk. Cute. The next day I’m told that when the other English teacher that works in the school came into the office the girls had written “we like you Kate” in English and Chinese. This made my week. It would have made my month if I had been there to see it. Still, cute.

“Tina 3” is on the school’s traditional hip-drum dance team. I watched part of their practice. Cute.

A phrase I have come to understand at my schools is “American teacher.” This is because at my schools wherever I go, my skin and hair provokes a lot of stopping, staring and uttering of this phrase. I was taking a nap during school wide naptime (naptime is a beautiful feature of Taiwanese schools). During said nap I heard a little voice say in Chinese “American teacher.” I opened an eye and saw a Kindergartener’s face (only her face, that’s how short she was) peering in the class window watching me sleep. Creepy. But cute.

Oh. That's cute.

After my first week of teaching in Kaohsiung, I already have a handful of examples of how cute, enthusiastic and precocious the kids that I teach are:

On my first day of work, the first Taiwanese student I ever had a conversation with was a second grader named Tim. I was waiting in the hallway for one of the teachers. Time moseyed up to me and opened the conversation with “No Chineeeese?!?!” I confirmed that my chinese skills were a negative. I asked Tim if he was seven. He said that this was correct but was vastly uninterested in the subject. He pounded his chest and said “I am TIM!” Then he moseyed off to attend to other business. Cute.

The other day I walked to the bus stop from my school at the same time that the kids got out and were going home. I walked part of the way with one of my fifth graders. I couldn’t remember her name. I asked what it was. She said “My name is Tina 3” (There are three Tina’s in one of my classes). Cute.

In addition to teaching in the classroom, part of my job is to teach a dialog at the “English Village” every Monday and Friday. I work in a room that is set up to look exactly like a real grocery store. The students are my customers and I am a "clerk." A portion of the dialog that happens in this "supermarket" goes like this:
Clerk: Hello, can I help you?
Customer (student): Yes, I would like to buy _______ (the student is assigned a food item)
At this point in the dialog I normally have to hold up a vocabulary word such as “carrot” in order to get them to tell me what food they would like to buy. One group of students was special. When I got to this part in the dialog, the students paused, as usual, for my to tell them a food item. All except for one rascally fellow who enthusiastically yelled “CANDY!!” Cute.

Another time at English Village, students were helping me spell pillow. They loudly and enthusiastically said “P-I-“ellow”=”ellow”-O-W.” I was really sad that I had to correct this. Cute.

my pets

A fun fact about Taiwan is that there are a lot of cockroaches. Pet sized ones. My apartment has its share of them. Due to this fact, we bought some "cockroach poison" when we first moved in. However, we are worried about using it. This is because the poison is technically food. Poisoned food, but still food. Will we attract cockroaches while trying to kill them? Based on the following picture that was included in the instruction manual (this is NOT our kitchen... thank god), the answer looks like it may be yes:

The roomies and I have a good system worked out for killing our unwanted pets. We trap them under a toilet plunger that has so far never been used for its originally intended job. The plunger is good because it has suction. This means the cockroach can't escape or breathe. Also, it has a handle. This means that we can maximize the amount of space between ourselves and the roach. After we trap the little bugger, we generally follow up with liberal amounts of bug spray. Just to make sure. We are very determined exterminators.
The other night, a pet sized cockroach scuttled into my room as my roomies and I were planning English lessons in our living room (which is right next to my room). The exchange went like this.
Kate: "A RIDICULOUSLY HUGE COCKROACH JUST SCUTTLED INTO MY ROOM"
Roomies: don't seem to recognize the problem
Kate: goes to room to see if she can locate the pet.
Cockroach: was hiding
Kate: Tiptoes into room because she left a cup in there and didn't want to tempt the roach to stay.
Kate: Returns to safety and peers through bedroom doorway suspiciously.
Cockroach: scuttles out.
Kate: "SCREAMS" and jumps, literally, to the other side of the room (I am not proud. I lost my head).
Cockroach: is startled and returns to the safety of Kate's room.
Roomies: Start to recognize the urgency of the situation. Also start to laugh at me. Can't think why.
Kate: Runs back to doorway and peers in cautiously. "IT'S FLYING NOW. AARRRRGHHH, IT JUST LANDED ON MY PILLOW." it did. ridiculously huge cockroaches can also fly.
Roomies: Spring into action
Shiela: "We need the toilet plunger!!!!"
Billy: "We need bug spray!!"
Kate: is reduced to a fit of hysterical laughter.
Roomies + ETA visitor: 3 of them. All chasing the cockraoch around my room. With a toilet plunger. Simultaneously yelping everytime it gets too close.

It's trapped now. In a toilet plunger in a puddle of bug poison. I'm waiting 24-48 hours before I move it though. It has to be good and dead before I look at it again. It flew. Onto my pillow. Moral of the story: I was highly mistaken all of those times that I told myself I am good at remaining calm in crisis situations.

Apartment A

To set the stage for my further entries, I have decided to give you an idea of my living arrangements in Kaohsiung. There are 12 other Fulbright English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) in this city and three apartments: Apartments A, B and C. I live in Apartment A with three other ETAs: Billy, Rebekah and Shiela. We are quite chummy.
My apartment building is relatively fancy. It's name is on the gated entryway to the complex in both English and Chinese. In English it is "Cathay President Square Mansion" (I'm guessing that makes more grammatical sense in Chinese). The complex comes with its own security guards who are really friendly and wave enthusiastically at us every time we enter and exit. They have their own TV channel on our TV. I am not kidding. It is Channel 14. It is very comforting (if not interesting) to watch them sitting in their guard hut making sure no miscreants infiltrate the apartment complex. I’m pretty sure not everyone in Taiwan can watch our guards on Channel 14. That would defeat the purpose of making the residents feel more secure. Guard-TV also means that I get to feel famous sometimes. Once, I tried to get into the apartment and the gate was locked. The guard was reading a newspaper and therefore could not see me. So I had to knock on the window of the guard hut. The whole time all I could think was “oh my god! I’m on Guard-TV!!!” and wonder how many people in the complex were watching at that very moment. I’m pretty sure people watch that channel all the time. Why look out your window when you can watch it on TV? Apartment A is also quite nice. There are 4 bedrooms, a living room, a smelly kitchen, and a laundry room (no dryers in Taiwain!). Our apartment came with furnishings and a TV with Taiwanese cable (hence Guard-tv). I have a single room, with a queen sized bed and a private bathroom. It's bigger than it looks in this picture. I couldn't get a good angle. I have an IKEA desk that I bought for the equivalent of US$15 which is in an unphotographable corner. My roommates and I (actually, mostly me...) want to decorate the apartment with pictures of ourselves. Because this is not at all self-indulgent or narcissistic. We are thinking glamor shots. Or maybe we’ll have our portraits drawn. Or maybe we will casually stand in front of the guard hut, while another one of us sits in our living room and takes a picture of the other one appearing on Channel 14...

Getting There

My mother is a delightful person not necessarily known for her organization/punctuality. On the day I left for Taiwan, my suspicion that I am turning into my mother was confirmed. On July 30^th, I woke up at around 9:30 and had a nice, leisurely surf of the internet. At around 10:15, I decided to double check my flight to Taiwan. It was at this point that I discovered that I was scheduled to leave on July 30^th at 5pm… NOT July 31^st at 5pm. Despite the fact that my flight had been booked since early May, this was a surprise. A surprise that could have been avoided if I had thought to write down the date of my departure… or print out my ticket. But these are things that only someone known for their organization/punctuality (not me) would have done.

Two things are certain: I made it to Taiwan. I am turning into my mother.