Our friend Pearl, the pre-k teacher at KAS, took us out for lunch yesterday. We went to an aboriginal restaurant about 45 minutes outside of Kaohsiung in the foothills of the mountains. It's the first time we've been out of the city in a month (we took a day trip to the countryside the second day we were here) and it was beautiful.

There are a dozen or so aboriginal tribes in Taiwan that represent the people who lived here before the Chinese started arriving. The Hakka were the first Chinese to arrive, about 1000 years ago. The original settlers of Taiwan were probably from Polynesia. Those tribes were forced up into the mountains, out of the fertile lowlands, and treated like seemingly every indigenous group of people worldwide. In the past 20 years or so Taiwan has begun to embrace its past and the aboriginal tribes are getting recognition and some level of respect.

So, back to lunch. We ate at a restaurant that Pearl has been visiting for 20 years and loves to take new faculty to to introduce us newbies to some authentic Taiwanese culture, in her words. Here is the aftermath:

We had steamed fish, pickled papaya, fern and fruit salad, roasted boar, wild mushrooms and for dessert, red bean cake. It was delicious. The boar and the bean cake were not my favorites but the salad, mushrooms and fish were some of the best food I've ever eaten. I can't wait to go back again.

We had a lovely bike ride this morning. I started the day with my cup of coffee on the balcony watching the sunrise. It seemed relatively cool early but by 7:30 the temperature had quickly risen to the low 80's with 90% humidity. If you're going to bike that's the best weather you're going to get all day so you might as well just do it.

We went farther on the bike path than we'd gone before and passed lots of people out and about, including groups of folks doing group yoga and tai chi. We also stumbled onto a little farmer's market (literally stumbled since they'd set up shop on the bike path) and brought home some produce.

Apples, which we thought were local but actually came from Chile, onion, really long green-beany things, persimmons and a very big carrot. Don't let the size fool you. The carrots we've had are very tender and tasty.

Breakfast this morning:

Freshly made dumplings from this cart on the way to school:

Lee and I ate them in my classroom while we cooled off from our bike commute.

Delicious!

This weekend is a full of social events. This evening we had dinner at Foster Hewitt's, the expat bar nearby. I keep calling it J. Foster's, like the ice cream shops in Simsbury and Avon. They had no ice cream here, but Lee said the wings he ordered were the best he's ever eaten. We joined a friend of ours, Nancy, also a new teacher at KAS. She was here for a couple weeks then took a week off to fly home for her daughter's wedding. Crazy! It'll be a few more days before she's settled back into the routine.

Tomorrow we're joining the pre-k teacher for lunch. She's very excited to have another preschool teacher in the ranks of the faculty who understands what the little ones are like. She's fabulous with the children. The teachers in the youngest grades (pre-k through grade 1) are all Taiwanese. They teach in English but translate as needed so the kids get the English exposure but can also get instruction in Chinese so they don't get too frustrated.

Tomorrow night is the birthday of one of the KAS teachers and we're joining a group of colleagues for dinner and board games to celebrate. Then Sunday night we've been invited to another colleague's apartment for dinner. We may need to get back to work on Monday just to get some rest!

I feel like teaching overseas is like going to college. Everyone is thrown together in an exciting, unfamiliar environment and you form friendships very quickly because of that. You may not have become friends in "normal" circumstances but here you instantly have an awful lot in common. 

I've been slowly working through the bookshelves in my classroom and look what I found. (You can decide for yourself if you think these books are appropriate books for ELL children.)

"Cheating People"

"Are You Prepared to Die?"

And my person favorite, "Too Drunk to Walk" 

It's a crazy week at school. Faculty meeting, two open houses and a middle school meeting after school. The first open house was yesterday for all the ELL parents. ELL is English Language Learners, otherwise known as ESL. It's the first time I've had a parent meeting with an interpreter. I teach all of the elementary school plus sixth grade ELL students and the other teacher works with grades 7-10. The juniors and seniors aren't offered ELL support so they're on their own or get tutors at home.

On Tuesday we finally managed to get our bank accounts opened. The first two months we got our paychecks in wads of cash. With an exchange rate of 30 New Taiwanese dollars to 1 US dollar you can imagine how big a stack of cash we had.

We've been biking to work for the last week and a half and have figured out pretty well how to cool off and change once we get to school. The bike ride takes 15 to 20 minutes, depending on how many red lights I choose to blow through. The traffic is pretty light at 6:30 in the morning so there's really no reason to stop at all of them, right?

This morning we're going to stop at the dumpling cart on our way in to school. There are frequently vendors selling produce or prepared foods on the street corners. The carts are usually pulled behind scooters and the same vendor seems to claim the same spot on the side of the road. There are some countries where you'd be wary of buying street food but Taiwan isn't one of them. The sanitation is pretty good and there's very little poverty. We don't drink the tap water but we do wash dishes and brush our teeth with it. The problem with the water isn't bacteria, it's the heavy metals left over from a pretty dirty industrial history. Kaohsiung has worked very hard for the past twenty years to clean up the city and they've done a remarkable job. I wouldn't swim in the Love River but it isn't the sewer it used to be.

The sun is just coming up, Jupiter and Saturn are low over the horizon, and the mountains look close enough to touch. The temperature is in the high 70's, about as cold as it's gotten since we arrived and the sky is clear. It's a beautiful day!

Some of the fruit I have discovered recently.

First, dragon fruit.

It had the texture of kiwi but without as much flavor. A little bit sweet but kind of bland.

Second, dragon eyes.

These have hard, thin shells and are a little smaller than a ping pong ball. The shell (skin? rind?) comes off pretty easily and inside the fruit is like a peeled grape in texture with a big pit in the center. It's taste is hard to describe except to say that I liked it and Lee spit his out.

For those of you getting ready to start back to school this week I thought I'd show you pictures of my school.

This is one of the hallways on the second floor. The classrooms are on the left and the railing overlooks the playground on the right.

This is the view from across the hall from my classroom. The playground is in the foreground and the new building construction is in the background on the right. The elementary school wing of the current building is on the left.

Construction is a little bit behind but we are currently scheduled to move into the new building in April.

Week three of school starts today. The school has 600 students in pre-k through grade 12. There are about twice as many high school kids in a grade than in the elementary grades. The student body is nearly all local Taiwanese kids with a handful of international students, most of whom are children of the faculty. KAS is less of an international school than I expected but I think the hope is that the international population will grow with the new campus. Kaohsiung is not the international city that Taipei is so it's hard to find expat families to send their children to KAS. But Kaohsiung is changing so the school is bound to change along with the city.

We just got back from the most amazing hike up Monkey Mountain. We biked over to the park entrance, about 20 minutes away and started up the stairs built into the side of the mountain. It's one of those hikes that gets you up high quickly then levels out as you walk along the ridge. Here's the view of the city from the trail:

But the best part wasn't the views, it was the mountain's namesakes. We came around the corner and there they were - monkeys all over the place!

They were completely unconcerned with us and in fact came out of the woods to check us out. We hadn't brought any food so they were less interested in us than they might have been. We were warned that they'll try getting into your backpack to find your food so all we brought with us was water.

One of the coolest things was to see the groups of families, including babies and their moms. They kept an eye on us but didn't run away, although someone came by on a bike and spooked them. It didn't take them long to reappear on the path though.

At one point I counted 20 monkeys crossing the path. It was just so cool. I think we'll be spending a lot of time at Monkey Mountain.

It being Friday, it was time to drum up some interest in happy hour at the expat bar by the lake. Lee sent out the email and we met up with a happy bunch of colleagues looking for a little relaxation after a busy week inspiring the youth of Taiwan. The wind was blowing off the water, the beer was chilly enough and the garlic fries were delicious. All in all, a lovely way to finish off week 3 in Kaohsiung.

Yesterday was an especially beautiful day - clear sky, tolerable humidity and temps in the 80's, so Lee and I ventured out after work for a fabulous bike ride on the path. Tomorrow we're hoping for more good weather while we explore Monkey Mountain. The monkeys are supposed to be quite bold and will unzip your backpack and steal your granola bars. As long as they don't steal our phones I should have some good photos to post tomorrow.

IKEA before:

and after:

We now have a place to put kitchen stuff. It's in the living room but the kitchen is too tiny and there is no storage space in there. It reminds me of our first apartment at Walker's in Dodge House. The kitchen there was too small for the fridge so it was in the living room. Now that space is the office for the Montessori school.

Anyway, in addition to putting together the dresser we also got a chair, an end table and a couple lamps. Now Lee can do his chillaxin' at home in a little more comfort.

Next step is to get some things up on the walls. Our wonderful friend Nicki sent us some stuff to help with the decorating so we'll be adding color to our lives in no time!

I was going to tell you all about our trip to IKEA but we went out to find dinner and found a better story instead. Since I know you all want to hear about our IKEA adventure I'll tell you about it tomorrow after we've assembled everything and taken pictures.

Here is our Tuesday night story: We had heard about Sushi, Sushi, a restaurant with a very good reputation that's in our neighborhood. However, when we arrived we found out we needed a reservation, which we didn't have. I have to admit, I'm a little stymied by the idea of making a reservation. I can't find the name of the restaurant online since I don't read Chinese and even if I could call I'm not likely to reach someone who speaks English. I guess they would just set aside a table for the Americans and figure it's unlikely that more than one set of Americans walks in. To give you an idea of how many non-Asians you're likely to see on a typical day, during our whole 4 hours at IKEA on Sunday we saw one family and one couple who were Caucasian. And the place was packed.

Anyway, no dinner at Sushi, Sushi so we walked down the street, turned the corner and came across a market full of stalls of fruit, vegetables, seafood and food.

This stall caught our fancy, just because they seemed to be open (we were there pretty early, by Taiwanese standards). There were no pictures to go by so we asked the gentleman behind the counter if he could speak English and he said yes, a little. His English was pretty good, actually. Enough to tell us they had pork, chicken, fish and rice with soup and spices. Sounded good to us!

Here he is with his mother making us our dinner. He came and sat down with us, inbetween customers, and chatted with us. He was surprised to hear we were living in Kaohsiung and was pleased that we were enjoying the city. Here are our dinners:

For Lee, spicy seafood stew with yellow rice.

For me yellow rice, crispy pork, sauteed greens, dried anchovies, taro and basil sauce.

It seems like every time we take a walk we find fabulous little places to eat and really wonderful people who want to share their little piece of the world with us. An excellent dinner all around.

Now that we've had our bikes for a week and we feel like old hands at navigating Kaohsiung traffic we took the leap and rode to work this morning. We left at 6:30 and arrived 20 minutes later but it was another half hour before I'd cooled off. I have to work on the logistics of this. There are a number of teachers who regularly commute on their bikes (although most use scooters) and they have lots of tips. But because there aren't shower facilities it's a little tricky. I cranked the AC in my classroom and sat still for awhile before I wiped down and changed clothes but I have to tweak the technique a bit.

Like any big city the air quality isn't great but so far it doesn't seem any worse than Boston or New York. I hear that it can be worse in the winter. At least it will have cooled off!

There's a trick to turning left in Taiwan that I'd like to try to explain. For scooters (and bikes), if you want to turn left you stay in the far right lane in the designated scooter box painted on the road, which is about a car length in front of all the cars. When the light turns green you cross the street on your right and patiently wait in the scooter box on the far corner. Then when the light changes to green for the cross street the scooters zip across and go along their merry way. It's amazing to me, given the flaunting of so many other traffic laws, that almost everyone follows this one.

Anyway, we too followed the turn-left-law and made it home safely and now it's time for a cold drink. You know you've had a successful shopping trip when you come home with this:

Mango smoothies, Taiwan Beer, and the ultimate mash-up: mango beer.

At this point we know where to find, in our neighborhood, just about everything we need:
The 24 Hour Store, aka The Plastic Store, is like an old Woolworths. A place to get a trash can, step ladder, rain poncho and little packs of tissues. Plus just about everything else if you look hard enough.
The 9x9 is the stationary store. Pens, paper, wrapping paper, books, etc.
The night market is open every night except Mondays and Wednesdays from 6 pm to 2 am. It'll be our go-to spot for food that's not good for us but tastes really good.
The Wellcome and the 7-11 are on every corner. The 7-11 is the place to get a cold drink and snacks. The Wellcome is more like a small grocery store.
Dollars is the really big grocery store. Think mega-Walmart.
Costco. Self explanatory.
Foster Hewitts is the expat bar. English spoken here and the beer is on tap.
Our restaurant options are ever-expanding.
We're on our way to IKEA now. Pix to follow!

This morning one of the veteran teachers, Jen, took me and Lee plus three other newbies on a bike ride along the Love River and down to the city harbor. It was quite an adventure! We took the bike path all the way to end where the Pier 2 art center is (see the post from August 2 about the sculpture park) and along the pier to Jen's favorite spot for mango ice. Mango ice is a big thing around here, especially now when mangoes are in season.

Here we are at the snack shop, waiting for our mango ice.

After our refreshing snack we made our way to the ferry to Qijin Island. The ferry costs NT$15 (about 50 cents US) for a passenger with a bike and takes about 5 minutes to get to the island.

The bottom of the ferry filled up with scooters. The top is for walk-on passengers.

The buildings in the center of the photo are on Qijin Island.

Kaohsiung City skyline, including 85 Tower, the tallest building in the city.

 The island itself is a lot like Virginia Beach or Coney Island. Shops with trinkets and beach paraphernalia plus food stalls and the streets full of tourists.

In addition to honky tonk there are also temples, which you can find all over the city.

We biked through the town and quickly got past the crowds and onto the bike path along the beach. It was pretty incredible. The sand was black and the beach deserted. Apparently the Taiwanese are not much into swimming. It was also hot (I know, I mention that a lot...) and the ocean temperature was the warmest I've ever felt. Not exactly refreshing. Anyway it was beautiful. On the horizon there were more huge container ships than I could count.

  

Which fruit to choose for breakfast today? Guava, dragon fruit, banana, pineapple? It's an embarrassment of riches!

The rain finally stopped and the sun came out. Normally that would be great but really it just meant that it got really, really hot. When we left school at 4:00 it was 35 degrees, which doesn't sound so bad until you convert it to fahrenheit and it's 95! Today was the perfect day to cool off in the pool. Did I mention we have a pool at our apartment?

 
It was incredibly refreshing and I had it pretty much to myself. I think I'll be spending a lot of late afternoons there.

It's been raining so much in southern Taiwan that the mayor of Kaohsiung cancelled schools today, in addition to closing them early yesterday. Yesterday the city got upwards of 14 inches of rain (over 300 mm - sounds especially dramatic in metric, doesn't it?) and today has been alternately pouring and lightly raining.

We had a wonderful early walk through the park this morning and stayed relatively dry, thanks to our handy little umbrellas we bought on one of our first days in Taiwan. They have seen a lot of use in the last 5 days!

By noon we were getting pretty antsy to get moving and the rain had stopped (briefly, it turned out) so we decided to hop on our bikes and explore the bike path along the Love River.

Lee, chillaxing on the bike bath.
(Those are brick pieces of furniture, including a book and pair of glasses on the coffee table.)

 
Having the bikes opens up the whole city for exploration. I can only walk so far and taxis are great for getting you to one place but not really for exploring. There's a pretty extensive bus service and a 2-track metro (the north-south line and the east-west line) but we haven't figured out the systems yet. Eventually.

My classroom last week:

My classroom yesterday:

It may not look like much but it's my home during the day.

Lee has two classrooms, one the floor above mine and one downstairs and around the corner. Unfortunately, he has to share both of them with other teachers so he's a bit of a nomad. At the end of the day he likes to come hang out on my miniature couch while I finish up my work. I may think about putting in a miniature coffee maker.

Today it rained. A lot, apparently, because at noon the mayor of the city closed all of the schools. I guess there is such a thing as too much rain, even here, where my students tell me it rains all the time. This rain is different than the typhoon rains because then there's a lot of wind. We should expect school to close at least once or twice before the typhoon season ends in October.

Today was the first day of school. After all the prep work it was nice to actually get started. I am now exhausted. I took some pictures of my classroom but forgot to bring my phone home so I'll post the photos later.

It was pouring this morning, something it's done for three straight days. I've never worked in a school where it rains in the corridors! The hallways are open to the outside so there's a lot of splash, plus the ceilings leak in places.

KAS is building a brand new campus next to the old building so there's not much impetus to fix things like leaky roofs. We got to tour the construction site last week but it was a little hard to imagine the end result. There was a ceremony at the new building on Friday for the Ghost Festival. From what I understand, the festival is a chance to placate the ghosts by offering them food and money. There were tables set up all over the city covered with food and burning incense and braziers on the sidewalk where paper money was burned (not real money - I think the ghosts aren't particular). Anyway, I think the ceremony went well and we are on schedule to move into the new building in April.

Here's a link to the architect's video:
http://www.kas.tw/kaohsiung-american-school/campus/

Today we have to go to the grocery store. Yesterday we got 10 pounds of oatmeal at Costco and fresh mango and papaya from the street vendor but that's not really enough to make lunch for school tomorrow. The problem is we had planned on walking there and taking a taxi back but, unfortunately, it's pouring ran and it's a bit of a haul to walk there.

So you're thinking, just take the taxi there, right? Our problem is how to tell the taxi where to take us. When we are going to school or home we have the addresses to hand to the driver.

Most taxi drivers we've encountered don't speak any English and my Chinese is limited to counting to 10, thank you and sorry. Lee can say chopsticks. Addresses are beyond our language skills so far. Hopefully it'll stop raining long enough for a walk or we may have to try showing the driver google maps on the phone.

Here's my new bike!

We went to a wonderful Giant Bikes shop and spoke with Joe, whose English was excellent, and bought a bike that'll be good for commuting on the flat roads of Kaohsiung. But it also has plenty of gears so I'll be able to bike up Monkey Mountain if I want. I also got a water bottle, fender, lock, helmet, pump and a really nifty basket that detaches and has a handle so it'll be great for shopping at the street markets.

Unfortunately they didn't have the bike Lee wanted in the shop so he has to wait until Monday evening to pick up his. That's not really a big deal considering it poured on and off all day today and the weather forecast is for more of the same for the next 6 days. Not exactly biking weather.

On our way to shop at Costco we walked a bit out of our way and found part of the bike trail that goes along the Love River.

The river itself is pretty murky but the trail was great. There are something like 100 km of bike paths in the city and the one along the river is one of the most popular. We'll start exploring the paths next weekend.

Ta da! From this:

To this (with only a little help from Lee):

Yeah, I know, it's only a fan and all fans are pretty much alike, but I'm looking for little victories right now.