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!