Here we are in Massachusetts in late December. The sun has yet to make an appearance at 7:30 in the morning - yet another cloudy, cold day. Sunset was at 4:30 in the afternoon yesterday. December in New England means there just isn't enough sunshine. There are nine hours between sunrise and sunset here today and eleven hours in Kaohsiung. I'm going to miss those long winter days when we leave Taiwan. The summer days, of course, are much shorter in Taiwan, but that's not such a bad thing, considering how hot the days can be.

Yesterday's weather is something I have not missed while living in Taiwan. Sleet, freezing rain, slushy snow, cold and raw. And dark. Did I mention there's been no sunshine?

One thing I have missed? Clean air. The lack of air pollution is such a breath of fresh air (sorry, I couldn't resist).

Christmas is over and we're in that odd, should-have-its-own-name week leading up to New Year's Day. Our plan had been to spend the week in Japan but we've changed that plan and are staying in Massachusetts for an extra week. Dad looks as though he's started a new Christmas tradition of falling and breaking his neck. An odd tradition, I must say, but our time seems better spent here with family since we were in the neighborhood anyway. We'll try to get to Japan another time.

It was delightful to have time with the boys, as well as to see all of my brothers and sisters.

Squeak guards the Christmas tree.

Zach, Dad, Gavin and Josh

Cady, aka Tigger, and Dad

We have made it safely to Massachusetts on yet another uneventful series of flights. No lost luggage, no missed connections, acceptable movie selection, decent food. That's about as good as it gets. Our journey started on foot to the subway, followed by the high speed rail to the Taipei airport, one flight to Japan, another to Boston, finishing up with a walk to the Hilton.

The train station has a bookcase with books to borrow. Alas, they were all in Chinese.

The train is clean, comfortable and fast. 

It worked out well to recover from the traveling by spending the night at the airport hotel (although the Hilton was way under par from what I'd expect from a hotel like that). We were awake and refreshed and ready to pick up the rental car bright and early. We had lunch with one son and Lee's mom in Boston then parted ways for a bit. Lee has stayed in Boston for an extra day while I've traveled on to Amherst to see the family.

The meals have certainly gotten better:

At the airport in Taipei.

In Amherst - chicken pot pie and kale salad made by my lovely sister Leslie
and hosted by my lovely sister Jenner.

Last evening I went to a friend's apartment and met her doorman/healer. Linda was pretty sure that he could rid me of my sore throat. I think she didn't believe me when I told her my hoarse voice was just a hoarse voice and not a sore throat too. David, the doorman/healer, gently rested his hands around my neck and had me concentrate on my throat, but his specialty is reducing pain and I wasn't in pain. I think the fact that my voice didn't sound any better was a disappointment to all. But I did have a lovely cup of tea and a lovely evening of conversation with friends.

My voice has been getting better on its own since Tuesday. If I can keep myself from yelling at the students during sports day this afternoon I think it'll be back to normal by the time I get on the plane tomorrow.

Any time I get a cold it goes straight to my voice box. As the day wore on yesterday my voice got worse and worse. Fortunately, my classroom is outfitted with a microphone so that's what I resorted to by the last class. It's very odd to speak into a microphone while you're trying to teach. When I needed to say an aside to Douglas, along the lines of "knock off what you're doing," it wasn't an aside but instead broadcast to the whole room. Not that everyone else knew that Douglas should stop doing whatever it was he was doing, but my comment wasn't intended to be that public.

Some of the Chinese language teachers, all of whom are Taiwanese, use the microphone to teach every day. I think they must be used to teaching to a large group of students in a lecture hall setting. There's such a contrast between students who have just transferred from the local schools and the students that have been at KAS or another American school for awhile. When you've spent so much of your schooling in a lecture hall setting, especially in elementary school, you get trained to memorize, don't ask questions, keep quiet. The American system has flaws, for sure, but the Asian system is not the place to learn independent or creative thinking.

I've been feeling a bit under the weather the past few days. No complaints here, though. I haven't had so much as a sniffle since I've been back in Taiwan this year. Back in that previous life, working with small children, my work life was fraught with little kid germs. It's not nearly so bad with middle school kids. I just hope I'm over whatever it is by the time we step onto the plane in four days.

The school is nicely decorated with secular Christmas. There's no worries that you'll offend anyone because here the holiday is not a religious one at all. I think it's just an excuse to buy sparkling things and decorate your home. Here's what the lobby at school looks like.

What a difference a day makes. The rain did indeed clean the air. After school we went for a bike ride to Cijin Island. I had suggested we go to the harbor but it was so lovely out that we extended the ride by going out to the island. We stayed long enough to watch the sun set.

It's funny how sunsets can be so alluring. The sun has set nearly 20,000 times in my lifetime and yet I still like to watch it go down. Me and Lee and hordes of Chinese tourists too. It was nice to get some exercise, something we didn't get a lot of while the kids were here, and the weather was as good as I've ever seen.

Those are the mountains of the Central Mountain range - over 200 peaks over 3000 feet high.

Cijin Island palm tree at sunset.

It's actually raining this morning. Not the thick air mist kind of rain but the drops you can hear falling on the trees. It'll be a wet ride into school today but maybe the air will be a bit cleaner than it has been. Taiwan would like to blame China for the smog that hovers over Kaohsiung and I'm sure that's a factor but this city produces plenty of its own pollution and it's been bad recently. When we flew back from Hualien Cierra used the word horrifying to describe the blanket of smog she could see from the air that lay across the western half of the island. Horrifying is right.

We fly back for Christmas in less than ten days and I'm really looking forward to breathing some clean air.

Yesterday we hopped on a train for a day trip, something we almost never do. It's easy to do, if you're willing to look blankly at the ticket machine and wait for some kind soul to help you out. We were trying to buy tickets to Tainan and a young woman came to our aid, translating what the ticket booth gentleman was trying to tell us, then confirming that we were waiting on the correct track and finally, finding us on the train to let us know we'd arrived at our destination. People can be so nice.

We'd decided to go to Tainan and check out a couple of places I'd been to last January. Lee hadn't come with me on that trip so it was new for him too. Zach and Cierra have seen just about everything we could think of to send them in Kaohsiung, or at least the ones you can get to either on foot or on the MRT. They also accepted an offer from a friend of ours to spend a day driving to places a little out of the city. On Thursday they visited a huge Buddhist monastery, a former brick factory and some mud volcanoes. I hope to go to these places before we leave Taiwan so you'll have to wait until then to hear all about them.

Our destination in Tainan was the Anping Port area. Tainan is the oldest city in Taiwan and the former capital. It's where the Dutch set up headquarters and where they built their fort when they briefly controlled the island. This was in the latter half of the 1800's. The Japanese took over around 1890 and didn't leave until the end of World War II. Tainan has just a few European buildings and quite a bit of Japanese influence, as does most of Taiwan. When we were in Hualien there was also a lot of Japanese history to see.

Although there were signs to read at the Anping Fort about the history of Tainan we didn't really spend much time exploring any of the historical sites except for the fort. Instead, we wandered through the streets and tiny alleyways where the street vendors set up shop. It appeared to be bring-your-school-group-to-Tainan day because it was packed with teenagers dressed in school uniforms, most of which look like polyester leisure suits. I finally got to eat one of the foods I'd read about before coming to Taiwan: coffin bread.

It's a thick slice of bread that's deep fried, then the center is cut out and filled with various things and the top is put back on. This one seemed like chicken pot pie filling. I thought it was quite tasty and the vendor seemed very proud of his famous food.

The highlight of our Tainan trip was visiting the Tree House. It's an abandoned warehouse that a banyan tree has overgrown. Some clever entrepreneur cleaned it up and started selling tickets to walk through the old building and it's worth every NT (in this case, $50NT).

When we got back to Kaohsiung Cierra decided she really needed to go back to the night market and find some stinky tofu. You can't come this far and not try stinky tofu. Well, actually, you can, judging by Cierra and Zach's expressions.

With the arrival of December the weather has definitely changed. For the past few days I've been wearing a windbreaker for the commute into work and we haven't been turning on the a/c in the morning. I haven't had to resort to socks yet but that may be coming soon. The problem with the a/c is that the pollution levels have risen dramatically and the air in the apartment needs conditioning but not cooling. There's an option for that on the remote. Too bad I can't read Chinese.

Zach and Cierra are still with us, but just for a few more days. I'm putting a sampling of photos from our trip to Hualien after I finish these thoughts but time is marching along and I may not do much of a recap. I'm sorry for that because this blog is my journal - I'd like to be able to look back at what I did while I was in Taiwan - but having house guests really eats into your free time so it's hard to keep up with posting.

We've been out to eat nearly every dinner, walked and wandered all around this area and taken the subway to areas too far to walk to. It's pretty exhausting! I still have Christmas shopping to think about, not to mention having to go to work every day. Finding time to blog has been lower on the priority list than getting some sleep. But the kids went to Taipei for an overnight trip - and had a great time with our friend Simona and her mother - so I'm sitting down to hopefully catch up a bit.

Here are some pix from the east coast.

We biked around Liyu Lake and only got rained on a little bit.

We found a weaving studio!

Cierra and Zach at the beach.

Overlooking the coastline.

 

No explanation required.

We went back to Sanxiantai, the Eight Dragon Bridge where we went we Josh in October.

Sunrise from our hotel room.

We just returned from an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving weekend in beautiful Hualien on the east coast of Taiwan. It was a whirlwind of touring the city, driving down the coast to the Dragon Bridge we went to with Josh, touring the rift valley and a day hiking in Taroko Gorge. I have excellent photos to share and stories to tell but not right now, as the work week looms ahead. Having visitors can sure be exhausting.

One note, however. The hotel in Hualien, the Anntiss Ocean View, served sandwiches for breakfast and, while the fruit sandwich and the chicken sandwich were perfectly fine, I decided to try the fish sandwich on our last morning. Picture toast with tuna salad, heavy on the mayo, topped with sliced cucumber, shredded cabbage and onion, and peanut butter. I decided to skip the fish part and had cabbage and peanut butter on toast for breakfast. It lasted fine and I got to finish off the day with a delicious bowl of ramen from the Red Bus, a lovely little restaurant-on-wheels along the Love River back here in Kaohsiung. Meals here in Taiwan can be pretty hit-or-miss.

A trip to Kaohsiung would not be complete without a hike up Monkey Mountain. The day started out cooler than earlier this week and clear, although the smog had really taken over as the morning moved along so the views were obscured by the haze. But we did see plenty of monkeys.

We also saw some beautiful spider webs, one of which Lee got a very nice photo of.

There was a gentleman playing music for the hikers, and the monkeys apparently. By the way, I shot this video before the monkeys peed on me and Lee, which is supposedly good luck. It didn't feel much like good luck to me, but what are you going to do? The music was nice anyway.

Zach and Cierra very kindly agreed to come to school on Friday and be the audience for my students. My lower level ELL kids had prepared a slide show of sorts and recorded an essay they had written describing a space at the school.

It's good for the students to have an opportunity to share their work and they were happy to have Ms. Bestor's son and his girlfriend listen to them talk. A couple of the kids with no filters peppered them with personal questions, like "When are you getting married?" but Zach and Cierra handled them with grace and patience - and a couple of none-of-your-business kind of answers.

I also got to treat them to lunch from the snack bar and give them a tour of the school.

We finished the day with dinner at an Indian restaurant and were quite surprised to find it raining when we finished dinner. I hasn't rained in a month and I hadn't expected it to rain again for another six months. But it felt pretty good and it cleaned out the pollution a bit so we didn't mind. We walked up to the fruit store to restock the larder and came back with persimmon, pineapple, passion fruit, Asian pear, oranges, grapefruit, dragon fruit and wax apples.

Delicious.

We took Zach and Cierra to the night market, on a round-about route along the Love River bike path.

The weather had gotten a smidgen cooler a few weeks ago but it's gone back to the "comfortable-hot" range, according to the government weather page. It a bit sticky for everyone else's liking, although I don't mind it too much. I prefer less humidity but I don't find it unbearable, the way I did last year. It was nice to walk along the river, anyway.

The night market was busy, but not too crazy, the way it can be on the weekends. 

Cierra wasn't feeling up to eating too much (their clocks haven't quite synched up yet) but we did get a nice sampling of foods, even if we did skip the stinky tofu. Our menu included fruit smoothies, German sausages, Hungarian pizza, odd chicken parts (butts and skin, maybe?) and my new favorite, candied sweet potato. We will make an attempt to go back for stinky tofu and scallion pancakes before Zach and Cierra leave. I'm pretty sure their friends will shun them if they haven't at least tried these Taiwanese delicacies.

Zach and Cierra have arrived, a little bleary-eyed and travel weary. One of my goals is to take them to all of our favorite restaurants. I hope they came hungry!

First stop, Din Tai Fung, a Taiwanese original. Anthony Bourdain of the Travel Channel fame calls the dumplings there "little pockets of heaven."

They're up early this morning so they've gone off to find our favorite dumpling cart to bring back some breakfast before we head off to work. Tonight we'll go to the night market. I'm pretty sure they'll need naps in between.

We have gotten into the habit of eating out many nights, and who can blame us? The food is great and inexpensive, we have an incredible variety of cuisines to choose from and, frankly, I don't really like to cook all that much. Christmas cookies, yes, but the every day not so much. But I also don't want to never cook. It's satisfying to cook a really good meal at home. Lazy Sunday afternoons are a good time to plan, shop, prepare and then have your home fill with the smells of delicious food cooking.

So today I made the commitment to roast a chicken. Not such a big deal, you say? I am not interested in preparing a chicken that still has many of its parts that I've spent a lifetime trying to imagine were never attached. The chickens at the market here still have their heads and feet. I know that they're supposed to have those parts when they're alive but I'm just not used to seeing them when the bird is ready to come home to my oven. So, no fresh chicken from the street vendors. Instead we picked up a nice, clean plastic bag of chicken from Costco.

It even claims that this was a happy chicken, running free on some chicken farm in Taiwan. All was fine and good until I opened the bag and discovered, to my dismay, that our dinner had not lost its head, or its feet either. I really, really wanted to be strong and embrace my carnivorous self but I just couldn't do it. Fortunately, Lee overcame his own qualms about beheading this poor dead bird and took care of that part. I did cut the feet off all by myself, however.

I didn't eat meat for a number of years but have been happy being a meat-eater for quite awhile. I may have to rethink that position. But not tonight. The bird is in the oven as I type this.

It smells good and I'm getting hungry. When it comes time to slice into it I may lose my appetite for an animal that just a short time ago still had its head. I'll let you know after dinner.

Addendum: I did not lose my appetite. The chicken tasted good, although not great. I think I've been cured of the desire to roast my own chicken. The next time I get an inkling that I'd like some roasted chicken I think I'll just get Costco's already-cooked version. I know those do not come with either the heads or the feet. Although you can get them in the chicken parts section of the store. No thank you.

Today has been a day to think of Paris, including the people I know and care about who live there.

The school's string orchestra put on a mini-concert the other day and boy, were they good. They set up their chairs in the lobby at the end of the school day and serenaded the students as they headed out to the buses. There are about three dozen students in the orchestra, some as young as 6th and 7th grade, as well as seniors who have their eyes set on going to schools like Julliard.

The program included three pieces by Handel, Pachelbel's Canon, and Mouret's Rondeau (well known as the Masterpiece Theater theme music). The performers were all dressed in their black performance outfits and made an interesting contrast to the swirling crowd of exiting students who would pause as they passed by. There was also a small crowd of parents and faculty who stood around and listened to the whole 20 minutes of music and went away humming the classics. Or maybe that was just me.

Earlier in the week Lee and I went to the solo performances by the IB music students. Those are the ones who end up at Julliard and Berklee College of Music. Music is taken very seriously here and they love the classics. The two music teachers at KAS take every opportunity to let the students perform and we go to every performance. These kids are not like my peers back when I was in school. There is no cringing at missed notes or being off-key. Even the kindergartners do an impressive job up on stage.

And not only are these kids good, they seem to be really enjoying themselves. There is definitely some nervousness at having to perform in front of an audience but once they get started they pretty much all seem to relax and really get into the music, smiling, concentrating, enjoying themselves. It's pretty magical.

This weekend was the Lion Dance competition. Saturday's competition was held at a swimming pool because the poles they were dancing on were 5 meters tall. I guess they figured there would less likelihood of death if the dancers fell into the water, provided they were fished out before they were drowned. We didn't go but it must have been pretty impressive.

Instead, we went to Sunday's event, which was held nearby at the Kaohsiung Arena. Here's a sample:

We learned recently that there is a tunnel on Cijin Island that leads to the point below the lighthouse. It's an area we've wanted to visit but couldn't figure out how to get to. So this morning we headed out on our bikes to find it. If you've read much of this blog you know we spend a lot of time biking around Cijin. It's got a long, quiet bike path right along the black sand beaches. There's very little traffic once you get beyond the little town and because it's such a tourist destination there are plenty of bathrooms and little shops for snacks, drinks and trinkets. Heaven.

Today did not disappoint. The entrance to the tunnel was right where we were told to look and it led to a delightful little bike path around the end of the island, right at the mouth of the harbor.

In one end....

... and out the other.

Like most places you can go, if you're willing to go a little ways off the beaten path you can find a lot of uncrowded, lovely little spots. The bike path and beaches here were splendid.

Since we were in the neighborhood we walked up to the lighthouse as well.

A walk in the park.

Fan dancers in the shade of the trees.

Next in line, dancers in beautiful, native aboriginal costumes.

New flowers were being planted along the walkways.

This gentleman was out with his family, taking his dogs for a walk.

The family was quite pleased that I wanted to take pictures of the dogs. And who wouldn't want to take their pictures? They're adorable!

This family was feeding the turtles in the pond.