This blog hit a milestone of sorts yesterday - over 10,000 pageviews since I started writing a year ago. I decided to blog about our travels as a way of letting family and friends know what I was up to without having to email each individual person. I've heard it said plenty of times that Facebook is where people stay in touch but I'm not a big Facebook fan. So I started blogging back when we started packing up to come to Taiwan, way back in April of last year. I love that people are reading what I write. It keeps me coming back to the keyboard. But frankly, I'd write even if no one was reading. It turns out I like writing. Who knew? Hmm, there are a lot of things I've learned about myself in the past ten months. Anyway, thanks for hanging out with me.

In news from my corner of the world, it's raining. I know, who wants to hear about the weather, but we've needed the rain so badly and here it is. It rained all day yesterday and it was delightful. We rode our bikes to and from school and it really was quite pleasant. The air temperature was in the low 80's so the rain is more refreshing than chilly, even on the bike.

However, the rain did complicate the musical performance the kids planned for after school yesterday. But this is Taiwan and we, apparently, don't let a little rain get in the way of our plans. The high school students have a performance club that performs mostly pop songs to the delight of their peers and yesterday was their last concert for the school year. They set up on the high school courtyard but the rain started to get a bit heavy so they tucked themselves under the eaves and brought out the umbrellas.

I think they mostly perform for each other so the audience isn't crucial. (Kind of like my blog - see how I brought this post full circle?) My classroom is on the second floor, all the way to the left in this photo so I could sit in my room and listen while I got some work done after school.

I've got big news to share. We're going to move! It's not very far, just eight floors down, as a matter of fact. We had heard that the apartment next to another one of the KAS teachers was available and it got us thinking. There are things we don't like about our apartment - the hot water heater leaks, under the kitchen sink smells awful, the kitchen is way too small. There are things we like too, the main one being the location.

As teachers started making the decision to leave Kaohsiung we'd look around their apartments to see if it was an improvement over ours. There are always things that are better but the location was never better than where we are now. Then when we heard about this one we figured we'd take a look. The rent is a little higher than what the school covers but not by much and it's a much nicer space.

Lee and I met the landlord and looked around the apartment this evening. We spent about a half hour there but we made our decision in the first five minutes. The landlord is really nice and wants to rent to someone who will appreciate the space. She used to live there and put her own touches into the decorating and such and says she wants to rent to someone who will enjoy it. She got an offer from a company in Taipei that wanted to use it as office space but she likes us better.

It's got two bedrooms, a study room of sorts off the master bedroom, two baths, a big (by Taiwanese standards) kitchen and a nice little living room. There are some disadvantages of course. I'll miss the view from the tenth floor balcony and we'll be closer to the street level noise. Another issue is that we have to be moved in about three weeks. Good thing we don't have too much stuff.

Why is it at the end of the school year teachers are surprised at how busy it is? After all, it's busy at the end of every school year, year after year after year. Even in my previous life at the Children's Center there was that sense that there are more commitments, more loose ends, more curriculum to cover, and not enough weeks left to do it all. Anyway, it's that time of year.

Yesterday, though, we took a little break from all that and rode with a friend to the outskirts of the city to see a little cabin-in-the-woods spot that he thought we might enjoy. It translates to "leisure farm" but that phrase conjures up some odd images. It's more like those little motels you find in the mountains of New Hampshire (and plenty of other places as well) where there are a bunch of little cabins clustered along the road. This place is tucked in among some pineapple farms and scrubby hillsides and can be reached on bikes in an hour or so from our apartment. I can imagine us heading up there on a Saturday morning for a respite from the city and combining some biking with some hiking and coming back on Sunday morning exhausted but replenished.

The school year is winding down which means it's getting crazy busy. Time for a road trip! Twelve of us hopped into three cars and headed south to Kenting at the south end of the island where the beaches are beautiful and the air is clear. We left right after school, drove a couple of hours, checked into our hotels and were sitting down for dinner with margaritas in hand by 6:30. Not bad.

Lee and I were up early, naturally, and took a nice walk along the beach in town.

There's a street that's lined with little hotels that look out towards the water:

Half of our group stayed in one of those hotels. They didn't have room for all of us so I found another hotel one street up that was quite nice.

They adhered to the old Chinese custom of skipping floor number four.

Some buildings in the US don't have a 13th floor but here it's the 4th. The word for 4 sounds very similar to the word for death so it's a very unlucky number. Anyway, back to our little trip...

Back early in the fall we came down to Kenting and went to the nice beach outside of town for the day. We spent Saturday back at that beach.

Lee building a sand castle with Lawson.

Lee, Lawson, his mom Casey and Claire. It's nice to have kids along when you go to the beach.

The beach at 10:30 was pretty quiet. There were people hunkered down under umbrellas but not many in the water. By 3:00 the tour buses had dropped off their passengers and the beach was crowded with fully clothed tourists standing ankle deep in the water taking pictures of themselves not swimming in the ocean.

After enjoying the spectacle of watching a few of them getting knocked over by an unexpected wave (Waves at the beach?! Who knew?) we packed up, took showers, ate an early dinner and drove home. We were back in Kaohsiung in time for a nightcap and bed. If we owned a car I might be down in Kenting every weekend.

We don't own a car but we do have bikes and I'm back on mine so we went for a ride this (Sunday) morning. It was already into the 80's at 6:00 in the morning so went went early. We biked down to the harbor, took the ferry to Cijin Island and biked along the shore. There were more ships dotting the coastline than I ever remember seeing. I counted 50.

Here are some random things I made note of today.

This is what the new school building looks like from the front. Lee's classroom is on the far right, third floor corner room. He gets a lot of sunshine streaming into his room in the morning. It's great light but it's hard to cool the room down. My room is on the far side of the building. By the time the sun starts shining into my windows it's the end of the school day.

There are garden plots tucked into unexpected places along my commute. This isn't a great photo but I wanted to show you what people do to protect their fruit trees. Each piece of fruit has a plastic bag rubber banded around it. I think it's to keep the bugs away but people I've asked have given me different answers. In any case it's odd to pass by farms and gardens and see trees that are apparently growing plastic bags.

Some more attractive looking trees are these beautiful yellow-flowered ones:

After school today Lee and I went for a bike ride along the bike path and found these in one of the parks along the way. I felt like it was Mother Nature's way of welcoming me back to the biking world.

There was an absolutely beautiful sunrise this morning. We've had some rain every morning for three days which has been great. The city seems like it's had a nice scrubbing and the air seems clear and clean. In four weeks we'll be packing up and getting on a plane for seven weeks away from the heat and humidity that defines Taiwan in the summer.

I'd like to start off by saying Happy Birthday to my lovely sister Jenner. I hope you spend the day doing just what you want to make you happy.

Bike riding is what made me happy today. The low point was when I crossed Cuiehua, the street where I had my accident. It was pretty terrifying and once we reached the other side I had to stop for a second and catch my breath, but then I was fine. There was very little traffic this morning, which was nice, but it was busy this afternoon and I was still okay. Lee and I are going to try a few strategies to overcome the Cuiehua Road issue. It's an unusual road in that it's pretty busy plus the traffic can build up some speed. At the moment I'd like to avoid it if I can. Unfortunately, it's the road the school is on so I can't avoid it altogether. I'm sure it'll get easier with time.

Now that I'm back on the bike shopping for fruit just got easier. We stopped at the new market on the way home and restocked. Mangoes are back in season - yippee. In addition to the ones I'm used to seeing there are little ones the size of the palm of my hand as well as these huge ones:

Lychee season has just begun so I finally had a chance to try one fresh, not in a can or flavoring in a martini. Delicious!

We also brought home bananas, watermelon and pineapple. An excellent haul.