Dragon boat festival is coming up, unfortunately after we've left. I hope to be in Taiwan for it next year. I don't know anything about it except that there is a traditional food that's made around the time of the festival, rice dumplings (zongzi).

There's sticky rice inside that's mixed with a number of different ingredients, depending on the family's traditions and the maker's inclination. Often there's a boiled duck egg in the center, with pork, dried shrimp and/or red bean paste. The one I had for breakfast had boiled peanuts. The rice ball is then wrapped in bamboo leaves and tied with a string and you steam them until they're hot and eat them with chili sauce.

They're an acquired taste. I usually like them, although it depends on the filling, and you never know what you're getting until you open them up. My Chinese teacher gave us all one from her aunt (who grows the special, traditional Taiwanese leaf wrappers) plus a colleague gave us a couple. But since not everyone has acquired the taste (including Lee), I'm finding our freezer filling up with these little packages. They're a little like zucchini in August - they're everywhere and some people work hard to give them away. Kind of like lychees now in Taiwan.

Today was a much more productive day. By one o'clock this afternoon I had skyped with my sister, had breakfast with a friend who's moving back to the US, met with our new cleaning lady, shopped for a new vacuum for the aforementioned cleaning lady, and picked up a pair of chairs for our balcony.

The afternoon included starting to pack, watching a Red Sox game (which they won), booking a hotel in Germany and dining out with friends at the best dumpling place in all of Kaohsiung, which is saying a lot because there must be hundreds of dumpling restaurants to choose from. I think we may be ready to leave in six days. Too bad I can't bring Din Tai Fung with me.

One week from today we will be getting on a plane to start the first leg of our seven week trip around the world. The first leg will go from Kaohsiung to Singapore to Abu Dhabi to Paris. After a few days in Paris we take a train to Germany for another few days. Then back on a plane from Frankfurt to Reykjavik to Boston. Seven short weeks in the States and we take our final (very long) series of flights from Buffalo to NYC, then westward over all of North America and the Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong and then one last puddle-jumper back to Kaohsiung. Sounds pretty crazy to me, but there you go.

This morning we attempted to get some things done in preparation of this trip. We hopped on the bikes and headed to the bank - check. Next, get the apartment key copied so we can give our new cleaning lady her own set of keys. No check - we couldn't find the shop we thought we remembered on Yucheng and Huarong. Put that back on the list of to-dos.

Next stop the train station to do some last minute shopping at a store recommended by a friend. No check - either we didn't find the store our friend recommended or we need to remember not to take her advice again. That's okay, we also planned on getting lunch at one of the many Japanese restaurants at the train station. Check, we got lunch, but it will be counted as one of the worst meals we've had in Taiwan.

Since the shopping didn't work out we decided to go to our favorite grocery store and do one final shop for everything we need to get us through one last week of meals. The route there passed near our favorite tea shop so we made a detour for some grapefruit green tea. At least we knew it would taste much better than our lunches had. We were suitably rehydrated, but found ourselves unmotivated for tackling the shopping with the Saturday afternoon crowds.

So after three hours and 10 miles of biking we came home with one item checked off on our to-do list. Ah well, there's always tomorrow...

Today was graduation day for the 59 seniors at KAS.

The ceremony was very nice, with the right amount of speeches mixed with some lovely musical pieces. It was tastefully done and not too long. I only knew one of the kids, a faculty brat, since I have very little interaction with the high school students. But we're all encouraged to go and it's nice to show support for important events like this. Plus, I'm a sucker for ceremonies like this.

The ceremony wasn't until a couple of hours after school. Too little time to go home, so Lee and I walked around Lotus Lake and stopped at the Wakey to get a salad to tide us over until the after-graduation banquet. The walk was hot and sticky but well worth it to get out of the building for awhile. Plus, the lotus flowers and back in bloom and they're beautiful.

Two favorite spots on my way home from work.

First, the train tracks. Sometimes we get caught at the crossing just as the barriers come down. I love standing there right by the tracks as the trains come by. The ground rumbles as they approach and the wind rushes past just as the engine reaches the intersection. The noise of the train overpowers the cacophony of the warning signal. Then there's the rhythmic clanking as the rest of the cars go by. I love it.

All of the trains on these tracks are passenger trains. The blue ones are the local, smaller and slower trains and the orange ones are the longer-haul ones that are bigger and faster. The high speed train travels on completely different tracks and stops not too far from the school. At 6:30 in the morning many of the train passengers are students getting to their various schools around the city. Many of our students take the hour long trip down from Tainan.

My other favorite spot is the kite flying park. It's actually called the art park because it surrounds the art museum but oftentimes in the afternoons there are kites swirling around in the sky above the park. We always get stopped at the lights at the corner of the park and I get to watch the kites for awhile. My favorite one was up yesterday. It's a string of ten black fish undulating just like real fish would in the water. I'd love to see that one get launched. Some day I'll have to stop and find where the people are who are flying the kites and watch them for awhile.

We've got a week of school left and I believe I'm going to make it.

One of my least favorite responsibilities is my 6th grade advisory class. It only meets once a week but the expectations are ill-defined and getting a bunch of young middle schoolers to talk about anything meaningful is difficult anyway, especially when half of the group of 15 are ELL students. Today was the second to last meeting with them, yippee. Don't get me wrong, I like the kids well enough (most of them anyway) it's the structure of the system that I find difficult.

A month or so ago I decided to make the kids run advisory for awhile so each pair of students has had to plan an activity and run the class for the week. It's been up and down in quality but the 45 minutes passes and there is neither blood nor tears shed so I figure it's been successful. Today was card games, run by Ben and Derrick.

Some of the boys opt for sitting at a table...

while the girls sit close on the floor.

With the move to the new apartment comes needing to learn how to use some of the appliances. The washer in particular had me stumped.

Fortunately one of our colleagues (Lulu, who took us to her grandfather's farm last weekend) and her mom dropped by to give me a tutorial. It's been nearly a year and I don't think I'm any better at reading Chinese characters than I was when we first got here.

My spoken language is getting marginally better. Tonight we took a bike ride and stopped for dinner at a cafe that had no English menu and no English speaking waitress. I tried to ask about the few things I know how to say in Chinese - rice, chicken, pork, a glass of water. I even understood when she told me that the pork and rice dish had cheese on top. My attempt to ask about vegetables, however, was unsuccessful. And I'm pretty sure the only reason we got water is because the waitress' little sister figured it out.

The evening was beautiful - clear and starlit. Both Venus and Jupiter are high in the sky and this evening is the first time I've seen the Big Dipper in Taiwan. When we got home the full moon was rising between the nearby buildings. In this photo it's the white ball of light while the street light is the orange ball of light to the lower right.

For dinner tonight we decided to go to our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. It's actually the only Vietnamese restaurant we've been to in Kaohsiung. It's really quite good though, so fortunately we don't have to keep searching for any other. After all, finding good restaurants can be such a hardship.

One of the best things about being back on the bike is that places like this are a 10 or 15 minute bike ride away instead of a too-long walk for dinner or a cab ride. The neighborhood has gotten small and manageable again.

The traffic seemed especially aggressive this evening. It's probably because of the time of day but it certainly is tiresome. One incident though made me chuckle. There was scooter ahead of us, waiting for the light to change. Mom was in the front and brother and sister were crammed onto the back of the seat. This is a pretty common occurrence. I've seen as many as five family members on a scooter. They nestle in together like spoons in a silverware drawer.

Anyway, this pair of kids reminded me of countless squabbling siblings who have had to share rides in the family vehicle. But instead of crossing over into each other's space in the back seat these two were picking a fight while basically sitting in each other's lap. The boy in front was giving his sister a quick jab with his elbow while she pounded on his leg. The fight escalated to the point where Mom tried turning around to yell at them. It was a little too crowded to effectively face them while yelling but they got the message: If you're going to hit each other use small enough wind-ups that Mom doesn't notice.

By then the light was changing to green and the brother and sister were over their squabble and ready to point out to each other the "mei guo ren" biking by. That was us, the Americans, still ever-popular with school set.