Lee and I got up and organized early this fine Thursday morning and were on our bikes before 5:30. We biked down to the harbor then turned back north towards school. In a bit less than an hour I was in the shower and here is it, about 6:45 and I'm at my desk, ready to start the school day. The first class doesn't start until 8:00 so I have time to finish any grading or planning that I've put off until now. With only 15 days left (but who's counting?) there's not much planning left to do and I'm actually all caught up on the grading, so I have time to write and putz around my room, organizing and cleaning up for my replacement.

Tomorrow is dumpling breakfast so there will probably not be an early morning bike ride, but it was nice to do today.

We took our last fling to Kenting on the weekend. I say the last, although we still have a few weekends left and who knows what we may do. Well, there's the packing, closing the bank account, paying last bills, but we may find we have some time on our hands and find a way to get to the beach again. We'll see.

Anyway, here was our weekend.

We left straight from school and shared a taxi with another couple from KAS. A friend had organized the weekend and in all 17 people headed down. We were the first to arrive. The taxi driver was fast enough to get us there ahead of the Friday rush but slow enough to not be terrifying.

Kenting is a quintessential tourist town. Lots of surfers and beach bums, plus families from the city (it's about two hours from Kaohsiung). There are also big tour buses that drop their passengers at the beaches where they stand at the water's edge and take pictures of themselves holding scarves in the wind and occasionally falling in the surf. We chose to spend the morning hiking in the Kenting National Park. But first, scooters. I fell in love with my little panda rental. Cute, right? The scooters were electric, so very quiet, and small but zippy. If we had gotten scooters when we arrived in Taiwan I would have done a lot less biking.

Scooters make it so much easier to get to just-out-of-reach places. I'm not sure I would have tried biking up to the national park. It was a very long hill and didn't take long to get high enough for some pretty spectacular views.

Since visiting this place requires walking, there weren't many people. (That seems to be a universal truth. The further you walk from a parking lot, the less people you see.) As always in Taiwan, we found some really incredible trees. This one was hollow inside and looked like it was straight out of Tolkien's Fangorn Forest.

We found some amusing signs as well. This one says "oops."

The hills around Kenting are old. uplifted coral reefs, so the rocks are craggy and and holey. We were delighted to find a cave that was well lit and beautiful. Another plus, there was no one else there so it wasn't claustrophobic to walk through. This stalactite sparkled and glowed.

At the top of the hike there was a tower with a 360 degree view of the southern tip of Taiwan. It was also a cafe so we got to drink some tea while we enjoyed the view.

After our hike we scootered down to the beach. We passed a cemetery along the way. Burial plots are located based on feng shui and dot the hills all around the countryside. Being on a hill, especially facing the water, is very auspicious.

The beach was wonderful, as expected. Not many people actually go in the water, but we had plenty of company under the umbrellas that lined the beach. Sun, surf, a nice breeze. And plenty of sunscreen so you're not too red at the end of the day. Being this close to the equator certainly makes it easy to burn.

Being the tourist town that it is, Kenting rolls out a busy night market along the main street. Fortunately, the police station and its resident zebra sculpture are nearby to keep everyone in line. We ate corndogs and ice cream and jostled along with the crowd. There were even fireworks.

Saturday morning we hopped onto the high speed rail and travelled north to Taichung, the third largest city after Kaohsiung and Taipei. It's in the center of Taiwan, which is what the "chung" part means. Taipei is in the north, "pei" = north; Tainan is in the south, "nan" = south; and Taitung is in the west, "tung" = west. This is a very organized country.

Even the agriculture is organized, or at least that's how the rice patties looked out the window.

After the train we took an hour bus trip up into the mountains to Sun Moon Lake.

What a wonderful way to spend one of our last weekends here in Taiwan. This place is beautiful. The color of the lake is an unusual greenish blue, it's nestled in the western edge of the central mountains and not hard to get to, either from Kaohsiung or Taipei. It's as touristy as one can imagine and caters to the busloads of tourists from the big cities and mainland China. But if you stay away from the cruise boats and bars you can have the biking and hiking trails pretty much to yourself.

We stayed in this cute little hotel perched on the side of the lake at the edge of town.

 The view from the room was spectacular.

 This was the early morning mist on Sunday from our hotel room window.

After we arrived on Saturday we rented a couple of bikes and headed out on the bike trail that skirts around about a third of the lake. It was relatively busy for the first part but thinned out quite a bit after a few kilometers.

There was also a walking path along the lake's edge in town that we visited before dinner.

We had dinner at one of the many restaurants along the lake. On the menu: tea and jellys (think bubble tea pearls and jello jigglers), hot pot and a mango smoothie for dessert.

On Sunday morning we found a hiking trail up Maolan Mountain to a tea research center. Although it was hazy with the morning humidity the views were still pretty nice and we felt like we had hiked to the top of the world.

I'm glad we finally made it to this lovely place. There are other areas we will not make it to - the Alishan Mountain region, Green and Orchids Islands off the east coast, the Penghu Islands to the west. I'm not sure if I'll ever make it back to Taiwan once we leave, but I've got places I'd like to visit if I do return.

One of my duties at KAS has been to run a middle school club every Wednesday for 50 minutes after lunch. For two years I have offered weaving. All of the teachers are also required to offer an after school activity for at least one quarter. Again, I offered weaving, this time to 4th and 5th graders for six weeks in the spring. My elementary club wrapped up last week but my middle schoolers are still chugging along. I've had three groups cycle through this year, each one about 15 kids and all but one student has been a girl.

I've had a love-hate relationship with this particular duty. I love that at least once a week I get to play around with fiber. On the other hand, the level of interest in my students has varied - some kids get assigned to weaving, rather than having chosen it themselves - and I've had mixed results with my teaching approach. Club has really been a work in progress. This trimester has been a good group, fun and chatty. A few I've taught in class but mostly they're kids who are new to me, which has been a nice way to get to know a whole new group of students.

At the moment we've veered away from weaving and they've been working on braiding friendship bracelets. Here's a sample of what they were up to today:

Six weeks from yesterday we will be stepping on an airplane and leaving Taiwan. There are wrapping-up details that are quickly falling in place. We have finally gotten boxes to pack and have the paperwork to fill out for mailing them to Connecticut. Lee has been in contact with car dealerships in Seattle and found us the car we want to buy. The airline tickets are bought and our last tours in Asia are booked. Now there's just the everyday stuff to deal with, like keeping dozens of teens and tweens occupied and on-task for the last 26 days of school.

We've got a couple of weekend trips planned, those last chances to get out of the city. This weekend we're going to a new place - Sun Moon Lake - and the next weekend we're taking a group trip to Kenting and biking around the national park and sitting on the sun-drenched beach. In the next few weeks we're also hoping to get to the butterfly valley, the mud volcanoes and the giant Buddha statue just north of Kaohsiung, but unfortunately, time really is running out.

This is what it sounds like at a professional baseball game in Taiwan.

The noise doesn't stop when the players come to bat, it doesn't stop when the pitcher throws the ball. It was a little quieter when the opposing team was up but only because the fans were mostly sitting beyond left field and they didn't have control of the PA system.

Now that I've caught up our trip to China I'll try to catch up the past three weeks.

Week one was getting us, and our students, back on track to finish the last bit of school. When we got back from spring break we had eight and a half weeks of school left. That's a fair amount of instruction time in a classroom. Too much time to just let the kids slide into the end of the year. The first few days back were spent whipping them back into shape, getting some grades into the gradebook, threatening them with parent-teacher conferences coming up in a couple weeks.

At home, it was time to re-stock the fridge and make the beds. Leslie and Cady arrived in Kaohsiung on Thursday (April 14) and our niece Amanda arrived on Friday. We did a whirlwind of city touring for the next little while. Tours of KAS, shopping at the jade market, a walk-through of the night market. Leslie and Cady were only in Taiwan until Monday morning, but Amanda stayed until the following Friday (April 22). It was nice to have an excuse to do some things one more time, but also nostalgic to think they we may never do some of those things again, like going to the former British Consulate.

But time does march on. I got another wisdom tooth pulled last weekend, stitches came out today. All is healing well, if a little slower than I'd like. (The first one was such a piece of cake that I have no patience for this one taking longer to heal, even though Dr. Jason had explained to me very carefully and clearly that this would be the case. I'm just being a baby, an impatient whiner, to be exact.) The week was full of end-of-the-year activities. We had a day of parent-teacher conferences, got rid of some extra furniture, went to the school's spring concert, bought boxes for packing.

Tonight we're going with a dozen or so friends to a baseball game, Kaohsiung's Eda Rhinos vs the Lamigo Monkeys. It will be incredibly loud and raucous, with lots of opportunities to eat baseball stadium food and people watch. Oh, and see some baseball too. Then tomorrow morning we'll join many of the same people at the playground at our apartment building for a pair of two year olds birthdays. It will also be loud and raucous, and fun too.