My first day trip out!

I finally have a photo site up:
http://picasaweb.google.com/annefloyd

This weekend I went up to Danshui which is a town along the water at the far north of Taiwan (where the Danshui River meets the Taiwan Straight which separates Taiwan from China.) It used to be a major fishing town, but fishing isn't so big there now. People from Taipei flock there on the weekends for it's Ocean City-like entertainment. (It's a 40 min ride from the city by MRT.) It has a boardwalk and everything that goes with it: arcade games with prizes, ice cream cones, cotton candy, caricature artists, junky trinket stores, and the list goes on and on. It was really nice to get out of the city finally (not that the air was too refreshing, of course, due to pollution).

After some walking around the boardwalk and town (we also saw Fuyou Temple, the oldest in the town) we took the across the river to another town called Bali. It was much of the same type of environment over there, but Bali actually had a little "beach" area (see my photos). The water is so dirty that it was kind of sad to see the kids playing near (and a few actually in) the water. The big thing to do in that town was to rent bikes and ride around, although we couldn't quite figure out why anyone would enjoy that because it was just so crowded. There were some pretty views though, especially of the emerald volcano Kuanyinshan which was the backdrop of the town. We decided to take a short taxi ride over to Bali's very new and modern Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology. It was just built in 2003 and was much more sophisticated than I was expecting. It houses the remains of the Shihsanhang culture which is an extinct tribe of aboriginals who lived in Bali 500-1800 years ago. There was quite a bit of ironwork and pottery to look at. The building itself was really interestingly constructed. It's supposed to look like a whale coming up out of the water, something this tribe of people would have seen back then living along the water. The building also had a couple of really cool views of the surrounding areas. And the sunset was really gorgeous when we were taking the ferry back from Bali to Danshui. I took a bunch of photos today and have uploaded them to my album (listed above). I also put some pictures of my apartment up and promise some more of my neighborhood later this week.

Everything else is going pretty well. I now know how to say the following in Chinese: hello, thank you, mango and dumpling. My roommate is starting language classes tomorrow, so hopefully she can help me with some new phrases! It's still hard adjusting to living in a completely foreign place, and being completely in the minority. My neighborhood has pretty much no other westerners. So except for my roommates and the few other foreign teachers at my school I see no other westerners during the week. It's been nice to get together with other teachers on the weekends! One funny thing about teaching in such an environment is when I introduce new vocabulary to my students and then check for their understanding. Sometimes (even though they're not supposed to speak any Chinese in class at all) they will try to compare the word to it's equivalent in Chinese, so they actually start speaking Chinese to me. I just say "English, English" and they stop, but I'm amused by the fact that they think I speak Chinese. I guess it makes sense, everyone else they know speaks it, so why wouldn't I? Another teacher who teaches in a town just east of the city was telling me this weekend that she was working with some advanced students in class and one of their workbook questions was something like "describe the first time you saw a foreigner." These students said they hadn't EVER seen a foreigner until they came to the school to learn English. I thought that was really interesting.

Someone told me about this website this weekend: www.Engrish.com. It's mistakes that appear in Asian (mostly Japanese) advertising and products. I've only looked at it a little bit, but it's really amusing.