Happy Chinese New Year!

(A little early.) Chinese New Year begins Feb. 6 and continues for several days. It’s the biggest holiday over here (equivalent to our Christmas, if not bigger.) Everyone has vacation from work and travels back to their hometowns to see their families. They have large family dinners, exchange gifts, and the adults give the children “lucky money” in red envelopes. To get ready for the new year people clean their houses and buy new clothes. They also post poems on red paper outside the doors of their homes. There are parades, fireworks and other festivities during the new year celebrations.

For the past week I have been extra busy with work. The kids have their winter breaks from their Chinese schools, so they’re coming to English school for extra classes. On top of my regular 12 afternoon/evening classes, I have been teaching a writing composition class from 1:30-4:00 everyday. It began last week and goes through this week. The kids range in age from about 11-13. I have a basic lesson plan, but have been able to get a bit more creative with what I’m doing which has been nice, as my regular classes are very much by the book. Last week they wrote an essay about holidays. Many of them wrote about Chinese new year which was good for me since I don’t know too much about the traditions and meanings. Teaching this class has been a good experience. This week they’ll be writing a letters to friends and then their final project will be to write short stories in groups.

Overall life is good in Taipei. I’m continuing to stay very busy with friends doing stuff around the city. After feeling guilty for not having done something “cultury” in a while, I went to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum with a couple of friends last weekend. That was pretty cool and they had some interesting exhibits. One temporary exhibit was art by this German guy who writes poetry to go along with his pieces. They also had a huge exhibit of Taiwan Surrealist paintings which was really cool. After Chinese New Year some friends and I are going to start a tango class on Sunday afternoons. So random, I know! I went to see the class last week and it looks pretty fun. Not sure how great I’m going to be at it, but hopefully they won’t move too fast. I’m continuing to meet with my language exchange partner each week. Things are going well with that. I really never expected to get much from it, but it’s a good experience. I’m learning little phrases here and there. This past week I worked on numbers a bit. I know 1-10, but really didn’t know how to say numbers much higher than that, so we practiced and I caught on pretty quickly. For her English part, she brings a consumer/business magazine which is partly in English. She will have read the article beforehand and underlined vocabulary she doesn’t know. Then I read the article out loud and we go over the vocabulary as we read. A few weeks ago we read an article about how the iphone works which was actually pretty interesting!

Mom arrives on Wednesday! I can’t wait! We’re going to stay at a hotel downtown for four nights over the weekend, and then we’re off to Hong Kong Feb. 7-11. I hope to take a couple of short day trips while she’s in Taipei, but also just go around the city. In Hong Kong we’ll do some sightseeing (take the tram up the highest peak on the island, take the ferry around the harbor at night, etc), do some shopping (of course!) and visit her old ‘hood, Repulse Bay.