The Life of Rachel: April 2013

And when I want a serious face, I get a funny one

Some of my students:

When I want a funny face, I get a serious one

Kent and Jeffery

Having Fun in class with Jill

The Teachers and the Intern Sam

March has passed by rather quickly, though I though it was going to creep by because it is usually the slowest month of the year for me. I have been busy teaching and having fun with the kids. They are finally warming up to me and I am finally settling into the kind of teacher that I am and want to be. I am posting some fun pictures that I have taken with some of my kids this month. I wrote my first big test this month, marking being a real teacher. The kids just took a midterm and I have the lovely opportunity of grading them all. Good thing I have had a lot of practice from being a TA and grading my brothers papers when I would make them play school with me over summer vacation :)

Kira, Barbie, and Owen showing off our lego house.

Playing UNO as a class

So close, so close,

WON! This is what happens when you win UNO!

The last day of February, we had a day off of school. We took the opportunity to go to Lugang, a very old city close to us. It was about a 40 minutes bus ride. This town has one of the oldest temples in Taiwan and is also very touristy. Probably the most touristy place I have been so far. Which made it an awesome place to buy things. There is a man there that hand paints Asian fans with pictures of LDS temples. We found a place where a man shapes things out of glass in front of the place and I had him make me a glass zebra right in front of me. It was really cool to watch. Lugang was such a cool place and I am sure I will go back many times if only to buy more souvenirs. :)

Smallest alley i've every seen!

Cotton Candy!

Making my Zebra

Its coming along quite nicely

Adding the stripes

Finished Zebra

Old temple in Lugang

Burning Incense

This month I also went up to Taichung and checked out the Taiwanese National Art Museum. That was pretty awesome. I went with Sam, an intern at our school. We just checked out the different exhibits and ate at Subway. It was pretty cool to see art from Taiwanese artists. We couldn't take pictures in most of the exhibits but here are a few that I was able to snap.

Teeth art?

Cool Staircase

I was called as the singles representative in our Branch and this month we had our first singles activity. It ended up being really fun. We went to a Mexican place, Red and Green, for dinner that ended up being really good. Afterwards we went to a night market by the church, i bought some nail polish. It was really fun, we had 7 people come out of about 20 singles in the branch so it was a better turn out than Sunny (my co-chair) and I had imagined. We thought it was going to be the two of us hanging out.

Decorations at Red and Green

McDonalds with Daniel, Jason, Kiki, and Jill

The last week of March found me in a rut, a little homesick as i hit the would be half way mark if i was going home in July, but really the quarter mark and that hit me hard. I absolutely love it here but some weeks are harder than others. Ummmm.. i've been running a lot more which makes me feel a lot better, i am slowly working my way up in distance, it relieves a lot of stress to run to my music and makes me happier than most things can, which still surprises me since I hated hated hated running until two years ago. My tennis coaches had a very hard time getting me to run in practice. Friday night we took the super students from the school out to eat McDonalds. It was fun to hang out with them outside of class. I ate at a Teppanyaki place that week. It was amazingly good and gave me the good meat that I crave here! Tessa and I ordered so much food that an old lady next to us stared at us and our food. Oh! There was also an earthquake the last week of March! I think it was on Wednesday, my sleep in day. I was in and out of sleep as I snoozed my alarm at around 10 am when all of a sudden my room started shaking. I freaked out and I ran out of my room to the doorway but then i thought i remembered that you are not supposed to stay in doorways anymore. So i ran to the wall outside my room that is made of concrete at the same time that Rochelle ran down the stairs from the third floor. We were both freaking out, because despite growing up in California, it was the first earthquake i have experienced. It was over in about 30 or 40 seconds. It was a 6.1 at the epicenter but by the time it got to Changhua it was about a 5. It was scary but amazing and a cool experience to have in Taiwan. March was a fun adventure but I'm ready for the next experiences I have.

Teppanyaki!

On February 24, we got the awesome opportunity to go the sky lantern festival. You know, the scene from Tangled where they let go all those lanterns and they float up into the sky? I saw that in real life and it was amazing! Although they floated up a lot faster then I remember them floating in the movie. It was so beautiful to see! But it was also a fun night with a good story.
We left right after church to head up to Pingxi, about a 4 hour trip one way. Because the festival is so huge- and this was the busiest night of the festival- we were with many other people traveling up north and had to stand most of the four hours. We took the faster train that has seats in it for about 3 hours, but we didn't have seats. Right at the beginning, the conductor walked through, looked at me and had me follow him through 3 cars to a little compartment, a service room, that had a seat in it. Tessa and I sat in that room for the first hour until a trash collector lady-who must have thought we snuck in there even though the room locks so that's impossible- kicked us out. That was ok because we had seat for the second hour. The third hour I stood with Rochelle and Eric, trying not to touch people in their seats. After that train we took a local train to actual Pingxi. This train was insanely squished as it took us right to the busy festival. Luckily we arrived way early and were able to get seats right before the crowd came. To quote Tessa, "that was the closest I have ever felt to a sardine". We were literally shoved into that train, both ways and it was not the most fun experience I have ever had, but it was still an experience to remember. On the train there we met some people studying this semester in Taipei from the University of Texas-Austin. They were so cool and Tessa and I followed them around for the rest of the night because they had a native speaker with them- and they were just really cool and fun. We also met a guy from Amsterdam on the train, and mostly listened to him tell his stories to others, and tried not to laugh when he talked about his friend that worked on a California medical marijuana farm when he found out we were from California.

The first lanterns I saw going up

Walking across the train tracks!

People standing on the tracks watching the lanterns going up

So many people!

When we finally got to Pingxi it was insane! We got separated from Eric and Rochelle in the crowds. It was almost like a huge night market, the streets lined with places to buy food and lanterns and souvenirs. We walked for about 40 minutes before finding a more open place than the train tracks (where a lot of people were letting them go when trains weren't coming). I bought a mini lantern to remember what I came for, mine says in Chinese something about family and house safety. I also ate some candy covered strawberries, it was like a candied apple-so good!

Candied Strawberries

Tessa and I went in on a lantern, a big green lantern that symbolized good luck with everything in life. Blue meant career, purple- studies, yellow- money, pink- you want to find someone, and so many more colors, I can't remember what they all meant. The tradition is to write on your lantern and send it up, hoping for good luck with whatever you write. With the Texas friends, we all sent ours up one at a time so we could take pictures for each other. Shortly after we sent ours up we saw from another direction what we were trying to get to- the mass letting go of the lanterns. It was beautiful. All the lanterns slowly went up and got farther and farther away. It was amazing, better in real life than on Tangled! It was simply breathtaking and wonderful to set fire to one and let it go as well. I have let a lantern go before when I moved back to Provo at the beginning of last year, but this was so much more amazing being in the middle of the real festival and seeing so many go up at once.

Piles of Lanterns waiting to be let go

Someone's lantern

My Lantern

Second side of the lantern

Setting up our lantern

After we let the lanterns go, Tessa and I took off back to the train because we wanted to get back at a decent time. On the long walk/run/charge through thousands of slow walking people, we met some boys from New York who were doing what we were doing, holding on to each other's backpack handles so we wouldn't get lost. We realized how funny we looked when we saw them. They asked us where we were staying and what we were doing after the festival. We ran pretty quick from them. We made it back to the platform, but the train that was there was shoved packed full and we could not get in. We had to wait an hour for the next train. While we sat with our legs dangling off the platform, we met a group of Japanese boys. We talked while we waited and two of them left and came back with beers for all of us. Needless to say, Tessa got to drink two Taiwan beers but thanks for the offer! They were nice but we got separated from them when the train came, and on the train we met two Dominican guys with an Austrian girl who are studying in Taipei. This trip was full of making new friends. Its amazing how people just talk to pass time in weird situations. After we got off the local train and had bought tickets for the faster train home, we ran in to the Japanese guys again and chatted until the train came when we sat in a different car. We had a train to Taipei main station. At the station we had barely missed the last high speed rail train and ran like chickens with our heads cut off trying to catch a train. It looked like all were done for the night, but we recognized a couple characters and barely made the last train headed south. The train ride home was long, cold, and tiring. Tessa fell asleep on my shoulder and I tried to stay awake so we wouldn't miss our stop. When we were back at the station in Changhua, Tessa's bike was stolen! Luckily, Eric and Rochelle had been on our train in a different car. They rode on one bike home and Tessa rode Rochelle's bike. We got home at 3:30 in the morning. It was exhausting and stressful and tiring. But it was worth it. It was an experience I will never again have and it was amazing to see.