What A Busy Day: From Confucius Temple to Piano Concert and In Between!

A Day of Explorations!


Today, Friday for us, we had a "let's just explore and see what happens" day. We started with a couple of phone calls to the USA, to see how Ted's mom is doing (she is coming along!) and to a dear colleague from Betty's teaching days, to ask for some photos of some of our teaching strategies to use in the panel presentation Ted and I have been asked to give in April to Taiwanese educators interested in inclusive techniques in the mainstream classroom.
Then we hopped aboard the subway and decided to disembark at the High Speed Zuoying Railway Station and explore. But first, while there, we purchased our train tickets for next weekend when we shall go to Taipei. It used to take 5 hours to go by regular train from Kaohsiung to Taipei, but now, with this new high-speed option, the trip takes 90 minutes!



Once we made that purchase (a little tricky, as the clerk's English was only slightly better than our Mandarin), Ted and I left the station and walked in the general direction of a yellow-roofed building, where, when we asked, we were told the Lotus Pond and Playgrounds were. And indeed they were! First, we came to the beautiful lake and some bridges that crossed over to tiny islands , each surrounded by lush, tropical plants.










Then we came to Confucius Temple; as I am sure you are aware, Confucius is greatly revered as a philosopher of the first order, and there are many temples all over Taiwan to memorialize him and his teachings. he is known as the First Teacher, and his temples are usually very colorful, with red as a dominant hue, symbolizing good luck, wealth, happiness, etc.


Next we came upon playground after playground park play areas, with all sorts of slides and fun things for kids to ride on! We ended up walking almost totally around the lake (quite good exercise!) , bought a cold drink at one point , saw beautiful lotus plants under a lovely little bridge, even saw a bunch of turtles in another area of the lake (picture of them is for you, Jan!)and a chocolate cake that we shared at another; that served as lunch.(Eat your heart out, Jackie!)



After that, we discovered Costco!! We had been told there was one and we found it after another subway ride in the opposite direction from our ecological journey.
We mainly went there to see if we could get Ted Cheerios, which he sorely misses and is not to be found in any other store we have been to. Lo and behold, we found Cheerios!! Four boxes later and we got home!


Then we capped the day off, after a nap(!), with a piano concert right here on campus; it was restful and terrific. The first piece was Mozart;s Piano and String Quarter in G Minor, K. 478, and the second was Brahms' Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op.34. The performers were outstanding; their individual resumes included studies or performances at places such as: New York Philharmonic,International Music Arts Institute, Mountain Top Music Center of North Conway, NH, International festival at Round Top, Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra, etc. And the tickets are free.

When we left the National Sun-Yat-Sen Performing Center Hall, though, we experienced our first rain! Fortunately it was a relatively light rain as we made our way back up the hills to our villa! But my hair-do became a slight hair-don't! Here I am just having run inside!!

LIFE ON CAMPUS



The Ubiquitous 7-11, The University's Goals, Betty's Hair Appointment and More! 03/04/09

Not much to report new, for Tuesdays and Wednesdays are heavy work days for us. Nevertheless, we have a few photos and comments to share. For one, every town, every village, every city in Taiwan has at least one 7-11 and typically many more than that! It is THE place for a lot of stuff, including international calling cards, renewal of one's SIM cards (for minutes for local cell phone use), passport photo booth, basic food stuff, etc. Ours is at the top of the steps in this photo (but at the bottom of THE STEPS from our villa!), and right next to the Post Office, the dry cleaners, the hair cut shop,the University Bookstore, and a little cafe. Plus, we discovered an elevator there that allows us to bypass three of the four sets of steps!! To make it work for us, in terms of where we live, we take this outside elevator up to the fifth floor, which suddenly finds us in one of the University buildings! Then we go outside, walk across a roof top (!), go into another door, around a corner, outside again to a walkway, and then up one set of steps! We haven't used it often, but discovered it the other day when we were so hot and tired after work!!

When coming out of the office, I noticed this sign, which I think is kind of nice! We also learned from some of Ted's students, all from business schools either from Taiwan or other countries,that it is expected that they will spend a semester abroad. It is impressive that universities recognize, in a global economy, the importance of living in another culture as part of their educational experience.








And yesterday, I got my hair washed and blown dry (I have not yet asked for a cut!) Wow! For a fat $5.00, I got the most incredible hair shampoo ; the gal scrubs your hair basically while giving your head a fabulous massage! Then, she follows it with a real massage of your neck and back!! I couldn't believe it. it was wonderful!! And I think my hair looks nice! I am addicted already and have my next appointment next week!! (again,as with the taxis, there is NO tipping! We love that!)

I close by sharing some pictures of our campus, which really is lovely; there are courtyards and flowers everywhere. Of course, there are monkeys and ants and an occasional cockroach too, but who's counting?




We ended tonight with another super meal in the dormitory cafeteria (most elegant, but hey, who's complaining at these prices!) for $4.33 for the two of us: a rice and lamb dish and one of our now favorites: Shanghai steamed dumplings. These happen to be stuffed with ground pork and are very flavorful. Look at the container to see how they cook them: in a wooden basket with a raised platform inside, the water underneath. And for some reason, the owner or main chef (?) seems to like us, as he has started to bring us something extra with each meal! The other night, he insisted we take another iced tea and tonight, he brought over a delicious omelet and spinach plate. Nice!

JUST A COLLAGE OF PHOTOS

Just a few photos we had not included before (we don't think!)

Kenting National Park Visit

KENTING NATIONAL PARK VISIT: VERY FUN and EDUCATIONAL TOO!!



$250 American dollars bought us a wonderful adventure, including hotel room in a luxurious setting, buffet dinner and buffet breakfast, swimming in our choice of fanciful swimming pools, two tours of the Park (one, to a fabulous Marine Biology Aquarium and the other, to incredible ocean views of coral reefs and surfing waves etc), !! AND we also had the unique experience of being both a linguistic and racial minority. This YoYo Beach and Resort Hotel had no other Caucasians at all. It clearly is a deluxe hotel that caters to Taiwanese and mainland Chinese families on holiday. It is a fantastic place to bring kids! It even bills itself as as YoYo Kids Hotel! There are kid-friendly swimming pools, waterslides, events scheduled almost every hour for kids to paint or draw or see a play or dance or tumble in a gym or read children's books, or go to a story time or to an arcade or you name it! Everyone was so happy and friendly and helpful to the obviously not Taiwanese couple who were also there!! We loved it!

Early Sat morning, we dutifully, with ONE suitcase in hand (Ted's hand; aren't you impressed, gals, that I did not need my own separate suitcase??!), climbed down the steps carefully, rolled our bag down the street to the subway (about 3/4 to 1 mile away), boarded the clean metro and travelled about another half hour to the High Speed Railway Station in Kaohsiung, which also houses the bus stop for Kenting. By the way, just to add another comment about riding the subways in Kaohsiung versus those in New York : people here are friendly on the subway; they talk to us, they make eye contact, they smile! A funny aside to that: when we came to a stop before our destination, a Taiwanese woman came frantically rushing to ask the first people she saw who were nearest the door if she was on the right metro. Unfortunately for her, WE were the couple sitting nearest the door. She blanched, did an about face and quickly, before the doors would close, asked the persons across from us, learned it was the wrong subway for her, and out she flew. After she left, the person across from us laughed with us at the poor woman's reaction when she realized she was asking the ONLY non-Taiwanese speaking people in the car for directions!

We arrived at the YoYo Hotel , checked into our very nicely appointed bedroom, with one king and two twin beds (!)just in time for our afternoon tour.




It was great; we went to a fabulous National Marine Biology and Aquarium Museum. Mainers: check out their lobster in this museum!



Laid out in three large, multi-floor buildings, this place was HUGE and really well done; it was technologically sophisticated beyond anything we have ever seen in the States. It had enormous tanks for different species, from penguins to sting rays, to puffins, to sunken ships and beyond, it was a wow!

That evening, we had a buffet dinner at the hotel, with food we recognized and food we did not.
Today, our morning tour began early (7:50am) and we saw the eastern or Pacific side of Taiwan, stopping at beautiful and interesting places, including a Maine-like lighthouse, coral reef shorelines, crashing ocean surf (Ted even found a body surfing beach but there was no time to surf it!) and a special tea place where the woman served up this supposedly special tea (it was good!) and we were helped in the endeavor by one of the Mainland Chinese tourists on our tour bus.





But along with the fantastic beauty of the scenery we saw at each stop in the Park, today was unbelievably WINDY. We were buffeted about everywhere!





Two specific highlights of today's tour include the following: one, the natural gas leaks in fissures in the ground, that explode into a fire if one drops a warm ash into it (which is how this area was discovered);





and the other, a rock formation that the Taiwanese have name, "Nixon's Rock." What do you think??
We returned to our hotel in time to take a quick swim and have a ham and cheese croissant for lunch (it tastes good every once in a while to have something sort of familiar to our taste buds!)and delicious iced coffee (well, I had the iced coffee; Ted, a beer!). We then found hammocks on the beach and read until it was time for our bus ride back (it takes about two and one-half hours) to Kaohsiung! We are tired but so glad we did the weekend!

What Do We Know????

WHAT DO WE KNOW?????



This blog is going to share some of our "What Do We Know?" experiences!! Living in a foreign country, one needs a certain willingness to acknowledge that you cannot control everything and you most likely will not understand everything, especially if you do not speak the language!! So, here is just a sampling of some of those adventures for us!!

Food: Yesterday, we went to the local market near our villa (thereby avoiding THE STEPS) where I had decided we needed some sort of vegetable, for we had run out of our fresh produce and we had not had time to go to the traditional market in the morning. Suddenly, I spotted a bag that said garlic-seasoned green peas!! Dummy that I am, I assumed that when we got home, I would open the bag, pour some peas into our one saucepan, add a little water and steam the vegetable du jour. Wrong! When I opened the bag, there were lots of tiny, individual size packets of dried, nicely seasoned peas that one eats, presumably, as a snack, like a package of nuts. Ted and I looked at each other and the now oft cited refrain we say to each other, "So what do we know?" was uttered by us both simultaneously!

Another example is one without an accompanying picture, but Ted can describe the sound: barfing outside our villa window on a Saturday night! This is indeed a college campus! That sound was one we could say, "Hey, we know!!"

One of the disadvantages of the warm weather is its conduciveness for some of the biggest cockroaches we have seen (although Ted says he has seen some big ones in NY City too!) This was also an adventure, since very little English is spoken in the nearby market. We had asked our Taiwanese friend Cynthia to write the Chinese characters for ant and roach spray, which we dutifully showed the clerk. (We knew we would never be able to gesture well enough to ask where that might be in the store, if they even had it!! )The clerk snickered when he saw our request and took us right to the correct aisle. Lo and behold, there was RAID!!!

Tonight, we decided to splurge for dinner, not wanting to buy any more food for the ants and cockroaches (Michelle, you would go nuts!!), since we are going to the Kenting National Park for the weekend. So we went to the nearby cafe, for the dormitory students, where basically again, no English is spoken. We pointed to what looked like a good meal, by its picture, but "what do we know??"" For an enormous price of $3.44 , Ted treated BOTH of us to dinner out. It actually was very good and filling: crispy fried chicken pieces (sort of like chicken fingers), a large bowl on noodle and vegetable soup, and a large glass of cold green tea! Thinking we were doing extremely well with our chopsticks, and actually starting to congratulate ourselves on same, suddenly, a man appeared at our table to show us how correctly to hold our chopsticks. So, what do we know??? We both tried his way and could not do it!! We have gone back to our incorrect way to hold them, so that we could get food down!!

Undaunted, returning to home,we now decided to try that artichoke-looking fruit, that we had been told would be ripe by today! Lo and behold, when we went to "open" it, it fell apart. The insides were very soft; had it gone bad? Was it at the correct stage to eat? What do we know??? Ted was far more adventurous than I, and ate it. I finally took one piece (oh, it has pits, but what did we know?) and is very sweet, almost more than what I like. Ted compares it to a ripe, sweet pear.









Many other such adventures come to mind, but fortunately, we have Janet to save us from ourselves. With a phone to each ear, you can see just exactly how efficient she is!!