I Hold You Responsible

Last night, I had a good idea for this entry on the ole’ weblog. However, I became busy with other things and subsequently forgot what I wanted to write about. This may turn out to be a quite unpopular stance on this issue, but I blame you, the readers, for this whole snafu.

Now that we’ve got the blame shifted to where it clearly belongs, I offer you a chance to redeem yourselves. I’m want to try something different and hopefully get the readers a little more involved in this weblog so here is what I’m proposing. If there is any topic in particular you’d like me to write about in an upcoming entry, leave your suggestion in the comments area or just send an email to taiwanorbust@gmail.com. Hopefully I’ll receive at least a few suggestions and maybe even a good idea for something to write about.

An Interesting Lunch

I’ve been teaching an adult class this semester on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. One thing I have to say is adult classes are so much better than teaching children. It’s nice to not have to spend half of my class time telling kids to either sit down or to be quiet. Not to mention that adult classes take much less time to prepare for. If I had my way, I’d only teach adults.

My adult class currently has five students. Two of them, Gordon and Tiffany, are husband and wife. Jay is the married to Tiffany’s niece and Michael is one of Gordon’s employees. My school is a relatively expensive place to send your children to so it’s no surprise that Gordon and Tiffany are quite well off. Very well off, from what I understand. Gordon is a building contractor and owns several building in Hsinchu. As a matter of fact, he owns the building our school is in. His office is actually on the 12th floor of our building.

Our class Thursday ended at noon and I was invited to have tea and lunch with Gordon, Tiffany, Jay, and Michael upstairs in Gordon’s office. I obviously accepted. Just another benefit of teaching adults. Once I got upstairs, I was served some very expensive Chinese tea. I was told that one box of tea cost somewhere in the neighborhood of US$300! Can’t say that I’ve ever drank tea like that before. I don’t have to tell you that it was quite good.

Our little tea party lasted for about a half hour. During that time, we discussed a number of topics. One of the more humorous topics was if I liked Taiwanese women. Obviously I said yes since I find Taiwanese women to be quite beautiful. I consider jet black hair and dark brown eyes to be two rather attractive features.

They started asking me about particulars. Do I like tall or short women? Do I like girls with long hair or short hair? Do I like girls with straight or curly hair? It was pretty cool because just last week we had a lesson on describing people and now they were actually using what they had learned in a real life conversation. It was a lot of fun to see and it made me feel like I was doing good job in class, which is something that hasn’t happened very often since I’d started teaching.

After a brief period of my students brainstorming on women they knew that they could set me up with, the conversation progressed to beverages. They asked if I liked coffee and I told them I didn’t care much for it. This came as quite a shock to them as they assumed that nearly all Americans drank coffee. Jay then asked if I liked beer, to which I emphatically agreed. I told them that I preferred darker beer as opposed to lagers like Budweiser or Taiwan Beer. Gordon then asked me if I’d like his driver to go out and get me some dark beer for me. I respectfully declined as I’d hate for them to go out of their way just to get me a beer. I was fine with just drinking the tea.

A short time later, lunch had arrived. I told them that I had eaten lunch downstairs already and that I should be getting myself back to work. They convinced me to come sit with them for just a little bit longer while they ate lunch. I figured that would be okay so we moved the party down the hall to a conference room. As I walked into the room, I saw four plates of food had been set out around the the table. At the place I was supposed to sit, there were two ice cold bottle of Michelob Dark. All I could do was chuckle to myself and take a seat. Given it was 1pm on a Thursday afternoon, I wasn’t in much of a beer drinking mood but I didn’t want to be rude so I cracked open one of the beers while the others began eating their lunch.

While we ate, Gordon asked me if I liked golf. I told him that I used to golf a bit in high school and that I enjoyed it, though I was never very good at it. He then asked if I’d like to hit the links with him sometime. I couldn’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t so I told him that I would love to come. So it looks like I’m going golfing at a fancy golf club next Saturday. Gordon’s a 9 handicap golfer so I’m sure he’ll mop the course with me but I’m sure it will be a pretty fun experience regardless. Maybe I could get used to this teaching thing after all.

An Evening of Gluttony

I’ve recently introduced my roommate to the joys of the television show 24. We’re currently working our way through Season One and to put it loosely, he’s become somewhat addicted. Now, I’ve seen every episode of the 4-plus seasons of the show but I’ve found myself re-developing a dependency as well. This week alone, we’ve watched the first sixteen episodes, which accounts for roughly eleven hours of our lives.

This evening, my roommate came home after hitting up the local convenience store for approximately NT$600 (~US$20) of junk food which he has affectionately coined “The Jack Pack” in honor of Jack Bauer, the saga’s hero and focal point of its every evolving storyline. It’s currently 2:15am and we just finished up a nearly four hour marathon of watching our buddy Jack kick some good old terrorist be-hind while stuffing our faces with everything from ice cream bars to sushi rolls (yeah, you can buy pre-packaged sushi rolls at a convenience store).

I’m exhausted and somewhat bloated but damn if it wasn’t a good evening.

Disappointment

If you’re curious what my mood is like this evening, the following image may give you some insight.

Yeah, it was one of those days. Actually, it’s been one of those weeks and yet it’s only Monday night.

I’ve Probably Forgotten How to Drive

The other day I was sitting at a traffic light and a completely random thought occurred to me. By my count, it’s been 281 days since I’ve driven a vehicle with more than two wheels. The last time I sat behind a steering wheel was on June 11th, 2005. That was the day before I left for my two weeks of training in California. I gotta tell ya, I really don’t miss driving all that much. At this point, it seems like a completely foreign concept to me. There’s really no point to this entry. I just though I’d point that out.

Chinese Women Love the iPod

One of the Chinese staff at my school, Sylvia, has recently become obsessed with my iPod. Every time she sees me listening to it, she makes some sort of comment. First she wanted me to give her my iPod. Now she wants me to buy her a new one.

Last night, a group of us from work were out at a local pub. Of course, nearly all of them had a camera. I’m pretty sure that it’s a violation of the female code of conduct for any woman to go any place without a camera on their person. Sylvia came up with the bright idea that we pose for a picture using our hands to spell out “I-P-O-D”. Somehow, I got wrangled into the whole thing. I found it all to be was pretty random and straight out of left field but that’s a Chinese woman for you (at least the ones I know, anyway).

At any rate, here’s the result. That’s me as the letter “I” (obviously), Vickie as the letter “P”, Sylvia as the letter “O”, and Shawna as the letter “D”.

 

Rock, Paper, Longhorns!

Today, I taught a group of kindergartners at my school that the hand gesture seen below is invincible in the game of rock/paper/scissors.

As you can imagine, the next five minutes of my life were rather amusing. Watching those cute little youngsters use that symbol repeatedly as they played the game was the highlight of my day.

Navy’s F-14 Being Decommissioned

Northrop Grumman’s F-14 Tomcat has flown it’s last combat mission and is being decommissioned by the U.S. Navy in favor of Boeing’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet.

The Tomcat is one of the most recognized fighter aircraft in the world, due in large part to the film Top Gun (which can be seen by turning on TBS at any given moment of the day). It was originally commissioned in 1974 as a replacement for McDonnell’s F-4 Phantom II.

Even though I know next to nothing about most of them, I’ve always been fascinated wth military vehicles, especially aircraft. I guess that’s just part of being a guy.

By the way, there’s no need to thank me for getting Top Gun’s theme song stuck in your head.

[Via Digg]

Puzzle Alarm

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a bad case of CSD… Chronic Snooze Disorder. You know what I’m talking about. CSD is when you hammer the snooze on your alarm clock every nine minutes for an inordinate period of time until you finally find the motivation to drag your sorry ass out of bed. Some morning, I have an exceptional bad CSD attack and have been known to abuse my snooze button for an hour or more. Yeah, I’m that lazy.

I don’t know why, but that nine minutes the ingenious snooze button gives me is probably the best nine minutes (or 90 minutes, as the case may be) of my day. The bed is all warm and toasty and sometimes I find myself still enjoying the last remnants of a dream. In my opinion, it’s the closest one will ever come to experiencing heaven on earth. However, that feeling quickly fades when I finally realize I’ve been wasting my precious time and decide to roll myself out of bed and head for the shower.

In hindsight, I find the whole snooze situation rather annoying and I’ve thus tried numerous ways to remedy the problem. One that used to work was putting the alarm clock on the other side of the room so I’d have to actually get up to turn it off. That resolution worked for about a week until I noticed that I’d just trudge back across the room and crawl back under the covers. Finally, I became annoyed enough with the inconvenience (not to mention all that walking!) and placed the clock back on the night stand next to my bed. I figure if I’m just gonna fall asleep again anyway, why should I spend my valuable snooze time stumbling around in a half-conscious stupor?

Enter the following gadget…

This, my friends, is what is known as the Puzzle Alarm Clock (via Digg). This mechanical marvel requires you put four puzzle pieces back together before the snooze alarm will reset. The hope is that the thought cycles you need to put the pieces in place will help you stop swatting the snooze button so you can wake up and start your day.

It seems like a good idea but I’m a bit skeptical. I figure that after a week or two, you’ll be able to train yourself to instinctively solve the puzzle, thus soundly defeating the purpose. Another problem I see is it costs $52 dollars!. I’d love to take this little gizmo on a test drive but I sure ain’t paying $52 to do so. Of course, maybe there’s a reason for that price point. Perhaps $52 is just enough money to keep you from chucking it across the room when you become frustrated that the darned thing won’t let you go back to sleep for another nine minutes.

Speaking of that nine minutes, did you ever wonder why seemingly every alarm clock in existence uses a nine minute snooze cycle? Common sense says you probably don’t but I have an inquisitive mind so I did a little research. While there doesn’t seem to be any clear answer to the question, this seems to be as good as any.

Robert

Kids, especially Taiwanese kids, never cease to amaze me. In my ESL classes, I have some very talented students. The artistic abilities a lot of them display are phenomenal. There are a few that are able to draw some astounding pictures. Other possess very impressive musical talent. And every once in a while, a youngster blows me away with their English aptitude. I’m sure many of my students have a much better grasp and understanding of the English language than they actually let on, but nothing has impressed me more than what I witnessed just the other night.

At my school, there five levels of English classes; Starter, Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3, and Level 4. Each level has three sub-levels; A, B, and C (with the exception of Starter which only has A and B and Level 4 which only has A at this point). Robert is one of the kids in my 2C class. At the 2C level, the students have a pretty good understanding of the language which makes it one of the more fun classes to teach. They’re able to understand my jokes and sarcasm and often times, I find them joking and being facetious with me as well.

Robert is, I believe, 13 years old. He is a very quiet and reserved young man and is one of the better students in the class. During the break we have halfway through the hour and a half class, he often sits at his desk and works on his homework from his Chinese school or reads a Chinese novel. At break time on Wednesday night, he approached my desk and said he had a question. He then produced a copy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. He pointed to a specific sentence in the book and asked his question. The fact that he was holding an English novel in his hand caught me off guard and I was somewhat taken aback at first. After a few seconds, I recovered and was able to answer the question to his satisfaction.

Many of my students like to read books. There are a few that are completely engrossed with the Chinese translation of the most recent Harry Potter novel. A couple of the kids in the 3C class I taught last semester often brought basic English story books to class (think Judy Bloom and the like). However, I had never seen any of the students reading a proper novel before. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, Robert has finished nearly three quarters of the book at this point. What’s more, he told me that he thought the English version of the book was better than the Chinese translation. Amazing.

That being said, I can’t say that I agree with his reading selection. I found The Da Vinci Code to be rather formulaic and pedestrian and we won’t get into the problems I have with the subject matter of the novel. Since it doesn’t look like I’m going to have to teach Robert a lot more English, maybe the next step is to teach him to have better taste in books. Still, it’s great to see a student take that kind of initiative. I’m sure he’s destined for some great things.