Wednesday, February 6th

This Wednesday is New Year's Eve here in Taiwan. I have a few days off so it's a nice chance to catch our breaths. Monday and Tuesday, Gosia subbed at Classtime for my boss-- he's in Canada visiting his ailing father over the vacation. So, we veritably took over the school -- Calvin was taken care of by the office assistants while Eli and Rhiannon joined various classes. It was a long lead up to the vacation...

Gosia starts teaching a few hours over at Yen in AnPing after New Years, Eli and Rhiannon will be in classes there, too, and I'll have my afternoon class at long last. The schedule will be a little fuller, but it's all in the afternoon, and we'll all be home mornings.

So, we went for lunch at Angel's house. There's a picture of Rhiannon eating the Polish sawatka with chop sticks-- often when we go out to eat at someone's house they'll give us forks but we end up asking for chop sticks...


































After lunch, Eli and I went for a drive into Tainan City, which is about 10 minutes by scooter... a few pictures of our drive -- yes, that's a garbage truck: Taiwan is home of the musical garbage trucks.

Supposedly, the music speaker systems on American ice cream trucks were first made in Taiwan. They installed these systems onto the garbage trucks (they beep out Fur Elise on a loop) to let people know when the trucks are coming.

At about 6:30 by us, as you hear the garbage truck music coming towards you-- you can hear it from blocks away!- people start coming out of their houses with the day's garbage bags, milling about on the street side waiting for the truck to arrive.

When it does, you swing your trash on in, say good night and go back in. Pretty much every night except Sunday is garbage night.

Even more interestingly, Tainan is home to the talking garbage trucks. They thankfully don't come out by us, but I remember when I first got to Taiwan, staying in Tainan city, and I slept through the first day, only to be awoken in the evening to

"Do-you-know-what-time-it-is?"
"Yes-I-do. It-is-six-o-clock."
"Thank-you" blaring through the city blocks. A few years ago the mayor of Tainan thought it would be a good way for people to practice their English by installing tapes of conversational English lessons onto the garbage trucks.

That's Taiwan.... The people find it so annoying, though, that they run out to toss in their trash and get away quickly as possible... but the mayor has himself acknowledged that it was never meant to truly teach people English, and that they'd probably need to take classes to really learn the language.

Talking about elected officials, Taiwan just finished it's first round of elections-- Parliamentary this time. The Pan-Blues swept into office, ousting the increasingly unpopular Pan-Greens. The Greens "focus on Taiwan" (if you know what I mean) while the Blues "focus on cross straight relations" (if you know what I mean). In a couple months, we'll have Presidential elections. President Chen Shui-bian is a Green, but has brought low the honor of his party due to corrupt family members... He's been leading the latest push for Taiwan entering the U.N. ...

And the big Olympics are coming up in a few months.. we'll see what happens after Summer's over, a la cross straight relations. It seemed so far off when we first got here, but now it's right around the corner-- Hopefully it'll all be a big nothing... still, those 600 ballistic missiles pointed at us... ugh... just part of life here!! Dodging cars, pedestrians and international crisises.

And down at the bottom is Calvin in his prone position!!! He can hold it for about 20 seconds now. He's been eating quite well this week. The kid's tough!

Well, I hope to put out an extra post or two this week since I have some extra time. Tomorrow we're vegging out, but Friday we'll be doing more eating and hanging out with my boss from Yen, the other teacher there and the Taiwanese everything woman Sebrina + her three kids. Maybe I'll just get up some of the backlog of older recent photos I have of HBOT and the like...... check back!