Hello Kitty and Dinosaur

Too cute! This is from one of the spelling exercises in this class.

I've recently gotten a job working as an English teacher at a "cram school" here in Taipei (for those of you not acquainted with the term "cram school," it is a privately operated school where parents send their children to after their normal school. Most children in Taipei get shuttled to cram school in the late afternoons, many of them to English cram schools where the kids get a linguistic boost).

I spent my first two working days teaching 4 and 5-year-olds about colors and hair, then Typhoon Morakot hit and I got a day off, and then I was assigned to teach some older kids.

One of the new classes I'm teaching consists of a half a dozen or so 6- to 8-year-olds, all really cute, one token girl in a class of super energetic boys! First day of teaching them, I split the class into two teams, and they offer up names for their teams -- Hello Kitty and Dinosaur -- big mistake! They form two lines, and all the boys naturally go to the Dinosaur team line, even the ones I've assigned to the HK team, while the little girl is beaming and standing in the HK team line. I realize my mistake and erase the names, and the little girl tugs at my skirt and eagerly points at her pencil case, asking if I could rename the team Cinnamaroll. It was soooooo cute, but no, Cinnamaroll is just another HK name, so ultimately, I named them Noodles and Dumplings.

I don't allow them to pick their team names anymore, but I try to come up with silly ones, like Stinky Feet and Stinky Tofu. Food names are pretty safe, but animal names can incite a debate amongst the kids about whose animal is fiercer, plus food is not gender-specific so we don't end up again with 5 kids scrambling for the Dinosaur team and one little girl representing Hello Kitty.

Morakot

We had a doozy of a typhoon last weekend, the worst flooding in 50 years. Last Friday was declared a Typhoon Day, which means people were highly encouraged to stay home from the dangerously strong winds and pouring rain, eat ramen and play mahjong (although I heard all the cool kids went to the movies or KTV - that's karaoke in private rooms for the uninitiated).

Taipei experiences the fewest clear sunny days and the greatest seasonal temperature variation compared with the rest of the country. The trade-off for crappy weather is that Taipei doesn't flood often (although when it does, it's bad, like really bad), whereas many small towns in central and southern Taiwan are frequently reported to flood during even moderate typhoons. Morakot seemed to have an axe to grind with the mountainous central regions and the south, but Taipei was back up and running by Sunday with little trace of the nastiness that just swept past us.

It wasn't until I watched the news that I saw for the first time the devastation, and realized that those of us in Taipei were extremely lucky. I checked in with my aunt who lives in the southern city of Tainan, and she reports that other than experiencing a water shortage, there was no flooding in her city, and that she and the family are all doing well. The severe rains resulted in sedimentation of Tainan's clean water supplies, so they've been forced to shut off the water every other day in order to carry out with the cleaning effort. My aunt and her family have been living off bottled water for the past week, and while they still manage to take showers, they've been hand-washing all their clothes instead of using the washing machine in an effort to conserve water.

I want to thank everyone for your concerns, and assure you that my relatives and I are all doing well.

I should think this has made the rounds by now, but if you STILL haven't seen it, here's the famous footage of the hotel that collapsed into the river (not to be confused with the apartment building that collapsed in China, pre-Morakot mind you).

Village Buried by Mudslide

Treacherous Rescue Effort

Google Morakot Map -- my sister loves the little dancing bananas in places where people have been rescued