Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Living for the weekend

Sorry it has been a while... I find ourselves only blogging when there is something exciting or we have good pictures... of course crazy and exciting things happen to us every day and it is hard to keep up... I mean we are the minority over here and getting caught up in something different has become the norm for us. And also unfortunately I have been lazy bringing my camera on outings so we also have a lack of pictures.... So my new goal is to start clicking pictures of our more regular every day life. Anyways two weekends ago is where I will start this next blog.... where we found ourselves at yet another hash but this one is much different than all the rest it was the AIR All Island Run... so that means that every hash from all around Taiwan met about an hour north of where we live, in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. The bus dropped us of in the middle of some rice paddies and we had to run from A to B... So in the 90 plus degree heat we set off with about 300 other hashers and went on about a 12kilometer journeythrough the hills and rice paddies of the Taiwan country side. THere was one point in the run we were all standing (300 of us) in the middle of a dried out rice field with no idea in a 360 degree direction to go, you would the think with the mass numbers of us it would have been a lot shorter than the 30 minutes that it took us to find our next mark and ON ON with the correct direction. After surviving the grueling heat we of course topped it off with a nice cold one and an abundance of noodles, rice, and the usual cabbage. After returning back to Taiwan in a Karokee (KTV) filled bus ride we then headed to one of the local bars that one of our friend hashers owns called La Bodega.... we enjoyed the night and then the next day was spent recuperating. So like I said before we seem to live for the weekends. Don't get me wrong our teaching is great it is so easy now and we really have the hang of things. But I feel as if I would bore you with the details of teaching that you won't come back to our blog.
We are now immersed in a Chinese class that we take twice a week. And last week we had a homework assignment to ask 4 CHinese people about 5 Chinese questions written in CHinese characters... It was pretty fun and we asked our CHinese teachers who preceeded to laugh at our pronunciation. With learning Chinese it is completely different. THey have 4 tones that go along with different pronunciation. You can say one word 4 different ways and they can mean sleep, thankyou, monkey, and crazy. So you never know what you are going to get. Even though the language is very hard I think we are making remarkable progress.. even Jay although he is a lot slower with picking it up and he calls himself the slow kid in the class although there are only 4 people in our class. Today we had our first oral and written test and I think Jay and I did fairly well... Keep in mind we are learning to write Chinese characters. 你好我來自美國 THis means Hello I am from America.... Crazy huh? Anyways this past weekend we didn't have a hash so it was a pretty laid back weekend where Daniel Ray came down to visit (who is Jay's brother in laws brother) We enjoyed a beautiful weekend outside and went out Saturday night and found ourselves coming home at 3 am in the morning after going to a going away party and going to our late night cantonese restaurant and stuffing our face. Sunday night Jay and I hosted another bbq with some of our close friends and enjoyed the weather outside on our roof and a bottle of wine. Things are going very well here and we can't believe it is already May. We have been here 5 months and 7 more to go... What will the next adventure be?再見 GoodBye!

2 comments:

::LYNDSEY:: said...

yay for may! i can't wait to hear your chinese when you get back. we can swap languages...i'll teach you texas and you can share chinese. it'll be great.

Unknown said...

It will be fun to listen to your chinese when you get back. Good luck with learning the language and writing the characters