Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Getting Ready for July

This past week has been Allie and I working towards getting ready for July. We will be really busy from our first Hash trail that we will be the Hares, to Allie going back home for Anna's wedding and everything in between. The first big event will be Canada Day Hash Run out by Taichung's Harbor. There should be plenty of good pictures of that for the blog. Then our one year aniversary, which seems amazing to think how time flies. We don't have any big plans but I have a few surprizes up my sleeve.....shhhh. The next week I will be off to Singapore with over 80 kids, 3 other English Teachers, and 4 Chinese Teachers for summer camp. This past weekend when Allie was out enjoying the Hash I was in Taipei for a six hour training going over every little detail (which is fine since I will have a free trip). The last week in July Allie will be leaving me and Taiwan for a well deserved break and will be heading home. So in short July will be a very busy and exciting month.


Our teaching has been going really good. We both have basically mastered the curiculuam and now some of our classes have over lapped and we are teaching some of the material two or three times already. This does make the lesson easy to prepare for but also a little monotinous What we need to do is challenege ourselves to be more creative and try new teaching styles and or techniques. I know our kids really like both of us because compared to the other teachers Allie and I bring a lot of energy and fun into the classroom and the kids really respond to it.


Besides teaching our day to day life is going good too. It has been really hot lately but checking the weather back in NC is seems the same. The big difference is that when the sun goes down the tempeture here stays around the same as it did during the day. It only goes down a few degrees. For example during the day it will be around 95 degrees (and yes really humid) then when we get home from teaching around 9:30 PM it is around 88 degrees and won't go lower all night.
Allie here, On Saturday after I came back from the grueling 13k 90 degree hash and Jay came back from Taipei we had a little get together at our house. We had some of our South African, Autralian, Taiwan, and American friends come over for a fun night of sitting on the deck talking and drinking some beer and wine. We also introduced our friends to the American college game of beer pong which actually seemed a lot more fun in college... for some reason it just doesn't have the same vibe. At about 1 am though our friends that Jay and I are very jealous of because they are going to Bali in about a month to work at a scuba shop and do some teaching. (IT think that might be something we want to try in the future) Anyways they had the great idea of going to McDonalds to try and steal this blow up kung fu panda because one of the guys wanted it for his kindergarten class and their performance. So we all headed to the McDonalds at sat there all looking very suspicous because no one ordered anything and thought of our plan to distract the workers and run up the stairs with the giant panda. Anyways after a failed attempt we decieded to just ask if we could have it. It seemed fairly promising but they had to talk to their bosses and see if it would be alright. Well after a long random night Jay and I went home for much needed rest. This week has been fairly easy... I have had some performances and next week I get to go to Ali Mountain to volunteer at an aboriginal village and teach some kids and play lots of games. So Jay will be a alone for a week but I think it will be a very rewarding experience and I am extremely excited to do something a little different. Until next time.....

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