Singapore Summer Camp

I am back from Singapore and all my kids made it back in one piece to..... somehow. Besides giving you the day to day adventure and up and downs I will just hit you with some highlights and let the pictures speak for themselves. My kids were really great their age ranged from 8 to 13 and there English level was all over the place too. I had two super cute little girls named Amber and Phoebe, they were my favorite, then I had two twin boys that ganged up and picked on the other kids, they were my worst kids. But everyone inbetween was really awsome! We all left Sunday morning and flew with 85 kids (and 8 teachers) to Singapore. It was a all day affair, and I will never complain about traveling with just Allie and I again. The coolest things we did with the kids was going to the zoo and night safari, the beach, and a water park. We also took them to a rain forest, little India, and a discovery place. Each day consisted of four hours of teaching in the morning then afternoon to evening events. The night was getting the kids to go to sleep then a teachers meeting to go over the day events and the next day lessons and activities. So I would wake up at 6 am to take a shower and knock on the kids doors then would go to sleep between 12:30 and 1 am. The days were high energy to keep the kids having fun and going. The whole week felt like one really long day. Even with all the work, I still had fun. I rode an elephant with some kids at the zoo, had a large snake put around me at the night safari, got a henna tattoo, got covered with sand at the beach, and got to hang out with 20 to 80 kids all day having fun.

Singapore as a city was really nice. It was like a small European city thrown into East Asia. The roads were super clean with trees and flowers everywhere. The people were from all over the world, and the mix was about even for all of the races. You could see the islands of Indoniesa and Malasia from the beach, so traveling around would be very easy. The temperature stays around 30 to 31 degrees or for us Americans 85 to 87 then would drop down at night. The tempeture stays the same all year round, with a cool ocean breeze.

Allie had an adventure here by herself. There was the first Typhoon of the year for Taiwan and it hit Taichung the hardest. There was a lot of flooding in the county. She had a Typhoon day off of work. When I was in Singapore I was watching Taichung on the news and newspapers. There were roads closed and most shops closed.

Allie will be going home this coming up Saturday for a week. So now I will be stuck here while Allie goes on her own adventure, and visits her friends and families.

Update on the dog

Today we decieded to go back to where we found the dog to see it we could find its owner. We put him where we found him and then saw a cage by this nice big house that had found waiting in it for the dog. So we did steal the dog for the night he had a nice bed and some good food but today we took him back to the mountains and also back to her owner. I am so relieved that we found its home I was really worried. So now no dog but I do think that will be a first purchase when we get home. Sorry we didn't have time to get pictures of the dog.

Look What Followed Me Home

Since Allie has been back things have been really busy! This past weekend we had Daniel (Daniel Ray is a friend and family from the Ray's: Emily and Ben Ray) down from Taipei to visit and hang out. He met Allie and I at our apartment early Saturday morning with his running shoes and an opened mind to try his hand at hashing. He has heard many storys and had many offers from us to join. This past weekend was a big run and a great run for him to be broken in. It was Canada Day Run, which is Canada Day is July 1st (I know July 4th is a closer holiday but there are more Canadians than Americans in our Hash so.... Canada Day won out). All the Hashers packed into a big chartered bus and drove about 35 minutes to a neighboring city on the coast. The run started at a cool park right off the ocean. The run was fairly flat compared to the mountain runs, but it was really hot and really long, about a 12 K. I found about 6 checks and thought that I was going to be the first person in, but the last bit was on the beach and I was running on empty when I hit the sand, and of course there was another hasher that seemed to be running faster on sand than on the trails, and no it was not Allie but Allie did pass me with about 100 yards to go, just because my glory was already taken. But right after the run and a nice beach shower they tied a rope around our waist and made us do a zip line from about 50 feet up and about 200 feet long. It was really cool but after being dead tired now you had to hold yourselves or trust the safety rope that another hasher with about two minutes of instruction had tied around you. Luckily everyone had a safe run and ride, and Daniel did really good, he kept up with the lead group and also found a short cut that took him right to the finish line, which he did have to drink for, but if you ask him it was worth it. Sunday after a long hash we dragged Daniel out to Dakeng to plan out our hash run that we are doing this weekend. We ended up getting lost and hiking for about 2 to 3 hours up and down mountains. We did finally find our way back to our scooters and some really good trails that we will use for our hash. Daniel left to go back to Taipei and I am not sure if he will be coming back any time soon. But we all had a great weekend full of excitement.

This week has been nothing but going to the mountains and hiking, running, walking, dancing, and bush whacking to make a really tough hash trail to get back at all the other hashers that made hard runs for us, and I think we have done it.

Every morning we would wake up early and head on the scooter and map out where we were going to run, today we were going to run the whole thing and time ourselves to figure out how long it was. Well some things didn't work out, we started running fine until Allie jumps up in the air about five feet and screams, I run into her and she pushes me almost down and starts running the other way yelling and not making sense. She finally stops hyperventilating and explains it was a huge snake brown with a greenish yellow stripe, fatter than her arm, about ten feet long, in the striking position, and breathing fire (I threw that last one in there since I didn't see anything and I still think it could of been a fast moving small worm). Either way Allie was not able to run fast or in the lead for the rest of the way. So we ended up running half of it and heading to our scooter. On the way back from our scooter there was a very nice looking dog with a hurt paw that Allie felt bad for and gave it some of our remaining water. Well the dog followed us all the way to our scooter and when we started to drive off it ran right next to us. I felt bad so I headed back into the direction where it came from thinking it might live at this one nice house. When we got there we gave it some water and then I drove off really fast thinking I could out ride the dog, the first time I went about 1 k and stopped and looked back. The dog was still coming. This time I put the dog on the scooter drove and got some food and more water with it on the scooter. Then drove back to where it started to follow us. Gave it some more water, and now food, and tried the same trick except I drove even faster and farther, I could hear and feel Allie crying and saying "she is such a good dog. " I drove until I could not take it, and stopped turned off the scooter and waited to see if the dog was still following us. One minute past and no dog I was about to start the scooter when the dog with on hurt leg was running as fast as it could and when it saw us still there you could tell it was happy. It ran and jumped right on the scooter gave Allie and I both a kiss. So Allie, I, and the dog (no name because we are trying to find a home for it) rode all the way home. The dog did really well it only fell off the scooter once, maybe because I was running a red light and turning left in the oncoming lane, which is a normal and excepted driving practice here in Taiwan, don't forget I am the one that passed the driving tests. We brought the dog to our apartment and bought some dog food, a bowl, and some doggie treats. She ate the food like she has not eaten in days, and she has slept for most of the day.

Besides the hashing trail and now the dog, I have been really busy trying to get ready for the Singapore Summer camp. I will be leaving this Sunday morning and coming back the next Sunday. There will be four English teachers and 4 Chinese teachers and 80 kids that are going. We will see all of the famous sights in Singapore (the zoo, beach, and little India to name a few). It will be really busy and a lot of work but I am really excited and nervous to be in charge of some many kids, I can't even keep Allie in line so how will I keep twenty kids that are hopped up on sugar in line. I am going to bring a bag of tricks; face paint, stickers, prizes, and one loud whistle, so wish me luck!

Allie went to Ali Mountain

This past week I voluteered to do a 4 day summer camp at Alishan also known as Ali Mountain at an aboriginal village and a very small elementary school. I went with 4 other Taiwanese "teachers" not really teachers. We left on Monday and it took about 3 and half hours. But when we stepped out of the car the weather was amazing. I have been so hot in Taichung and now I needed a jacket. It was a great feeling. We didn't do any teaching the first day just going to look at the miniture school in this small little village. There are only 40 students who go to the entire elementary school and 30 of them were going to come to our camp. The next day was early and filled with fun with the kids. These children didn't know any English and most of them didn't have English names so I had to give them to them... I proceeded to name some Hank, Iris, Teddy, I tried to make them sound close to their Chinese name. They were all so cute and so excited that we were there. We spent the entire day with them mainly playing games and teaching them some English which was a difficult thing since the things I was told to teach were extremely advanced for their level. But we all had fun anyways. The next day was full as well and tiring I had a lot of teaching to do that day. The last morning we woke up at 3:30 am to see the famous sunrise at Ali Mountain. We had to take a train to the top and waited for an amazing sight it was well worth the lack of sleep. Thursday was our last day and so we had a small performance with the kids and we gave out awards and went back to hot Taichung in the afternoon. I am adding a lot of pictures for this entry because I think the pictures tell the most. Hope you enjoy it.

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.....

Arachnophobia

Jay and I have a new outlook on the way we are doing things here for our last six months. I think both of us went through the culture shock thing last month and things that seem to keep going wrong didn't really help our situation... but I think we are both past it now and have a better attitude on how we are going to approach these next months. We are really starting to enjoy it here again and getting out there and exploring always helps our cause. After our awesome muddy weekend in Puli with the music festival we realized we need to start getting out as much as possible. We just finished up about 4 months of studying Chinese and I think we finally have a good basic level down. We now plan to take some time off from Chinese so that we can start exploring our surroundings whenever possible and we will start back up again as soon as possible. We of course started our hash again 2 weekends ago with a nice long run about 14 kilometers. Then last week we were very active. We bought a membership to an outdoor pool, which in such a tropical and hot country it is really difficult to come across an outdoor pool because no one here likes to get any sun. But it is really nice with and olympic sized outdoor pool, and indoor pool, mineral pools, jet pools, hot tubs, and water pressure things, where Jay and I layed down on this plank that looked as if maybe I was going to be put to death and then these fives bursts of water come from the holes in the ceiling and pound your back almost strong enough to look in the mirror afterwards to make sure it didn't break the skin. It really feels good after you get used to the pain. It is supposed to help with circulation among other things, not sure what. But that will be our new place as long as it is sunny outside... which also is hard to come by this time of the year since it is still plum rain season. This past weekend we had a really fun hash run. It was pouring rain and with an 8 k run through the dense forest of Taiwan ... it can get really muddy. At one point I crawled on my hands and knees to find that once I got to the top of the cliff I was slidding all the way back down.. Lukily Jay was there to stand as a road block and stop me from having to climb back up for 20 minutes. We really enjoyed running through the mud. It's much better to embrace the rain than sit inside and wish it wasn't raining. Jay and I have also been signed up to set a hash trail on July 12th. THis involves a lot of work. It is not as if you just go out and find some sort of looping trail. You have to go out and bushwack through bamboo and head up hills and find fake trail that are going to get the runners of course for a little while so that Jay and I (the hares) can make sure they won't catch us. Anyways on Sunday after our hard run we set off to the mountains and found a pretty good location to set a run. We found a huge buddhist temple that will be a good place to have the runners go around the mountain ridges that look down at the temple. IT was fun to go out a try to figure out a run altough it will prabably take about 4 or 5 more trips out there, exspecially since this is our first time to set one. One thing I learned while going out looking for trail on Sunday was that my fear of spiders has increased and I seriously can't hardly look at them and that Taiwan has some of the biggest spiders I have seen in my life. THe pictures I have here don't really do them justice. But you can kind of see the spider compared to the bananas. But we seriously saw about 20 of them and they were all huge. They were more like a man eating spider. I was happy to see that at some points I would make Jay walk in front of me and he would start jumping ten feet at a falling leaf. I was glad to know he was also a little scared. But of course I kept making him try to take pictures of them "Get closer honey, Maybe you can put your hand next to it to get perspective" The response "Hell now I am not doing that....do you see that thing"

My reply " Of course I can see it, that is why I am standing way over here, I thought you weren't scared of spiders"
Jay "Yeah but they supposidly can jump like 5 feet and I don't like the looks of those fangs"

I couldn't disagree with him. I was standing there almost Hyperventilating I was so scared of it. Anyways Jay and I are enjoying Taiwan even more these days. And I think it will continue with the things we have planned to do.

The Musical Rollercoaster

These past two weekends have had a music festival theme. We have traded our running shoes in for flip flops. Two weekends ago there was a music festival here in Taichung. A lot of western resturants and magazines put it on and it was really fun. The music was all western bands, the food was western food, and the beer was right off the tap and it was not the normal Taiwan Beer but good hoppy beer like we are used to from back home. It was really nice to sit in the grass with friends and listen to good music and just relax.
This past weekend there was no hash going on and we had plans to drive to a mountain city called Puli you might have heard about it if you are a regular reader of the blog, it is right near Sun Moon Lake. This time we didn't take the bus but we jumped on the scooter and rode through small mountain roads. We went with four other people so we had alittle scooter convoy with us. All last week it has been raining a lot, and it didn't change for our ride out. It was rainy and cold which didn't stop us. We put on our rain gear on and tuffed it out. When we got to the music festival we were almost surprised that it was still going on with all the rain. There were other people that braved the weather like us and set up camp, so we joined in and made the best of the weather. THe top of the mountain is owned by a foreigner who takes people paragliding. unfortunately the weather was bad so no flying for this weekend but we will definately go back to try that out. By the time the music started we had our camp site up and were too wet to worry about the rain. We just enjoyed the music, food, and the company. Everyone was really relaxed and had a good time. Lots of mud rolling, dancing. It was a complete hippiefest. The music didn't stop until late in the night. The next morning we rose to a nice view of the city Puli and some people that didn't make it back to there tent and were just sleeping in the grass. On our trip up to the festival our scooter had suffered a nail through the back tire (which it was not leaking any air but for caution we need a new tire) and also one of our friends that rode up with us had a flat tired. We heard of a scooter shop that is open on Sunday which is really rare. The scooter shop even makes house calls. An hour after calling them they were up the top of the mountian and had about five tires to choose from. A thousand NT later (about 30.41 US dollars) we had a new tire and were ready for our trip back. The ride back didn't have the rain but the energy was a little low because everyone was so tired from the night before. After making it back home we washed all the mud off of ourselves and rested our rears and had an easy evening.
The past work week has been a real rollarcoaster affair. We have been missing home since it is right the middle of our year contract. Feeling like time has stopped, and not sure if we can make it another six months. We got some really good news that both Allie and I will be going to Singapore for HESS's summer camp. Which we get a free trip to Singapore with a group of kids that we teach and take around to see the sites of Singapore. We weren't going the same time I would be going first which is on July 13th and coming back on July 20th, Allie would go Aug. 10th and get back Aug. 17th. The next day we get a call from the head guy in charge of the summer camp and informs Allie that the camp she will go with does not have enough kids so they are cancelling it. So Allie was really down and sad that she won't be able to go. The next day the person in charge of here school comes to her and tells her that she will be going just earlier. So now she would go July 7th through July 13th so now she feels really excited again, we are both happy and excited. I received an e-mail about sending my information so that they can book my tickets and training, but Allie never received her e-mail. When I faxed my information I called the guy in charge of the summer camp and asked about Allie. He said he was still waiting to hear from Allie's boss about if she could go during that time. So the next day Allie asked her boss about going. The same person that told Allie that she would be going, and she said that they aren't sure if she will go because she will be going home a week after the summer camp and that another teacher will be on vacation during that time too. So with in two days the same person told her two different things. We found out this past Monday that Allie won't be able to go to the Singapore summer camp. This time we are just down about her not going but now we feel like we have just been played like pawns in some kind of game. I will still be going which I am very excited but for the head ache that they caused with Allie it does not make it feel as sweet. This week has started like the last week raining and full of bad news. Lets just hope the sun comes out and shines on us again.