First Taiwan post

Come tomorrow I will have been in this crazy place a week. In many ways it feels like longer. I spent a sleepless flight watching movies and various tv channels trying to drown out a crying baby. I then got off the plane and breezed through customs, although I got stopped so someone could poke a thermometer in my ear (at least it looked like a thermometer) and also so the sniffer dogs could do their thing (fortunately they didn't find the ton of coke in my bags.... j/k please don't come and arrest me Mr policeman if you are reading this....). It was just before 3pm when I met my airport pickup bus and startd the journey to Jhushan (Nantou county) which is meant to be just ovr 2 hours away. My fellow Englis h speaker on the ride was an expat American now living in Kuala Lumpa. We got lost trying to find his hotel (I don't know how hard it is to find ' Nantou Hotel' in Nantou City but this guy made hard work of it. After finally finding the hotel it was just the driver and I. Obviously I had quite justified reserves about his ability to find the school, he didn't disappoint. We finally arrived at around 6.30-7pm.

I almost got put to work the night I got there but thnkfully I just had to observe some classes and then I was driven to my apartment about 10 minutes away. At some point during the drive I got told to remember the way so I could find it the next day.....

The apartment is small but clean...or at least it was when I arrived (not quite so clean now). I had an electric pot thing I could boil water in for about 2 days and then that just stopped working. So now my only cooking tool is a small microwave sized oven.

Despite not having had any sleep in about 36 hours my body refused to sleep past 6am. Possiblybecause of the heat (which I was not prepared for). So I went walking around. I decided as I don't read English and very few people in Jhushan my best bet for wandering was to take photos at every corner I got to thus giving myself a trail of photos to follow back to the apartment and amazingly enough it worked.

Not surprisingly though I couldn't for the life of me find the school so I walked into one of the few stores that had English on their sign and managed to find someone who could at least understand me. After much armwaving and discussion in Chinese (obviously I wasn't the one doing the later) they ended up ringing the school and managed to give me an idea of where to go.

On a side note I was also given Taiwanese sim card for my phone however it had no money on it and my boss didn't really know how to recharge it. So I ended up walking into a phone store and waving my phone around saying 'Engliish. recharge. phone. money'. That didn't work so I pulled my phone apart and showed them my sim card and waved my wallet around. That worked however i was in the wrong store so after getting directions to another store I repeated with success.

My Taiwanese number (and only phone number at present) is +886987564892. I don't know my address yet (keep forgetting to ask).

My first day teaching (and also technically my first full day in Taiwan) I taught 2 classes and sucked in at least 1 of them. Amy is my boss and the head English teacher. Alan is her husband and the owner of the English school even though he himself can't speak it. My fellow teachers are Aniga and Anna then there is Lisa who comes to teach kindergarten occasionally and Chloe who just graduated University (majoring in Education) and she sort of mans the front desk. The kids range from about 5-14 and for the most part they are great. They are however not the angels I pictured in my head, far from it.

My second day teaching I got given about 4 hours of teaching and so it has been for the rest of the week (including Saturday). On Friday afternoon I got told that instead of having Sunday off I was to go to Taichung for teacher training. As I had no idea how to get there and Chloe was going also it was arranged that I would stay with Chloe Saturday night and then we would go to Taichung together Sunday. So much for my weekend. Also I need to get a medical so Monday I'm meeting my agent in Taichung to go to a hospital.

Oh I also got to experience riding a scooter which was cool although as I'm still unfamiliar with Taiwan's roads I'm demoting myself to bicycle til I have a better idea of how everything works.

Anyway after school Saturday Amy took everyone our for a banquet dinner and then Chloe scootered me back to her family's home which is borderline rural (they grow tea). Her family are great, I had a blast. Her mum insisted I talk as much as possible with her son and other daughter to help them work on their English. I would love to spend more time with the family as they were so warm and welcoming.

Today Chloe and I made it into Taichung to attend the teacher training....unfortunately it was 95% chinese needless to say I learnt very little and quite frankly I'm sliightly peeved I had to attend at all (as obviously teaching English in Chinese is NOT going to work for me) but anyway. So after that Chloe boarded the train back home and I stayed and tried to find a hotel for the night. After getting majorly confused I was standing outside what is apparently a 'love hotel' when I encounter a Westerner who also happens to be an English teacher (from the UK). So he directed me to a hotel which is actually quite nice Simple but friendly. And that is where this story ends for now.

I don't have the internet in my apartment and I'm not allowed to use it at work so I won't be on as much as I'd like but these things happen. I do now know of an internet cafe near the school so that's a plus...of course I need time to go there which is something I just haven't found much of lately but eh. Til next time my wifi activates.

I was gonna cut photos in here but my battery is low so check them out here (I think if not I'll fix it next time)