Of Heroes and Haunted Houses

Haunted House portion of the Halloween party was cancelled. There was a lot of miscommunication and a lot of simply non-communication going on. First thing is that a few of the native tutors at English Corner are seniors and will be graduating in January and are busy (rightfully so) with everything going on with that. The other part that was I wasn’t told when we started this venture is that a haunted house doesn’t every year, it happened last year because there were eight foreign exchange students working English corner that were all art students (add that with non-senior native students) for a total of many hard-working artistically inclined haunted house makers and they spent a week on it.

Cathy and I were put as leaders in the beginning of the respective students, Cathy for native tutors and me for foreign tutors. The big problem being that during the week we work until 5 or 6 most days and many times all our students show up (little to no downtime). I should have tried to call more meetings between all the tutors earlier, I didn’t realize until we really started decorating that Halloween was supposed to be our show as the foreign students.

 You live and you learn. We will still have pumpkin carving and tarot and Blake is doing Halloween Jeopardy (super cool by the way). I’m still pretty excited, I just don’t like going back on things I already said (and that seems to happen often, I need to confirm things as "sure thing" before telling people (no matter how excited I am).  I am a little nervous for tarot reading, I’m still memorizing all 78 cards and their meanings (I probably have around 40 or so memorized… but its tough…). I think the party will still be awesome either way and I am going to have pictures of it!

Over the weekend we went to Jennifer (our advisor)’s home and her parents cooked for us. It super good and it was great seeing the other exchange students again (Gao Zhi Yan and Xin Chi Ju from Korea as well as Jenny and On Tung from Hong Kong)!  Also Jennifer invited a friend who went to Berkley, he goes to NTU (National Taiwan University) I believe and his courses are language intensive, its literally all he’s taking. His Chinese is good, especially his singing lol. We did KTV in Jennifer’s living room. Xin Chi Ju, Kaitlin and I sang Peng You (friend) because we know it from Chinese class.




Jennifer’s family is very musically inclined. Her father plays guitar and she has a piano in her room. She has a beautiful singing voice by the way XD. The food was great too. I gave Jennifer a Michigan keychain and some of the other students bought her gifts and a cake. Her birthday is on Monday, 生日快樂Jennifer (Happy Birthday for those at home)!



























Also Kaitlin, Blake and I went to Gongguan on Friday night for the buy one get one free at Starbucks (every Friday in october, this was the last Friday) and we stopped by the CD store. Sadly Catch Me by: TVXQ still isn’t in yet, but guess what they did have!!
皮子英雄！(Chinese literal translation: The Ruffian and the Hero, international title: Black and White) The whole series box set for like $1200 ($40US). I so bought it and it even has English subtitles! No more watching youtube where the audio doesn’t sync with the picture or with blurry scenes! YAY!

Black and White Opening

 

 Peng You (friend)

Its Beginning to Look A lot like Halloween...

This week we started decorating for Halloween at the English Corner! Everyone was making such cute decorations. I can’t wait to help out more (I had a lot of students this week so I didn’t get to help much). Its really exciting, everything is starting to come together.  The Haunted House opens the 31^st and is open to everyone on campus! (It’s a Wednesday and likely to be during the evening, more details coming soon!!).

This weekend was the Dream Carnival at Chiang Kai-Shek (CKS) Memorial Hall. Its an event that was started in 2002 to promote friendship and celebrate differences. Its a large parade with costumes and floats handmade by the different troupes. This year troupes from New Orleans Mardi Gras were invited. Some of the floats were beautiful and some a little unsettling (lol).



 

The parade is put on by an education foundation apparently, which makes more sense now seeing as that most of the musicians in the parade were children between elementary and middle school age (they were very talented).  The costumes made me want my color pencils to draw.

 



I do have a lot more pictures than this (so just shoot me a message if you would like to see them).
Last order of business! A new PV (promotional video its the same as a music video) from Japan about Halloween. HYDE (lead singer of L'arc~en~ciel and VAMPS) is heading up the project with rock stars like Tatsurou (MUCC) and pop stars like Anna Tsuchiya and TommyHeavenly. Here's the preview, isn't it fun. Blake said we should have done something like this for the haunted house, a mad tea party! Maybe its something we can do at SVSU with our clubs in the future.

AIEF Fair and Brother's Hotel

So this weekend my Chinese professor from America was in town for the AIEF Fair (American International Education Foundation). So this means it was basically a study abroad convention where students from China and Taiwan could look at schools overseas and ask questions about living in America. We ran the booth with Professor Liu on Saturday and on Sunday. It wasn’t much different from running a comic convention really, just instead of giving on comic stuff we were pitching SVSU and trying to use a little of our Chinese.  (Also everyone thought our mascot, the cardinal, was an Angry Bird… lol). It made me really happy to show off my school.

 

On Monday we had the day off for Shih Hsin’s anniversary. This didn’t mean there wasn’t things to be done. I spent the morning studying for a Chinese test (encompassing all we’d learned so far) and doing translation homework. Then the evening was a formal dinner with Professor Liu.

  

 

The dinner was at the Brother’s Hotel near Taipei 101. It was super fancy. We invited students from English Corner and friends from campus. We ended up with something like 25 students total, more than expected but a great turn out. There were also students from Ming Chuan (forgive my spelling) University that had studied at my home university over the summer (they were really cool) and alumni. The alumni were professors and CEO’s and leaders of the alumni association in Taiwan. They had studied abroad at my home university and now visited every so often. One from Ming Chuan University, Ms. Carol Song sat at my table.

Apparently they are going to start a new graduate program with Chinese language as a focus, with some classes in the US and then some classes back here in Taiwan. I am super interested in seeing where that goes.

The food was Taiwanese and very good. Carol told us that it was “very Taiwanese, just fancy,” because of the hotel. So there are lots of food pics for me to share.

 

 

 

At last it was time to return home. I got to ride the MRT and Bus home with many of my Taiwanese friends and one from Hong Kong. We took pictures and sang songs and talked about the evening. It made the trip home go a lot faster and helped me forgot for a short time how tired I was.

Back at Shih Hsin it was time for more studying. Sally went out the Jingmei night market and got me a milk tea while she was at it. I was up pretty late studying and preparing for the week, but it was all worth it. Tomorrow I get to sleep in a little and then its off to buy decorations and costumes for the ~Halloween~ party at English Corner.

Comics and Music

 

The newness has finally worn off. Classes are now classes, and it was a little hard getting up this morning. A dog... cat ... or something cried, loudly for like an hour this morning at like 3 am. I'm not the only one, some of my students at English corner said they heard it too. It was bit ridiculous. Just a very strange night...  So I was literally dragging myself through class today it felt like.

Though I did realize its time to buckle down on Chinese. I finished translating my first children's book. I even took photo's of the pictures and put them in the document for my professor. I got it back... so. many. red. marks.... I was pretty close with most of it, but my wording was a little awkward and there were some colloquial phrases I misunderstood. So its still exciting, if only a little disheartening. I did learn a lot and I was getting faster at it toward the end of the book. On to the next one! I have more tests and midterm coming in my actual chinese class too, its starting to build and all at once it seems. Its good though.

 

 So I get to English corner sandwich in hand and my black tea... attempted to order it hot and got it cold... (just one of those days...) and was setting up my computer for my mini-presentation for my students that day. When Donovan (professor from the English department) races into the corner. I'm talking to Kaitlin and he hands me a large envelope. Inside are Grant Morrison's We3, and two volumes of Gotham Central. With a small description of each, a warning to "take. care. of. them" (picture a serious face here) and a note that there might be more comics on the way he runs back out of the Corner. I think I sat stunned for like two minutes.

I had talked about discussing American comics vs. Manhua (manga, asian comics) and was bummed to find out that American comics are not available in Chinese, only English and they are SUPER expensive because of it. Many students have never seen an American comic they assume they are just like Manhua... Donovan mentioned like a month ago when we had orientation to English Corner that he could let me borrow some graphic novels... I never really said when I planned on doing it...

 

Made my day, let me tell you that.

I can't seem to find a "not scary" Halloween sort of movie for my students without being Harry Potter (which all of them seem to have seen... many times) or renting a movie for 90NT a night (5 days... not good). So it looks like I may be doing my intro to American comics next week. For the win!


Though I am worried about class registration for next semester at SVSU. Registration is WAY early this year, October 29th. I am teetering between junior and senior which changes my registration time. If they don't count this semesters credits, I'm still a junior... if they do I'm a senior... and it changes my time and the classes that I can get into. If I miss my registration time I have to wait for everyone in school to register until it ends and open registration starts... Alot of classes for my degree fill up fast (not a lot of sections) and hopefully I get into the building I wanted to for dorms. I moved my housing contract from fall to winter and they were forced to give the room I was assigned away (understandable I wasn't using it)... but I will be upset if I get put in more expensive housing after I put down the money for a certain building... that should be fine though... I was told I could always move if I'm not where I want to be. It should work out, but its a little worrying...


BUT on a lighter note,  I want to share another video for you guys. This one is by an English band by the name of Transition. The music video was filmed in Taiwan and apparently a few years ago, the band visited Shih Hsin. The song is in Chinese with English subtitles and we sang in Chinese class. Its super cute.
The song's title is Dui Bu Qi, Wo De Zhongwen Bu Hao (sorry, my chinese is bad).

 

 

Mini-Excursion: Bitan

“No big trips until I get paid,” that has felt like my mantra the last two weeks. I love my roommates; they really know how to have fun and still keep it within the budget.  Yesterday Sally and I shared our Saturday in camaraderie being the only two most of the day while Daisy and Yu Jing were out. We studied and ate and dinked on the internet.

Today we took a trip to Bitan to the park. We were able to take paddle boats out on the lake which was a lot of fun. My roommates are crazy drivers! (lol) They kept running into things and they past us and got poor Jordan all wet. The lake was very busy with performances this weekend and lots of boats on the water. Super cheap and fun. Unfortunately, for some reason I can't find any of my daytime pictures.

 

We ate in the night market, a pancake sort of food. Mine had strawberries, blueberries and bananas in it (so good!) and also Takoyaki that was delicious as well (its octopus in a fried breading). After that we took pictures and just ran around for little bit. We went up on a suspension bridge but it wiggled too much for me to get good pictures from it.

Kaitlin and Jordan left first, but my roommates and I (and our friend Jenny from Hong Kong) didn’t stay much longer, since most of us have class tomorrow. I really forced myself to use more Chinese today, I think I need to keep this up. Also a local temple was having some sort of event here in Jingmei and were walking through the streets all dressed up. Yu Jing wasn't sure how to describe it in English, but she says these sorts of things are much bigger outside of Taipei particularly in the southern part (reminds me of something we saw in Nichol's Eastern Philsophy class at SVSU).











On another note, I found a new CD I want to buy. K-pop, WHY ARE YOU SO POPULAR HERE?!(Kpop = Korean pop music). I stopped listening to a group called DBSK after the split, (I wondered if two guys could really carry a group) but Yunho and Changmin’s  new album… it rocks. I can’t stop listening to it. I found out comes out this month. I’m being sucked back  in T_T.

 I want send you guys off with two of my favorite songs one in Korean and one in Chinese. The Kpop one is by DBSK (AKA in Japan TVXQ) and its from their new album (yup its a duo). The Chinese song is an older song off an album I bought by Wang Lee Hom (American born, Taiwanese singer). The album is mixture of modern and folk music... so awesome.

English Corner: Welcoming Students

Today was the Welcome Party at English Corner for the native students and us, I guess. I got there a little early with the other American students and we attempted to help as much as we could but it got crowded fast. At the beginning Peter and Donovan spoke (the founder of the Corner and a English professor that has been super helpful). Then we got to introduce ourselves.

Jordan was called first and he was really nervous. I think he did a very good job though, then Blake. Blake was very confident and had everyone in smiles. I knew he of all people would draw my name XD. There's a picture of me pointing at my X-Men shirt saying I like comics. Then it was time for food. It was a mix of snacks and pizza, but good.

All of the students were so excited and energetic espacially Joy and Cathy who were the hosts. Blake and Kaitlin taught students the Cupid Shuffle and the Wobble (Donovan got in on the wobble lol). I sat and talked with some of my students and met some new people. Roland (a native tutor) ran a bingo game, it was really hard to get everyone's attention for that. He was worried it went badly, but once it got started everyone was screaming and laughing when they won and were having a great time. I think he did a fine job, large crowds are always hard to deal with.



 
I had a few students for actual tutoring after the party. I didn't realize that three of them were part of the fortune-telling club on campus (two of them are usually pretty quiet, I was really glad to have sort of a one on one with them today). They were pretty excited to discuss it with me. One of them has a mermaid tarot deck! I can't wait to see it. I talked about my Aunt Cheryl  and my grandma Pauline a little today. I am so doing a history of tarot for one day.