Adventures in Scooting

I finally have a scooter! Yay! It's a little 50cc that I can drive legally with my international license, it's cherry red, and it has a basket! I also got my health card and my Visa debit card in the mail yesterday. So now I'm all set! :)
Scooting is way better than riding a bike. It's much faster, for one thing, and sooo much cooler (both the hip kind of cool and the wind/breeze in your face kind of cool). Traffic here is so funny to me. Instead of watching the traffic light, the people stopped at a red light will watch the little countdown walking guy at the crosswalk, because it counts down to when the opposing light will turn red. So when the digital crosswalk guy begins running and then says "stop walking", the traffic stopped at the red light will go even if the light is still red, because it is going to turn green in a few seconds. So far I haven't seen any accidents due to this but I'm sure they have them. I still wait for the light to turn all the way green. I saw a guy today carrying about 10 huge bags of leafy green vegetables on his little scooter, very cleverly perched all of them. It's amazing what people manage to fit on their scooters.

My afternoon class, the Bumblebees, we've been doing a summer theme unit on Ants. Today we made models of the Ant Family with silicone clay. Silicone clay is awesome. I don't even think it's on the market. I think my school has some because one of the kid's parents works at some hi-tech place that does stuff with silicone and he invented it. Silicone clay doesn't dry out, stick to things, or get hands dirty. It's cool.
The kids had a lot of fun with that.
Also today we practiced writing sentences again. The Bumblebees are learning to write for the first time this year, so their sentence skills aren't so great. But this one little guy, Hank, was so funny - the kids all got this worksheet that had half of a picture of a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end, and they were supposed to finish drawing the other half of the picture and then write a sentence about the picture. Most kids finished drawing the rainbow, maybe a flower or two, or another pot of gold. Some kids drew people. Most kids wrote sentences like "I can see a rainbow" or "Look at the beautiful rainbow". But one little boy, finished drawing the other half of the rainbow, and then underneath the rainbow he drew two obviously dead-looking monsters. Then he wrote this very short sentence: "Two monsters die."
I laughed so hard. Then I gave him a star. (they get stars when they complete their worksheets) Kudos for creativity.
They had another worksheet where they had to do the same thing, finish this picture and write a sentence. The picture was one-half of a hot-air balloon floating over a river. Most kids wrote stuff like "I can see a balloon" or "Look at the beautiful balloon" (sensing a theme here?) but this kid drew a person in the balloon, holding a fishing pole that went all the way down to the river, and wrote "I am fishing from the balloon". He got a really big star. That's my kind of kid!

Tomorrow we're taking a school-wide field trip to some farm place. Fun times to be had by all!

The other night I learned how to play mah-jong. I actually learned more chinese words learning how to play mah-jong than I did my entire first month in Taiwan. I learned how to count to ten, how to say "north, south, east, and west" and then all the other names of the tiles. It's very much like Rummikub, only more Chinese and more complicated. :)

New Things:
1.) The best kung-pau chicken in the world - see pictures on my Facebook because I am having a problem uploading them to my blog for some reason.
2.) How to get gas for your scooter at a gas station - pull up, open the tank, smile real big at the attendent and point up (as in fill it up because I don't know how to say that in Chinese yet), pay the NTD equivalent of about $3 USD, then scoot off! A much simpler and cheaper process than putting gas in my car in Alaska in freezing wind and snow.
3.) Discovery of Funnyions at the Carrefour. "Funnyions" are like onion rings only with no real onion. They're onion flavored rings. Actually Funnyion is the American version and I discovered a chinese version but still a very happy discovery.
4.) The milk ladies at the Carrefour. I was looking for "my" milk there the other day - the bottle with the red lid that means "whole milk" with the famous baseball player guy on the front holding a bottle of the same milk with a cow peeking around it, and whilst I was in the midst of looking, I was bombarded by Taiwanese Milk ladies asking me stuff in chinese and it scared me away and I never did get my Milk. :( I think they were probably asking me if they could help.
5.) The gas guy. Apparently Gas Guy comes once a month to read the gas gauge. I was home in the morning yesterday and he rang the doorbell and I opened the door to Gas Guy, only I didn't know it was Gas Guy because at first he was just Strange Old Chinese Guy I Couldn't Understand. So I kept saying, "No thanks, I don't want any!" but he kept saying "Gas-uh! Gas-uh! (chinese who don't speak English very well add "uh" to the end of their English words) and finally I got it! "Ohhh... GAS!!" so I let him in and he checked the guage and then bowed a lot and left. I can't wait to learn Chinese.

This list had five things the other day but I had problems uploading my pictures so I just saved this blog and posted the pictures to my Facebook. So I will now add a couple of new things to this List:
6.) A Costco card! I got caught at Costco using my roomate's card yesterday and I was so grumpy that they told me I couldn't buy my stuff with her card, but I did the math and figured that even if I only bought two packs of ground beef there per year it would still come out even with the membership fee (ground beef here is REALLY expensive and buying the Australian ground beef in bulk at Costco is the best and cheapest option by far) (also I can get Ghirardelli (spelling?) brownie mix there in bulk) so I figured it was worth it and gave in. Yay me.
7.) Um...can't think of any more right now. Gotta go out and get stuff done. :) More later.