Adventures with Very Small Pineapples, Broken Cameras, and Chickens with Scooter Helmets

Well! That's quite a title, eh? I suppose it's time to blog for the week and give everyone an update on what's going on here in Taiwan. Last week my classes all went fairly well, I think. My Bumblebees are showing a marked improvement in their behaviour and even my boss Jackson commented on how well-behaved they were when he did his class observation last week. Last Monday Jackson sat in on a class of mine for the first time and I was so nervous I didn't eat all day, but it went pretty good and he only had good comments for me. The rest of the week was pretty normal, as weeks go. Just teaching, grocery shopping, hanging out with roomates.
This weekend was a lot of fun, though. I slept in until 11:30 Saturday morning which was REALLY nice! then went out to lunch with all my roomates and we talked for a few hours. Then I had dinner and went to the night market with my friend Jimmy and we did all kinds of interesting things. We got these fake airbrushed tatooes (really cheap!) that are super cool and are supposed to last for about ten days, depending on how well you scrub in the shower. I got a butterfly on my arm. Then we bought these teeny tiny pineapple plants in little glass jars with rocks (really, they don't even have roots, they're just pineapple tops and you're supposed to water them like once a week and they grow teeny tiny pineapples! I saw them! So cute!) Then we went to a place where they had all these put-coins-in-and-move-the-grabbing-arm-to-pick-up-a-toy things like you see at the entryway of supermarkets in the US. So Jimmy spent a bunch of coins trying to grab this little round stuffed baby chicken with a big pink scooter helmet and were about to give up when I said "Let me try" on the last coin and I got it! (kind of on accident, I thought I was way off). So now I own a little chicken with a scooter helmet. I would post a picture of all this stuff, but...I kind of broke my camera... :(
Yes, the brand new one! Jimmy and I were taking pictures at the mango ice shop and it kind of got knocked out of his hand and fell on the table in such a way that the lens (that was extended because the camera was on), got knocked on one side and got stuck that way. So the lens wouldn't detract the way it normally does when you turn the camera off. The camera kept telling me "turn off and on again" when I hit the "on" button. Grrr...so today we went to the Sony repair shop here in town and they said something to the tune of "oh, hm...we've never seen this happen to a camera before" and that they need to replace the whole casing and it was going to cost me about $2500 NT (about $75 USD) arghhhh.... so it got mailed off to Taipei today to get repaired. So irritated at myself. *sigh*
Well, then we went to a used bookstore where Jimmy looked for textbooks for his classes (graduate school) and I looked for a Chinese-English dictionary. Which I found, but an old kind of dirty copy so I'm going to keep looking for a nicer newer one. They had a lot of English books and magazines there, which was nice and kept us busy for a long time.
Then today I went to church in the morning and a bunch of us went to eat Thai food for lunch (which was really good). Then to the Sony repair shop, Starbucks, English service, and cell group back at my house. So it was a good weekend, except for the broken camera Thing. :(
Next weekend I have tentative plans to hike a mountain called Big Snow with my roomate Katie Jo and possible a few other people. The weekend after that I'm going hiking with another group, my Taiwanese friend Annie from cell group invited me to go with. That's around Moon Festival time, so there should be barbecues and celebrations going on all over in a couple of weeks. Tomorow night I will go with Jimmy for my first hot pot in Taiwan (apparently hot pot is a very popular food thing in Taiwan, but I'm not really sure what it is. I guess I will find out tomorrow and blog about it next time) and then to a very much larger bookstore to find a Chinese English dictionary. I'll be speaking Chinese before you know it! And Wednesday I'm doing a bike ride up some mountain with Katie Jo and our other friend Josh who's really into biking. So I'm getting busier these days. it's kind of nice to keep busy and have plans instead of coming home to sit by myself like and watch TV like I did all the time in Alaska. :)
Yah, so perhaps by the time I blog next week I will have my camera and all my pictures back, and also have more new pictures of the Big Snow hike. Yay! Thanks again for all your prayers, everybody, they're always much appreciated especially since traffic here is so hairy and although I am getting better at scootering, things happen unexpectedly all the time and I'm so glad for God's protection.
Okay, zai jian! Until next time!