singin' ain't this life so sweet

mailed a box of taiwanese paraphernalia (ooh man i've been spelling that wrong my whole life. thank you, spellcheck), mainly odd foods and some engrish shirts. when i went to the post office, the woman at the counter told me it was $12,000 to mail and i gawked at her because the teachers have been telling me how cheap it is to mail stuff and $12000 is like $400ish which is obviously not cheap or reasonable. so then she said oh no on no, $1,200. WHEW.

my classes were pretty good. the first one is mostly boys and classes with tons of boys are just not my style. i'm girly. luckily, my coteacher, gene, is super fantastic. he's silly and he does boy things and i'm so glad i have him for that class. today the question was 'who are you afraid of?' and they came up with 'my father, my mother, my teacher, gangsters, robbers, police officers, and the mafia' it was pretty funny for me to correct kids pronunciation of gangsters and mafia.

one kid just got back from vacation in my second class and he brought me back south korean nail clippers with a little handmade clay lady bauble on them :) his mom comes to every class and she collects all of the homework at the beginning of class. i like them. i taught his brother in a sub class for 3 weeks. they both know a whole lot of english.

after class, chelsea, one of the coteachers, picked me up and we went to the night market. she's pretty quiet but she's really nice. she kept asking if i wanted to try various things. we bought fried chicken that appeared to be like chicken nugget things but i put one in my mouth and bit down and there was a giant bone in it! it freaked me out. i spit it out when she wasnt looking :X
youre supposed to put the whole thing in your mouth and eat all of the edible parts and then spit out the bone. i don't know. i don't know why that's necessary when there are so many bits of edible chicken without messing with bone. but they don't like to waste anything.
andd we had watermelon juice and we had chicken curry. it was fun. i hope we become better friends. she lives with her parents and she wants to move into the dorm but i'm not sure if that's allowed or not. she's never been outside of taiwan. i'm going to try to get her to come with us on our 10/10 trip. we have a 4 day weekend in october for 'double ten' holiday. they're big on double numbers here.

speaking of taiwanese traditions, today marked the middle of ghost month so everyone was back out with their tables of food and incense. the fancy mall, SKII (SK 2), had like tables and tables and tables of food out with all kinds of workers praying with incense. i wish i had my camera.

that's all for today. early to bed. i'm teaching fiiiive classes tomorrow. from 9am to 7pm. it's going to be such a long day.