Kaohsiung City, Taiwan

Kaohsiung may be a bit of a big, ugly city in some places, but other places are quite nice...like this! It's certainly not as ugly as I expected, but the pollution is much worse than I expected. Steph and I were out driving for a while a couple of weeks ago, and when I got in the shower the water running down my skin was brown. Don't trust air you can see.

This should give you a pretty good idea of what Kaohsiung, Taiwan looks like. It's a lot of pavement, scooters, tall buildings, Mandarin signs that I can't read, and Chinese people.

The driving here is crazy. I've gotten used to it and I'm not nervous wreck anymore, but when I stop and think about how dangerous it is I usually get a little freaked out. People here just don't look. At all. I've had a couple of close calls because I've been putting far too much faith in the power of traffic lights. Take it from me; a green light in Taiwan does NOT ensure that you won't smoked by a scooter who should be stopped at a red. I wish I could capture the insanity of the roads in a picture, but it's something you have to experience to believe.

I almost got run over trying to take this picture. I failed to realize that the light had turned green and I just sat there taking the picture like an idiot tourist. You know how people in Canada mock Asian tourists? Yah, I'm definitely the one being mocked now.

I took this picture last weekend when Steph and I went on a 3 hour mission to find Mega, the big Western department store here. The place is absolutely enormous, and after we finally found it I couldn't believe that we had such difficulty. It's a giant, circular 17 story building that says MEGA in huge letters on the front. Very hard to miss.

Being in Mega was rather interesting. The Taiwanese definitely don't do video games like Canadians. They have some crazy dancing stuff that draws a huge crowd. It's absolutely hilarious to watch, which we did. And we laughed. A lot. After that we went to go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith...and listened to other movie-goers burp through the whole thing. Ahhh....the beauty of Taiwan.

Employed.

Apparently I'm a teacher.

I'm so not qualified for this.

All in all the first day went pretty well. I taught 3 classes on my own today, and after the first I was about thisclose to a mental breakdown. I pretty much messed up you could possibly mess up, and then some. Thankfully the other 2 classes went much better, and I'm not terrified to go back tomorrow.

Of particular note from today was my kid, who when asked where the light comes from, responded loudly with "SEAN PAUL teacher!" For the record, the answer I was looking for was sun, and I was talking about sunlight, not a joint. Great. Day 1 and I've already got 8 year olds talking about pot.

Aside from an apparent drug problem, and one little girl who can't keep her hands out of her pants, it seems that I have some pretty good classes. Teaching ESL is much harder than you'd expect at first. Try explaining the concept of "but" or what the word "ago" means to someone who has no idea what you're talking about. Or how about "to" and "too". Yah, definitely not as self-explanatory as you'd think. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it, but it's very hard to step it back to their level considering I never learned english the way they did.

It was a fun, funny, and good day!

Pigs in a cage on the street.
Why not?

The Dragon Boat races at the Dragon Boat Festival in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. It seems that every person in the city gathers up and down both sides of the river for the entire day. It was cool to see, but once you've seen one race you've seen them all.  

After many requests, here is a picture of me on my scooter. This was on our way to the Dragon Boat Festival, and yes, it is quite challenging to drive in a skirt that short.  

Here are some pictures of the apartment. It's a 3 bedroom in a great location; very close to the school, the gym, the grocery store, and nightlife. It's a gated community and our security guard is quite the character. He speaks English and French and has so far proposed marriage to both Steph and I. His name is Five and he prefers we call him Five Pepe, which means Uncle Five.

I'm currently experiencing my first typhoon. It's rain like you've never seen in Canada. If you stood in it for 5 seconds every inch of you would be soaked right through. That's where the giant head-to-toe raincoats come in handy for driving. They're pretty sexy. The driving is a little frightening in the heavy rain, especially when you get pulled over the by the one and only english speaking police officer in Kaohsiung in some RIDE-like program. Good thing I know how to look confused and speak French:)

I hope all is well at home! Keep in touch.

The back of my bedroom 

My bedroom. You can't really see the whole thing, but the other side is totally empty. Lots of space and no furniture. 

The living room. The apartment came fully furnished with some pretty nice leather couches.  

The teeny, tiny kitchen. It's actually not this ugly and dingy looking in real life. 

The roommate, Stephanie, in her bedroom. 

Hi!

I'm finally posting these pictures up after many empty promises.

After an absolutely phenomenal 4 weeks in Vietnam and Thailand, full of abseiling, parasailing, sight-seeing, crawling through tunnels, seeing religious ceremonies first hand, hiking, elephant riding, swimming, tanning, partying, and much more, Steph and I are finally settled in Taiwan. We have our new apartment, our new scooters, and started work today. Responsibility is a little hard to swallow after spending 5 weeks worrying about no one but ourselves. Meh. Seems to be a great job though...I'm really excited to get started.

Some of you know that my camera got stolen out of our hut in Koh Samui. The following pictures are all from Steph's camera. It really stings that I'll never get my pictures back, but at least we've got Steph's. Hmmm...oddly enough her camera isn't working now though. Full moon party? Swimming? Camera in water? What?

Anyways....below are 30 or so pics from the trip. Obviously not all of them, but some of the highlights of places we went and people we met. I have about 990939840 more on my computer, so if anyone wants to see them, just let me know. They're in reverse chronological order, so start from the bottom. I'm buying a new camera this weekend, so I'll likely continue to post my pictures here.

Hope everything is going well at home. Keep in touch, and if we don't talk for a while I'm probably face down on the pavement somewhere. I risk my life everytime I get on the scooter and get in the middle of the absolute insanity that is Kaohsiung traffic. Pray for me.

Steph with the Canadians (Sean, Ethan, Matt) and a British girl, Gabby, that we met.

Ryan, me, Steph, and Sean getting painted at the full moon party. At least at some point that night we were all together...and no one was padlocked into a hut from the outside.

On the beach at the full moon party 

The boys from California, aka "The family". Steph, Sean, Ryan, Me. One's missing from this picture (Brian) as our afternoon drinking in the ocean resulted in him getting sunstroke. Go Figure. Here we are at the bar "Circle of deathing" the pail, as we so affectionately called it. We always got there too late to get a seat, so we ended up "circle of deathing" the pail of 1 mickey, 1 can of coke, 1 redbull far too quickly for our own good. This happened several nights in a row, and needless to say we made a scene pretty much everywhere we went.

My bed on the train. Much comfier than you'd expect. 

The overnight train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok with some Canadian guys we met (Sean and Matt, aka Dandy). We were the only people awake at this point and I'm pretty sure the rest of the train didn't enjoy our drinking games as much as we did.

The village we stayed overnight in while trekking through the Thai rainforest.

The adorable kids. Couldn't speak a word of english, but we had so much fun with them. 

One of many romantic meals that Steph and I shared. The meals we had in the village were absolutely amazing...best green curry I had the entire time I was in Thailand. 

On an elephant in the Thai jungle. It's not nearly as fun as it looks. All they ever do is eat and they move slower than you could ever imagine. It's a bumpy ride, too! Mine ate an exorbitant amount of marijuana leaves. It was quite entertaining. 

Me abseiling down a 30 metre waterfall. SO MUCH FUN!! 

A really fun group of people we met on a boat cruise...Matthias (Sweden), me, Steph, Daisy and Mark (England), 2 girls from Oz, and Lulu from Switzerland 

Steph and I with Matthias (Sweden) and Callan (Australia). That white jug is what they serve beer in. It works to about 30 cents a glass 

Me parasailing in Nha Trang, Vietnam! 

Cows blocking the road is a very common occurrence while driving in Vietnam. We must've seen it at least 30 times, but it never got old. 

The Fairy Stream in Mui Ne, Vietnam that Steph and I walked through.