Happy Mother's Day!

First of all....

Happy Mother's Day to my absolutely AMAZING Mom!

Wish I could have spent it with you.

    

All week I have been teaching about Mother's Day at school.

Making cards and teaching the kids the song "You Are My Sunshine!"

~ 

Tuesday afternoon Hai Chien had a Mother's Day performance that I attended.

They presented cards and flowers to all the moms and surprise... Me too.

I find it a bit disturbing receiving a card that says "This is to mommy" but after getting cards from several other Mother's Day cards from the kids in my classes, I just pretend that they say "To my big sister."

They're sooo cute!

Here are some of my students performing a song on the eucalaylie.

Some more of my students doing karaoke.

The kids LOVE doing this. 

Gem and I performed the hymn "In The Garden" together.

It went pretty well for only having practiced for about twenty minutes right before the performance began.

Haha... Talk about waiting till the last minute!

Me and Lisa (one of the office workers at Hai Chien).

She's sooo fun!

Eva and Dora from my super fun 3rd grade at my Tuesday school with the

 special picture the class made for Mother's Day.

Sunday morning I went to the church in Dajia. 

The kids had a special performance were they sang some songs.

It sounded great, even though I couldn't understand much of 

what they were saying since it was in Chinese.

After church, Johnny and BreAnne, fellow English teachers with IBLP, came to visit.

We hung out at the Huang family's house for the afternoon playing dodge ball and Uno.

The Huang's two dogs, JeDee and Money didn't like Johnny very much.

I don't think the Chinese song and dance he performed for them helped at all, either.

 They are still barking ferociously in this picture... BreAnne and I 

(the sensible ones, of course) simply enjoy the show.

We all went out to eat for dinner and I got hot pot. 

Yummy! 

Just to note, I didn't eat the pig blood cake served with it!

~

It was a fun weekend, but I still missed spending it with my totally awesome mom.

<3  I'll be sure to make up for it next year!  <3

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!!

Randomness

Yes, it's been a long time since I've posted I know. So here come my excuses...

Tuesday I went into Dajia (for the first time by myself might I add) to mail a letter and then stopped at a stand and got some milk tea to celebrate my great achievement.

Seriously though, the roads in Dajia are all twisty and crooked. It is easy to lose you bearings if you don't keep your eyes wide open.

Anyway, I also got two cream puff type things because I remembered that Gem had been wanting to try them. Yes, two... I got one for myself as well as her. :)

Here is someone making them at a food stand. The purplish ones are sweet red bean. 

I got vanilla tapioca... I think.

~

Anyway, that night I kept waking up with a horrible stomach ache. 

To make a long story short I ended up laying around my room in the apartment for TWO days straight.

I think I can sympathize a little better with those who have been through solitary confinement. (not that I know anyone who has) But seriously, that's what it felt like! 

................................

I'll just skip over those two days......

....................

Friday, I was feeling good enough to go back to teaching.

(Well, technically I had to be or they would bring me to the doctor)

~

I was sooo thankful that God answered my prayers and I was feeling almost all the way better by Friday afternoon and was great the whole weekend, because I had to go to the annual English teacher's Retreat at one of the other teams locations about a 2 1/2 hour trip away. All 43 of us!

~

Here are a few pictures I took.

                                      

Saturday afternoon water balloon fight.

I participated in it for about 10 minutes, but I didn't pack extra clothes so I came up with a genius plan to take pictures so I could stick around to watch without getting drenched like the rest of them.

You can tell that Tim wants to throw that water balloon sooo bad!

Audra laughs at a safe distance.

The school location the retreat was held at. 

So cute and small!

I went on a walk with some of the others over this super cool long bridge.

This was my bunk bed for the two nights.

Don't be fooled, that mattress isn't as thick as it looks. In fact it really and truly felt like lying on a wood board. I was sooo sore after that weekend!

Here I am heading to the trainstation Sunday afternoon to head back to Dajia.

I was sad to say goodbye to my friends at the station as I was taking a different train.

This was the first long train ride I have taken alone and I only got my seat number wrong twice!

The problem was that I also had an old ticket with me and I mixed up the numbers. hehe

Thankfully, I can always play the "stupid foreigner" card and people are usually really nice about stuff.

Ok, so back to teaching....

I was a bit disturbed when I came across this vocab card while lesson planning.

Is this how how my students really see me?

:(     :(      :(    

I got a name card for my desk at school!

Some of my students at my Wednesday school performing there play for me.

I love this story!

Ok, that was a lot of random disconnected stuff.

I had some videos I wanted to put up, but they wouldn't load. I'll have to mess around with that later to see if I can figure it out better.

Legos, Church, and the Seaside....

Yup, you got it: Another Weekend. 

Yay!

Saturday morning, I went to Taichung City with Gem, Mountain Man (Hai Chien's director),

 and Alex (a volunteer teacher at Hai Chien who has great English) to a lego creation display.

 Hope you all like pictures, because I posted a LOT this time!

 Taipei 101, the third tallest building in the world that I visited a few weeks back.

Taiwan is very well known for their delicious Bubble Milk Tea!

Now that's just crazy.

Definitely one of my top three favorites!

Yes, this dinosaur is really made out of lego bricks.

left to right: Mountain Man, Gem, Alex, and I.

The Cellos are especially for you, Jem!

Budding lego artists... hopefully not.

Lego sculptures as a life work... I think not.

Sorry, Nathan Sawaya.

 Cool tiger.

I think the sign post shows all the places the display has traveled.

Hum... transporting lego sculptures... Sounds quite difficult.

Lego pictures, that's pretty cool.

After the display, we went to a coffee/cafe' that was started to support a special forest in Taiwan that they are trying to make a national park.

A bunch of the stuff there was made out of wood from the trees.

The food is all apparently organic and natural. 

Isn't this table amazing! 

Dessert: honey cake, coffee jello, and a cookie thing I don't remember the name of.

 Lemongrass Tea. Everyone else had coffee. 

Believe me, I've learned my lesson about coffee.

I had some at a Taiwanese family's house one evening to be polite... Ummm. 

Let's just say I can be kind of scary on a caffeine high. Poor Gem.

She stayed up past twelve watching a movie with me.

By that time I was able to sleep.

Moving on...

We visited an art museum where they were having a performance.

Here, some people are dressed in aboriginal costume complete with

 painted faces do some sort of traditional dance.

Elementary students performing a dance/drum song.

Oh, yeah.... the Lion Dance (as they call in here in Taiwan)

atop some platform thing. 

You can see it better in the next picture.

Ok, that's just crazy...

And then they started throwing candy.

~

By the time we got done at the museum, it was about 5:30 

so Mountain Man generously offered to take us out for dinner.

Oh, boy...

I should have said NO!

The outside of the place he took us smelled like sewage and there were big bowls of food just laying around.

Inside, the food was cafeteria style and lukewarm. Who knows for how long.

I prayed really hard for my food before that meal.

That was just about twenty-four hours ago and I haven't felt sick. Hooray!

:)    :)    :)

Sunday, I visited a church in Dajia. I was especially excited because when I first got here 

I didn't know of any churches. It was really great being

 able to get to know some other Christians that live in the same area I do!

Gem, Me, Michelle (who translated for me), and Sandy.

After the service we went out to eat at Mos Burger with a bunch of other people from the church.

Black tea, fries, and beef in a rice bun.

The music in the restaurant was a bunch of pretty hymes and they told me the guy who owns this branch is also a Christian. How cool is that!

Sandy, from the church, took me to the seaside and I walked along 

the sandy beach by the sea for the first time EVER! 

I have been wanting to do this since the very first day I got to Dajia, but the lady from my HCT sponsor group told me I wasn't allowed to go there alone and Gem had little interest in visiting the beach.

But I finally go to do it!!!1

Here I am with Ace, Barbie, and Daniel.

Notice that way in the background under the striped umbrella is a Foreigner!

I have actually seen several of them over the last few days.

I love staring at them like they're some kind of oddity and whispering "waigou ren" 

(foreigner, in Chinese) to whoever I'm with.

Yay! it's the beginning of mango season!

Notice that it's a lot smaller than a "regular mango."

That's because it's one that hasn't been hybridized.

Delicious!

Mango, Banana, yogurt, and flax seed smoothie.

Hey, I think I deserve to brag about part of my dinner a little after what I had to eat last evening!

~

Yeah, so that was a Loooong post. I hope you all liked it!

I know I've been posting about nothing but my weekends lately, but I'm still planing on doing one on my schools sometime in the (hopefully) near future. I didn't forget!