A LITTLE PERFORMING, A LITTLE PERFORMANCE

Last weekend we had a going away party for a few of my co-workers. Phil and I were lucky enough to get a little KTV in. :) We sang “Achy Breaky Heart”...I bet you haven’t heard that song in awhile!

We also had the privilege of going to a jazz performance at a really cute café in Taichung. One of our “foreign friends” who lives in Taichung invited us. The music was great and the event was geared towards English speaking people. So, that was a nice treat!

Next week marks the beginning of our winter vacation. We both have to be in school during the beginning of the week (students come Monday and Tuesday). Then, we will be heading to northern Taiwan for a three day in-service training for all Taiwan’s Ministry of Education foreign English teachers. From there we’re taking some winter break vacation days and spending about a week traveling around northern Taiwan and down the east coast. We haven’t been to the east coast yet and we’ve heard it’s very beautiful. So we’re excited!

CHINESE NEW YEAR VIDEO

Cokato Elementary (my (Annalicia's) mom's school) and my school have started a video exchange. At this point, we've both just sent each other one video each, but it's been pretty fun! The video my mom sent my school focused a lot on Christmas. It was super cute! The video some people from my school made to send back is centered on Chinese New Year. It is also super cute! (It's hard for videos not to be super cute when kindergartners and first graders are the stars...regardless of what language they speak or what country they're from!) :)

Chinese New Year would be comparable to Christmas in the States in terms of its importance to the culture. We've been told that Chinese New Year is by far the most important holiday for most Taiwanese people. Chinese New Year is the celebration of the lunar calendar new year. So, it always starts on the first day of the first month of the lunar year. With this being said, it doesn't fall on the same date on the Western calendar each year. For example, this year Chinese New Year starts on February 14th (it's very late...so we've been told), last year it started on January 26th and next year it will start on February 3rd.

Family gatherings and celebrations last for 3-15 days. The interesting part about the family gatherings is they have a specific flow. For example, the first day of Chinese New Year is spent with the husband's side of the family and the second day is always spent with the wife's side of the family.

As you probably can imagine, Chinese New Year is a holiday full of traditions. So, if you're interested in finding out more about it, you can click on the link below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_New_Year

I've also included the link to get you to the video my school made about Chinese New Year. Enjoy! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ2ni_DqDPk

Here's a few things you might what to know regarding the content of the video:
--You're going to hear students say certain phrases over and over such as, "May a river of gold flow into your pockets." These phrases are traditional Chinese New Year greetings.
--The Lion Dance you'll see at the end of the video is done throughout the year for different occasions. So, it's not strictly a Chinese New Year thing, but it's often done around this holiday.
--If you're looking to learn a Chinese word, tune your ears to hear the word "qui la". This word is said quite often in the video and it means "happy".

TAINAN

Phil and I had our first day off last Friday (New Year’s Day) since we started working here. It was a different experience for us to work five days a week from August until January. I guess we were spoiled in the past with MEA break in October, Thanksgiving break in November and Christmas break in December.

Anyways, we decided to take advantage of our three day weekend and we did a little traveling in celebration of New Year’s. We spent the weekend in Tainan. Tainan is a little over an hour train ride south of Douliu. At one point it was Taiwan’s capital. (Taipei is now.) Currently, it’s the fourth biggest and the oldest city in the country.

(This is Tainan's beautiful train station.)

Since Tainan is Taiwan’s oldest city, it (this is probably an obvious statement) has the most historical sights. So, most of our time there was spent looking at 300+ year old temples, shrines and other historic places. The nice part about Tainan was the fact that even though it’s a relatively big city, all the sights were within walking distance from each other. And, our trusty Lonely Planet travel book provided us with an excellent map, so we were able to see everything without getting extremely lost! This may have been a first for us! :)

Lonely Planet also provided us with some history behind the sights and some different facts regarding them. Knowing these things made the sights much more interesting. If you’re interested, I’ve provided a link to some of this information below with each sight I’ve listed.

You may notice that almost all the temples have neon fake fronts. We have no idea what this is about. Our only guess is that they were put there because of the New Year’s holiday??? In our opinion, they were a bit tacky and we wish we could have seen the temples’ real fronts, but oh well!

Confucius Temple Grounds

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435082

Koxinga Shrine

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435094

Dongyue Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435084

City God Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435080

(As you may have read in the Lonely Planet link, these pink slips of paper are students' requests for help from the gods to pass different exams.)

Altar of Heaven Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435070

God of War Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435090

Chihkan Towers

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435078

Matsu Temple

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/taiwan/southern-taiwan/tainan-city/sights/435098

Our hotel room in Tainan was kind of interesting. The floor was raised and we had to put our shoes under the floor, outside the door (we weren’t allowed to wear them in). And, the beds they offered were simply mattresses placed on the floor.

Aside from sightseeing, we also went to a place called Willy’s Second Base Bar and Grill one night. This restaurant was established by a former American MLB player who moved to Taiwan to coach baseball awhile back and ended up marrying a Taiwanese woman, staying in Taiwan and opening this place. Although our Happy Buddha restaurant in Kaohsiung didn’t live up to our expectations, this one did! We enjoyed some food we hadn’t had in more than five months!

Happy New Year!