你好朋友們！

I've now been in Taiwan for two months, and these last few weeks at Wenzao have been really great. Jubbie and I celebrated Taiwan’s National Holiday (10/10) with her extended family at a seafood restaurant. The seafood here is super fresh; we’re in a huge Taiwanese port city.

 Food from 10/10 & Jubbie's cousin

Living in Kaohsiung makes me practice listening a lot. Even though I love to talk in English, I can’t communicate in the same way in Chinese, so I’m getting used to doing more listening. Letting other people make decisions for me sometime leads to pretty awesome experiences. This week, I ate lunch with Ben, Nora, two Korean girls, one Japanese guy, and my Korean guy classmate from my chess class. The Korean guy doesn’t speak much Chinese or English, but he’s really good at chess. Within our group, we could speak Japanese, Korean, English, and some Chinese, but there was a mutual language that everyone could understand.

Language skills were distributed as such:

Nora: English

Ben: English, pretty good Chinese-definitely the best of our group

Me: English, ok Chinese-can communicate some

Japanese classmate: Japanese, Korean (lived there for a year), pretty good Chinese

Korean guy: Korean (he’s really, really good at Chinese chess, but in class no one can talk to him because he doesn’t speak English or Chinese.)

Korean girl: Korean, pretty good Chinese-has been here a semester

Ester (other Korean girl): English, Korean (fluent in both, lived in Australia and US, also on the bellydancing team (WHICH BY THE WAY DID I MENTION NORA AND I MADE THE TEAM!?!??!?!?!)

It was so cool. Ester order us a bunch of Korean food; I tried my best to pronounce Korean dish names. If I want to talk to the Korean guy, my question went through Ester.

IEARN took us on another field trip this weekend! It was like being on a fourth grade field trip in a very pleasant way. We painted paper umbrellas and made clay pots in a pottery place in Meinong, and then visited a library where an American was reading little kids English stories (we may volunteer there next semester). Enjoy the snapshots!

Jubbie and her clay pot

Brandon and I represent the South.

Story Time (in english)

Nora's artistic. 

Jane (Taiwanese IEARN lady) watches over Ben.

Koi food machine

It was one of the best field trips so far.

Also, thank you to everyone who has sent mail recently!!! 謝謝 Chris, Gary, Melora, Carie Lee, and Kathy! Today, I got a package from home that really made my day. Special thanks to Christie for a super thoughtful package. Happy Halloween!!! Jubbie was really excited to get an authentic Halloween pumpkin, because she had only studied about it in school.