Mr. Ping in Taiwan: lantern festival

Taiwan has a really low fertility rate - 1.11. That ranks at the lowest in the world along with Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau. That's even lower than Japan and mainland China's birth rates. The schools are competing hard for students

That's a lot of only child's. and a lot of pressure for that one kid to be perfect

I'm trying to make education and career decisions. why that gotta be all difficult? o and can someone lend me $50,000? maybe ill have to ask my buddy B rock for some obama bucks

Barak obama change gon' come-a

church was so cold i left and went outside to walk around.

highs of 55 degrees. that's freezing when nobody has heating
we americans are high maintenance compared to everywhere else in the world i've been

freezing at work! i'm wearing 5 layers

Our school had a parade for lantern festival (the last day of new year's celebrations).

i found out our school is the best school in the region and the students are very wealthy. i never would have guessed.

welcoming stage

cultural insight - east asians love to make a big deal out of everything. everything's a spectacle

the whole parade was just our school of 4,000 students. we walked for almost 2 hours. the police had to redirect traffic throughout the city for us.

"kill the beast!"

we had multiple floats, musical groups, an entire fireworks show, an outdoor stage and more

i wondered where they got all these floats from

it was a paparazzi moment for us teachers because we're americans. nonstop pictures all night. and i'm pretty sure we're in the news

look how fat i look! i have on three jackets underneath

people were going nuts over the cute white baby (name is milo).

for the women he was the most exciting attraction. it's rare to see white babies

i was sitting on a bench talking with my friend. on the other bench was this old guy. in the middle of our conversation he let out the biggest, longest fart. we stopped talking for a few seconds and then got back to our conversation

cutesy poo haha

I walked into class. The students said... "uh, teacher, we have test. all day." I said, "See ya!" and walked out. Two free hours for me! I think we will only teach this class like 7 times by the end of the year.

happy pink and blue horses

life motto - it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. They're pretty chill here about everything so I think my motto works

...so i basically do what i want in class.
hey, at least they're learning lots of English!
I love doing what I want to do.

i do the "textbook" for part of the class and the other part is my own curriculum. i teach self-improvement principles based on the book "the 7 habits of highly effective teens."

This week they learned how to base your life around principles (Ex. peace, balance, helping others...) rather than people or things.

For class I wrote a story about a lady named Starla. I had a hard time saying that one without laughing. Starla is a workaholic

sweet peas

They randomly decided they wanted more people to audition for the play. a couple of the boys auditioned in high girl voices. i had to look down at the paper to not laugh.

also in some of the auditioning pairs the girl played the guy part and the boy played the girl part.

what happens when you ask an asian to take your picture

I finally got to teach my high school class for english majors! they are so good i loved teaching the class. a relief from those middle schoolers! some of them are a nightmare

my first erhu class was fun. i just played by ear and had no clue what they were saying