Wow. Living without the internet is not fun.1 I mean, look at this - I haven’t posted for a month! What gives? Well, we can’t get internet without being nice and legal. So, since our paperwork has been working its way through the Taiwanese beauracracy, we’ve been in a sort of limbo state. We can get an apartment, and we can pay taxes on our earnings (that’s universal, though, right?), and we can work (well, I guess that one’s a little iffy), but we can’t stay up too late keeping up with blogging and Facebook and email and podcasts and whatever else used to occupy the greater part of my day.
So, without the internet, what have we been doing? Working. Working some more. Then, on our days off, we go and try to do so much that we come home exhausted and we tell ourselves, “Next weekend, let’s just rest so we don’t feel like crap the rest of the week.” Of course, this never works - between sight-seeing and parties and the all-essential trips to Ikea, Costco, and Carrefour, our weekends have been booked solid.
Work is good, though. Well, mostly. You can measure the “goodness” of my days on an almost linear graph, really - I can stand Kindy (although I really don’t care for it, and I think I may not renew after the end of my current 6-month-contract), my afternoon classes are fun but the curriculum is awful (these classes are designed for the students that went through kindy and in theory have pretty good English relative to their age - the kids have far less reluctance to speak, and they can joke around with you pretty easily), and I love the standard bushiban classes. Love them. Love them a lot. So much so, in fact, that I sometimes fantasize about just teaching them and nothing else. This isn’t really feasible, of course, but a girl can dream, right?
We’re working a lot more than we’d thought we would be already, though, because we lost a teacher at our branch before he even started. There were supposed to be 3 new teachers at our branch to replace the 3 old teachers + the 1 head teacher, and instead there are only 2. We’re getting a new guy at the end of September, but until then, I’m working every evening and Saturday morning, as is Seth. It’s no wonder that I’ve had 2 colds already and still don’t really have much of a voice. It’s come and gone a few times, but it’s never come back to anything resembling normal. Grr….
Anyway, the paperwork I mentioned earlier is supposed to resolve in our getting our ARCs on Monday, and then we should be able to get internet hooked up and running within a week or so. Seth wants to get a big fat line in (we are junkies, after all - might as well pay the little bit extra to get the good stuff, right?), and then we’ll blog more often and put up pictures too. Well, old pictures, anyway. On our last trip to Ho Ping Island, Seth was climbing some wet rocks, slipped and dunked most of his right leg in a bit of water that was deeper than he’d anticipated. Our camera was in his cargo pocket. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have been able to pull through, despite our leaving it right in front of the dehumidifier for a few days. So, we’ll probably need to get a new one in after this next paycheck (or maybe the one after that).
Oy. This is longer than I anticipated, and I haven’t even told you about any of my students (there is a seemingly endless supply of stories I will tell), or about the trip to Costco (oh, dear lord, the pizza. I’ve never had pizza so good.), or who knows what else I can’t really remember just now. No worries, though - I haven’t forgotten much, and I’ll be back soon!
- I’m writing this at an internet cafe that’s mostly full of kids playing random online games. Not the way I really like to get my fix, you know? [↩]