Week 13: She was a scooter girl

This was my first full week of independence with a scooter! Although waking up on Mondays never feels great, at least this time, I knew I had a nice little scooter ride to the port waiting for me. Unfortunately, the joys of having a scooter and taking the ferry were shortlived.

It was rainy and gray on the way to the port, so the metal ramps leading to and from the ferry were slippery. Combined with the low tide, the ramps were also at a pretty steep incline, so when I tried to ride up the ramp, I didn't accelerate enough, and my scooter fell on me. I must say, the combination of scooters and inclines isn't in my favor. At the very least, I saw a cool photo of myself and the performers from Immigrants' Day on the front page of a Kinmen newspaper on the ferry, so taking the ferry wasn't a complete loss.

The school day was pretty typical. I had my classes, then hung out with the other Little K ETAs at lunch at a new taro shaved ice place that we found. After school, I followed one of the other Little K ETAs across the bridge. Although crossing the bridge was daunting at first, the wind speed wasn't very high, so driving across was easy.

The rest of the evening was also pretty chill. For dinner, a bunch of cohort members came to the excellent Sichuan noodle place, then we all scooted to Chinese class together.

Tuesday was my solo-ish teaching day, so as usual, I worked with my long-term substitute LET to teach the morning classes. There's definitely been a bit of a learning curve, but I think the two of us have been learning how to work together and teach more effectively these past couple of months.

Speaking of these past couple months, all of the kids have definitely been getting more restless since midterms. It's been getting harder and harder to keep their attention for the entire class period. There also aren't any more holiday breaks or days off between now and the end of the semester, so hopefully us teachers can come up with some new activities and other games to engage them.

After school, I just vibed with various people. I had egg dumplings for dinner in Jinhu with some other ETAs (and our singular ETF), which was nice—I don't typically get to see the Jinhu crew (or Jincrew) much during the week. Then back in Jincheng, I chatted with some other ETAs for a while.

I'm pretty proud that throughout the day, I managed to navigate everywhere without a map. Although I've been on the back of scooters for months, driving a route is a different experience for sure.

Wednesday was largely a chores day, but also a dance day. After school, I ran some errands, which included picking up some knockoff Airpods, then went back to Jhou Huan. Now that I have a scooter, I can finally help with the Chinese folk dance club after school!

I think the kids were pleasantly surprised to see me, and more surprised that I could do heel stretches, splits (mostly), and a standing backbend. Admittedly, the standing backbend surprised me too.

Their dance is coming along pretty well! Even though I think I lack a good bit of dance-specific vocabulary in Chinese, I liked being able to help teach. I also loved the music and the peony-shaped handkerchiefs they're using. When I was talking with one of the other dance teachers (who's also a homeroom teacher), she mentioned that they have a performance in December, so hopefully they'll be ready by then.

Thursday was kinda rough. The students were certainly antsy, and there was a little incident in one of the classes, but I made it through the day. I got dinner with another ETA at a cute little bookstore in Jincheng, then went to Chinese class, during which I was spectacularly zoned out (and overheated). I also bought a cute little map of Little K at the bookstore.

Friday was better. I got to wake up nice and late since I have a scooter now, then went to teach at EV. Then, since it was low tide after school, the Mr. Hong House ETAs and I went to watch the sunset at the beach near Jiangongyu Islet.

Beach is a bit of a generous description; in all honesty, the area was more of a mud flat. Even so, it was beautiful to see everything else fall away as we approached. As the sun set, it reflected in the open expanse of the mud flat, and it felt like it was just sea and sky.

Since the tide was still going out, the other Mr. Hong House ETAs and I had to pick our way carefully along the path leading to the islet, which was covered in barnacles and oysters. We saw some cool statues of oystermen, then met an oysterman himself. We chatted with him for a while, and it turned out he was actually the older cousin of one of my coworkers at Jhou Huan.

After waiting for half an hour or so, we could finally cross to the islet on the other side. The sun had mostly set, so it was pretty dark, but we made our way to a lookout and stared out at the bridge, Little K, and Xiamen.

Later that evening, we all went to the Jinning apartment to watch Everything Everywhere All at Once for one of our cohort members' birthdays. Even though it was my fourth (?) time watching, I still absolutely loved it. I think everyone else liked it too, and we had some cool discussions about it afterwards.

On Saturday, I woke up nice and late, got lunch, then went to a cute café with my partner. They didn't have the soufflé when we went, but we still had some delicious desserts.

Back at Mr. Hong House, my apartment and I worked on finishing our questions for trivia night. Each apartment was assigned a category of trivia to create five questions for. The six categories were history, philosophy, literature and humanities, hard sciences, sports/pop culture, and politics/international affairs, and my apartment was assigned hard sciences.

As a non-math fan who's never taken a physics class in her life, I wasn't super sure if I could contribute any good questions. Fortunately, we made the category fairly easy (we have very few STEM majors in our cohort), and I got to write a clinical language and the brain question.

Our trivia night also required us to bring a taro dish (since we have a surplus ever since taro day on Little K) and dress like one of our cohort members (whose name starts with a T as well). For the taro dish, our apartment improvised a Southeast Asian-inspired "dessert soup". Making the taro balls and cooking the sago pearls took a while, but we did it.

Trivia night itself was excellent! Unfortunately, my apartment (Mr. Hong 2F) didn't do too well. The hardest category was the philosophy one, written by our beloved Mr. Hong House 3F. Throughout the whole section, I think most of us were hopelessly writing random things down. Or at least my apartment was.

At the very least, we did get to guess how many kids Nick Cannon has (and how many he's expecting) during the sports/pop culture section. Apparently, he's had eleven children and is currently expecting two. The more you know.

The next morning, I went to dance, then spent the day doing chores and other productive things. Sunday night's one of our ETAs' hotpot nights, so for dinner, a bunch of us went to hotpot together. My boyfriend and I headed out afterwards to get soufflé at the café we went to on Saturday (which only serves them between 3-5pm and 7-8pm for some reason). It took a little while, and I had an entire phone call with a friend from back home while we waited, but it was amazing soufflé.

When I came back, everyone who'd gone to hotpot was hanging out in the 3F apartment, so we all just chatted for the rest of the night. Two of the other Mr. Hong House ETAs had made some tasty blondies, so we also had a bunch of those.

All week, I loved the freedom of driving myself wherever I want and doing things on my own schedule. If I want to get boba, I can. If I want to run an errand, I can just run and do it. Even when I got hurt at the ferry, at least it was with my own scooter on my own commute to school.

I might've mentioned it in my last blog post, but I'm also really enjoying how many more opportunities I have to spend time with people now. I liked being able to drive myself to the egg dumpling dinner and my bookstore dinner.

I also look forward to seeing the kids at Chinese dance every week! They're very sweet, but I haven't been able to see most of them outside of class besides when we went to sports day.

Here's to another week with a scooter (and hopefully without any new accidents).

Writer's Note: This post was originally written on Thursday, November 17th.