Apparently upperclass parents of primary school-age children in Taiwan won’t go for this sort of thing, according to our boss who made it big as a marketing consultant, so I have to lose the hair and the beard. It’s worth it for China, and I guess Taiwan is close enough.

The beard went last night (Jessica cried), and the hair cut appointment is for 3pm today. Joanna and Julia are quite happy about the whole thing – one of them is even paying for the hair cut.

You can see the memorial photos I uploaded to help with the grieving process here.
 
 
 
 

Greetings to all our friends and family and welcome to our blog! Please come back often and leave comments… Taiwan is a long way from home!

This site is created and designed to give our friends and family as big a window as we can into our China adventures. We want you guys to be as much a part of our experiences as possible. In addition to the stories and pictures, we’ll also occasionally post downloadable audio and video (once we have some worth posting!).

(This post updated 09 July 22.)

For Christmas, I’d like to introduce all of you to some very special people. This is Joel’s family… aren’t they such beautiful people???

In the top row on the left are his parents (the man with the goatee and the lady with the pink pants and puffy white sweater). To their right are Joel’s maternal grandparents, Vic and Effie who are visiting us from Ontario (the gent with the white hair, and the lady with the reddish/whitish hair in the pink pants and puffy white sweater). Underneath the grandparents are Ryan and Tami (the guy with the brown hair and red beard, and the lady with the pink pants and puffy white sweater). And last but not least are Joel and I (he’s got the full brown beard, and I’m wearing pink pants and a puffy white sweater). Festive, eh? Wait a minute….all the ladies have the same outfits on! Must’ve been a good sale on somewhere. Also, the brown looking blob at the bottom of the photo is Patch, the family dog. Joel’s sisters weren’t around for the photo op…maybe next year.

We had a few odd guests show up at Christmas time, too. Haven’t figured out where exactly they are from, or why the pink one is missing a leg. I don’t think they’re relatives and I don’t see any family resemblance. Maybe they’re distant cousins several times removed. Hard to tell….no one else around here has any antennae though.

Anyway, from all of us to all of you, Merry Christmas!!! Have a peaceful and happy holiday season.(=

Here’s the first candidate for our Chinglish category. Apparently some of our school’s competition accepts good behaviour from their students.

We aren’t in the same boat as them since our relationship with our school/employer is different, but reading some of those experiences makes me appreciate our cross-cultural training already.

We were brain-storming today about how we can give these kids a beyond-average classroom experience. One very cool idea we’re pitching to our school is to get broadband, data-projectors, webcams, and Skype in the classrooms so we can have the kids video conference live with real families and individuals on different continents. The kids would get to practice their English on real live North Americans in North America (or Brazil or Australia or anywhere else in the world we have friends). We could also use movies and TV shows to do dialogue studies so they’d get exposed to real English and not just English-teacher English.

We were intending to settle in Surrey, BC for the year to finish up that last year of grad school. There’s plenty of opportunity to study Chinese culture and language in greater Vancouver, and it was relatively close to the university. We planned to work part-time while we finished our studies and continued preparing for language school in Tianjin, China in February 2007. We’re still doing all that, except we’ll be in Taiwan instead of Vancouver.

When we committed to an extra year of full time graduate study we never dreamed that we’d get to complete it in Asia! We are overwhelmed with the ways in which we’ve been blessed. Taiwan may not be the Mainland, but it’s about as close as you can get.

Soon after arriving in Surrey Joel applied for a Teaching Assistant position at his old high school, Pacific Academy. P.A. came back with an offer for both of us to work as elementary school English teachers in a satellite school P.A. is opening in Taipei, Taiwan this January. We hadn’t even unpacked our bags yet from our sojourn in the Untied States, but after prayers, interviews, more prayers, and more interviews, we accepted.

The upsides are numerous. Aside from the cultural exposure, our total costs for the year will consume less than one of our two salaries; we’ll be able to save much more than we could have in Surrey. Our employers are accommodating our schooling requirements, flying us back for our June session in California and providing us with computers and high speed internet to do our distance learning in Taiwan. In the summer we’ll return to BC with some of our Taiwanese students to teach in P.A.’s international student summer program and take about three weeks of vacation with family before returning to finish out the year in Taiwan.

There are some downsides, too. Having much less time than we anticipated with family and the SBCC is the biggest – we leave January 4 and we just got here at the end of November! That, and balancing full time English-speaking jobs with 9 credits each of grad work per semester leaves little time for formal language study and running wild in the streets (two of our favourite overseas activities). We’ll be diving into the local culture less than we have in past overseas experiences.

We leave for California January 4, and Taipei, Taiwan on January 13. Our contract ends in mid-January, 2007.

The official December 05 China Hope progress report is done and will be e-mailed out tomorrow.

One of our annual family traditions is picking out and cutting down a Christmas tree. Since they have laws here about people just picking any old wild tree and chopping it down, we have to cut down domesticated tree farm trees. But it still makes for a great annual family event, especially on a sunny day with lots of snow like today! More pictures here.