DECEMBER 21 – 25, 2015
Technically, this is my second Christmas in Taiwan, but it felt like a novel experience. The holiday is not quite celebrated on the island. Everyone still goes to work on Christmas Day. For me, I had Christmas week.
Fortunately, I was able to find Christmas decorations on the weekend of the 12th – 13th. There’s a block in Taipei where it’s Christmas shop after Christmas shop.
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| There were probably a dozen of these shops on that one block. |
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| They basically all looked like this. |
On Tuesday, December 22, a couple of the foreign English teachers got together at the Sheraton Hsinchu Hotel and had a nice Christmas dinner buffet. It was a lot of fun. The food was good and everyone was happy with their elephant gift.
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| I got William’s gift, which was a pencil case and some useful stationary 🙂 He got a 1000 NT looking wallet. It wasn’t actually worth 1000NT though. |
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| The whole gang. |
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| And what’s a Christmas dinner without an elf and a reindeer? |
On Wednesday, the Miaoli County foreign English teachers got together for a Christmas lunch at Naples. Food was equally good and there was also a gift exchange.
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| I got a watch! (From Ben, one of the school soldiers :)) |
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| …and there was turkey. |
At school, they had an assembly where each class sang and performed a song. Almost everyone’s was a Christmas song, but a few were random pop songs like “When I’m Gone” and “Baby” (Yes, that one by Justin Beiber). Apparently, the kids felt a disconnect to Christmas. They argued that they don’t observe or celebrate the holiday so they don’t understand why they have to sing a Christmas song.
What was new was hearing the BINGO song, but the letters were replaced to spell SANTA. Try listening to that 3-4 times consecutively. No offense to the students, but I was about to shoot myself. I hope they just have the entire class sing it together instead of having each class in grade go up and sing the same song. But it’s all about the kids. As long as they had fun, everything’s fine. 🙂
On Thursday, I went back to Hsinchu for a Candlelight service and we sang Christmas songs for an hour. They were religious Christmas songs too! (Not the Jingle Bell song that we teach the kids)
Afterwards, we all went to Costco and had a Christmas Eve dinner at the Costco food court.
Read my next post, for what I did on Friday 🙂
Dang! Someone went to town on blog posts! lol…want to work on some of mine for me too?!?!:P
lol I know! I wrote 3 posts at once and posted them all at the same time so now the order is all messed up. I was so behind! I'm STILL behind! haha