WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2016
Tory, Tracy, Rebecca, and I met up at Ruth’s house after work and made some cookies and brownies. She was the only one with a toaster oven that was a reasonable size. I have to say the brownies and cookies we made were incredibly delicious. Before that, we ate at a restaurant they found near their house that has really good, what I call, thai chicken. It could also go by sweet and sour chicken I think?
That’s one of the things I miss about the United States. Most homes have ovens. Big ovens. Ovens that can fit a turkey for Thanksgiving. I miss baking. A lot of the homes and apartments in Taiwan don’t have those big ovens. Ruth has a medium sized oven, which is nice. The other day, Rebecca said she was going to make cookies. I asked, “You have an oven?” She replied that she had a toaster oven. I was skeptical that that would work. The next when I asked her how it went, she said she could only make 6 cookies at a time…. good to know in case you try to bake cookies in a conventional toaster oven.
I tried looking into the culture of it, but was not successful. My grandmother use to have a full size oven in her kitchen, but then she got rats in her kitchen and found that during the winter, the rats would hid underneath the oven for warmth.
My guess is that Taiwan is not big on space. Especially in Taipei, a lot of places lack space. There’s simply not enough space to fit a full size oven.
THURSDAY ~ FRIDAY, JANUARY 21 ~ 22, 2016
These two days, Miaoli County held a Winter Camp for the entire county.
What is Winter Camp?
Winter Camp is a two day English camp in which parents could send their children to for a price. It’s a full school day and the price was not expensive this year, at least to my knowledge. The camps are taught by the Foreign English teachers in the county. This year, there was a total of 16 of us. The lessons vary. The theme was where are you from, which is pretty broad. So we could really teach about anything. Lunch is provided in the form of a traditional lunch box.
I taught two days about Disney World. It’s always been a fond memory of my childhood and thought maybe the kids might enjoy learning about it. Other topics that I heard being taught was South African music, languages, making snowflakes, and more.
There were a lot of students. Each class had about 25 kids and there were two locations for Winter Camp. I was assigned with 7 other foreign English teachers at a school in Miaoli City and the others were teaching in Pantou. Students ranged from 3rd grade to 8th grade, so we really had to come up with different activities that would be appropriate for the different age groups.
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| This was the older 8th grade class. |
The roster filled up fast with kids actually coming to us crying because they didn’t make it onto the list to attend Winter Camp. I felt really bad. 🙁 Not that it was my fault, but to see a child sad.
