Friday and Saturday

Friday had a lot of firsts for us. We were invited to a Taiwanese barbecue by Danielle; a woman she met through her Chinese teacher invited her and all her friends to a barbecue at her home. I, originally, couldn't go because it started at 12 and I was subbing at 1:30 but when I finished subbing, I had a call from Rick saying that it had just started and they were wrong about the time. So I headed over to meet them at the barbecue. There was so much food and it was very different from a barbecue back home. What was also different from back home was the fact that these people invited us over at all. They went out and bought all this food just to have some foreigners over, it was beyond nice. I had to leave early cause I was subbing again at 5 (and I hadn't completely finished my lesson plan yet) and when I went to leave, I did something that was so not the norm for Taiwanese culture. The woman put her hand out for me to shake, and I went in for the Italian hug and shake hands thing. I was mortified, I got out of there so fast and I couldn't stop thinking, "why the hell did I do that?!?!"

I arrive back at the dorm and they gave me another sub for the same night, at 7:10 at a school that is about a 15-20 minute walk away. I finished at Tung-An at 6:40 and ran to Da-Yeh; made it just in time. And I'm glad I did because the money was worth it.

Today was our first real working Saturday. I started at 10:40 this morning at one of the further schools and I didn't finish until 4:00. The interesting part of my day was the Chatroom they had given me from 3:00-4:00. A chatroom is run by the foreign teacher alone, there were around 20 students, all at different levels, and the topic I was given was games. I think it went okay. It was hard at times to ensure that they were understanding me and they kept breaking out in Chinese but I think at least some of them had fun. Here's hoping it went well.

Tonight we are going out for Zach's birthday for pizza and wings. I haven't had pizza since we arrived here so I'm pretty excited.

Side note: I think, almost, everyone back home forgot that we teach all day on Saturdays haha I had three messages from three different people waiting for me when I got home, sorry friends!