Sleeping Beauty at Taipei City Hall

This weekend Lucy will have a small part in a professional production of Sleeping Beauty.  Her ballet teacher is a member of a ballet company (Century Taipei I think?) and arranged their participation.  I volunteered to help with the kids backstage.  At first I regretted volunteering because it means being there for all dress rehearsals and performances.  This will basically suck up all my time for 3 days as there are 2 dress rehearsal and 2 performances.  But I found the dress rehearsal last night so interesting I’m now glad I volunteered.

The most amusing thing I must share is that Lucy’s part is that of a boy.  She is one of 6 royal pages.  The girls suspect something, but otherwise don’t know this is the case (I think the flowers in their hair give them enough doubt they haven’t pestered us about it) and we haven’t said anything either way.  Nonetheless, they are still super cute.

 One thing that was really interesting was seeing the director in action positioning the dancers etc.  To help the kids, they have been putting colored stickers on the floor of the stage so they know where to stand.  She’s also been confident enough in these kids to be changing some of their moves on the fly – for instance whether they should sit or stand or adding a bit part where they should carry the King and Queen’s robes.  A lot for the kids to remember I think but so far they’ve done great and reminds me that kids often rise to the expectations you set for them.  Another intereting tidbit - the stage backgrounds are run by Microsoft Powerpoint.  They are slides projected onto a screen. 

If anyone wants tickets I believe they are still available.  Tickets start at 500NT.  Shows on Saturday 19:30 and Sunday 15:00.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

American Beef

Beef here tends to be clearly labeled with country of origin. In grocery stores most beef seems to come from the US and Australia with unlabeled stuff presumed to be local. Most traditional markets don’t carry beef at all although some of the bigger ones do.  In general beef here is pricier than other meats.  Some upscale groceries also have beef from Japan (Kobe beef). Country of origin seems to affect price with Japanese being the most expensive, next Australian, and then US beef.  However, the impression I get with regards to the US beef, is that it is highly prized as well, but supplies are larger.

But Taiwan seems to have a love/hate with US beef. See this picture we saw at a nearby noodle restaurant. Due to mad cows showing up in the US over last few years, some have been upset about all the beef imported from there. So some restaurants aren’t serving it whereas others are advertising it as a feature!

June 10 – Last Day of School!

Morning of the last day of school was spent letting the kids sing together and say goodbye – especially the graduating students in “big” class (大班）。

These are the graduates from Miss Candy’s class.  One (SinQi) is missing.

Language Aquisition update

Lucy and Leo continue to chatter with Peter in English but among themselves they have switched to Chinese for much of the past year. With me, it’s a mixture of Chinese and English which experts advise parents to avoid doing, but my parents did with me so I have a hard time getting too concerned about any possible downsides – which as far as I can tell are only theories with no data behind them. I’ve been lately trying to stick to just Chinese but inevitably English spills out from time to time. When my mom visits even she slips into English with them sometimes.

Lucy’s zhuyinfuhao has gotten much better. She can slowly make it through children’s books using it. She is also learning to recognize characters. I would estimate she recognizes around 100 characters at this point and seems very interested in learning more. Leo’s zhuyin recognition is just beginning but he too is starting to recognize characters – maybe 25-30?

At school he has really blossomed this semester. He always talked, but I think was much more reserved fall semester when getting to know his teacher Miss Sandra and the other kids. This spring he’s become quite the talker. His teacher has told me she has prepared her heart for his leaving, but will miss him very much. I really like Miss Sandra a lot. She is known in the school for being on the strict end of the teacher spectrum and for running a pretty tight ship. The more rambunctious boys are often assigned to her class because she is good at keeping everyone in line with her firm demeanor. She seems to have taken a liking to Leo – perhaps because he is relatively well behaved, but I think more because she finds him amusing. At any rate, both Leo and Lucy seem to be communicating as effectively as their peers when using Chinese. I’m worried of course that Leo will quicky forget a lot when we return. With Lucy I’m confident more will stick. In an interesting development, her use of vocabulary I’m not familiar with is happenning more and more often. (ai-ya!)

Many of Lucy and Leo’s classmates take English phonics classes after school. The result of these classes, as far as I can tell, is that many preschoolers learn to read English, but if there isn’t a lot of English spoken at home, have little idea what they are reading. I have no idea why these schools are focusing on phonics. Perhaps simply immersing kids in an English speaking environment where the teacher speaks English and the kids all speak Chinese doesn’t work and therefore these schools need to show some kind of measurable results to parents… phonics might be a specific skill that schools can point to to justify their existence. And because the spoken and written languages are so distinct in Chinese, people don’t question a partition which to an English speaker seems really odd. At any rate, we have not bothered to send the kids to learn phonics formally – figure they’ll learn it quickly enough later. Lucy is already doing pretty well reading those emerging readers – little booklets with super short stories consisting of words no longer than 4 letters and mostly limited to 3 letters long. It’ll be interesting to see how the next year plays out in terms of her literacy in both languages.

Rainy Hualien

OK, Getting caught up here.  Sorry for the late post.

Back in May (weekend of 5/22,23 to be exact) we went to Hualien for a weekend trip with some friends.  7 adults, 6 kids.  It rained on us most of the weekend, but we still had a great time because the kids loved playing together and with the kids happy, so were the adults.  Only complaint – the bugs in Hualien are wicked.  They are super small so we never saw anything other than the welts appearing on our legs.  Fortunately I wore long pants.  But at one point I rolled them up a couple inches because they were getting wet (raining remember?) only to discover within less than a minute that my ankles were being eaten alive.  Rolled them back down immediately but not until the damage was done.  Besides being numerous, these bites were unusually long lasting and itchy.  You can still see spots all around my ankles and it’s almost a month later.  Poor Peter was in shorts so got bitten pretty badly.  One of the moms wore a skirt and well, let’s just say she won’t be wearing skirts for the rest of the summer.  I covered the kids with long pants and lots of repellant on their arms.  So they got bitten, but not too badly.

But I digress… really, we had a lot of fun taking the train, driving a golf cart, feeding animals, eating Hualien specialties, playing in the hotel pool, and generally playing around.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We have discovered that traveling with other families with kids makes vacations a lot of fun.  The kids are never bored and easily entertained and adults can socialize or zone out as you wish.  As long as the kids are reasonably matched in temperament (no hawks playing with doves) and there aren’t huge differences in parental strictness levels, these trips are pretty darn stress free!  On our own we probably would not have chosen to go to Hualien again since we had visited just last November and well, there are plenty of other things to see in Taiwan, but going with others made it worthwhile.

Video from Lucy’s Graduation

Her school posted a link to a video if you are interested:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=130053267022844

2nd song is in Taiwanese for those of you who understand Taiwanese.  Unfortunately I don’t and had to ask what they were singing about.

3rd trip to Taipei 101

Tuesday (6/8/2010) the weather was clear and beautiful so I decided to take the kids up to the top of Taipei 101.  Many of you may recall the kids have been in love with that building since we moved here.  It all began with the lovely view of it we had from our temporary housing at Agora Garden Hotel.  We went up shortly after we arrived and then once more when Peter’s parents came to visit last year.  For much of this past year the kids have been clamoring to go up again.  With little of our two years left Peter and I figured we should probably go up the next clear and convenient day.  Peter is in Seattle this week but he said he wasn’t personally that interested in going up again so we went without him.

Unfortunately the people at 101 didn’t inform me until after we had bought our tickets that one of the elevators was closed for maintenance so our wait to get up there was long.  Fortunately we went and picked up dinner downstairs in the grocery/food court level first.  I was concerned that the observation floor would be crowded judging from our long wait but it was as comfortable up there as ever and the kids had plenty of room to run around.  In fact the crowd was thin enough I could sit down and keep and eye on them without fear of them getting lost in the crowd.

There is a small cafe up there and while the two young women working up there did not seem very conscientious about their work, I was happy about it since it meant they also didn’t bother us about the food we had brought up from the food court.  I bought a couple beverages and a snack and then sat down with the kids to eat our dinner.  The view was still quite pleasing but alas in the time it took to get up to the top the weather had somehow turned a bit cloudy and visibility wasn’t as clear as before.  As Murphy’s law dictates it got clearer again shortly before we left but on a school night I wasn’t going to push the time.

Lucy and Leo loved their time up there as expected and Leo even seemed to get quite a bit of exercise since he was so excited he just couldn’t sit down much but kept running around between bites.  Poor table manners perhaps, but he was so happy to be in 101 and there weren’t many people for him to bump into so I let him move around as long as he was within sight.

Lucy and Leo with a beloved damper baby and the real damper baby (used to keep the building stable when wind blows or there is an earthquake) in the background.