Wow, I can’t believe its Christmas already! Seriously two days from now it will be Christmas 2007 and the next day it will be over.
Its definitely different here than in the US. In the US even when you turn on the radio you know its Christmas. Here I know because Emily keeps on reminding me….she likes Christmas a lot. I’m a “bah humbug” compared to her vigor over the season.
Emily has made a sign for our door that tells our neighbors Merry Christmas. She also bought a fake 3ft christmas tree for our apartment and has decorated it beautifully. Hopefully she’ll get some pictures up soon. She bought lights for it too! However these lights are special. We think they were made in “China” because sometimes when you turn them on they are solid non-blinking lights and sometimes when you turn them on they are blinking lights but at fascinating intervals!
On Christmas day I have a calculus test! Thats how Taiwanese celebrate Christmas. Actually a bunch of the international students have always asked for Christmas off classes but we’ve never gotten it apparently and a lot of them skip classes. However I won’t this year because of the test. Emily and I will hopefully follow the Jefferies tradition and open one gift on Christmas Eve, then the day of we’ll go to class and open the rest of our gifts and celebrate on Christmas evening. That way we can join in using skype with our families who will just be waking up for their Christmas morning!!!! We think its a pretty good plan. We are also having Carla and Ramiro (our friends from Bolivia) over for dinner Christmas day.
Saturday night we went to our church’s Christmas party. They held it at a hotel and had a great big banquet hall rented out. Basically what they did was the 150 members of the church invited all their friends and it turned into a room of 500. The idea was evangelistic. Everyone had a wonderful buffet meal and then their was a Christmas program with songs and testimonies. When they asked who wanted to become a Christian a bunch of people raised their hands and went forward. However I’m not sure about authenticity. In the US the peer pressure says not to raise your hand, here from what I gathered the peer pressure was against not raising your hand. That doesn’t mean they weren’t authentic dedications to Christ though, I really don’t know. Actually because of translations I don’t know much of anything here. If anyone likes living in a sort of fog then I would definitely suggest a move to Taiwan. It was really really cool though. Both Emily and I really enjoyed ourselves and felt really loved by our church family for having been invited.
They way we got to the hotel was really cool too. Basically we had a little map on the invitation with us on our scooter. We went to downtown Taoyuan, then at stoplights we would ask the person on the scooter next to us to tell us where to go. They would look at the map on the invitation and give us some instructions and then we would follow those instructions as best we could. When we weren’t sure anymore from the previous directions we would would ask someone else at whatever the next stoplight was. I think we had talked to about 10 people or so when we finally found the hotel which turns out to be one we’ve passed before and knew of. I love living somewhere where I don’t speak the language!!!!!
I only have like three weeks left of school this semester. Its getting to be crunch time except I’m sick of school already. I can do it, I can do it, I can do it. Actually a blessing in disguise was a weird sickness I had this past week that was really bad in my throat and basically drained all my energy for 3 days. It kept me away from school for 2 days and the effect was that I wanted to go back by Friday. Thank goodness Emily didn’t get sick! She took really good care of me! I like having a wife!
The week before last I did a group project in a class. I had been elected group leader for us and we did a presentation on high school etiquette and the differences between Brazil and Taiwan. Its weird to become a student again and all the things that come with that like taking pointless classes and doing fluff projects and yes, slacking. The one difference is I selected none of my classes to take so I can’t take all the blame. In fact here you actually have to fight against the system to be able to pick your classes, even electives. This next semester they’ve given us our mock up schedule and I have 3 electives that I can “pick”. Hopefully I can figure out how to work the system and get something better than Understanding Art which is on the list.
Well the main thing was I wanted to get something up here because its been a while. Feel free to make suggestions on what we could write about that you are interested in.
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