this is just going up because I don’t want to forget how fun it was.  one of the best nights ever. so before halloween, I made some new friends, emily and lachlan. on halloween, I went to this huuuge concert with them, featuring a really famous dj named steve aoki.  it was a costume thing, and I went as data from star trek: tng.  (I made that costume out of a thrift store yellow shirt, cardboard, aluminum foil and my underarmour. hand sewed the shirts together. pretty proud of myself.)

the following are pictures from that evening.

 so yeah, post cake the makeup took a beating. not a fan of the last pictures, but i couldn't not include darth vader and rufio.

new job and classes

so my new job. long version. the place is called happy top.  I hear about it from thekla, another tpr teacher who works there on the side. apparently there’s a small class available 4 days a week, hour and a half per day.  I email a resume and meet with the lady in charge, dana, who is very nice, explains everything, asks me if I can give them a demo. I come back the next day, interrupt a class being taught by a girl named audrey, and teach vocab for twenty minutes. nothing hard.  she gives me the job. I come in and sit in on audrey’s class for an hour to watch how the pros do it, and then I start my first class later that week. 

almost simultaneously, I enroll in chinese classes.  I go on couchsurfing.com a lot just to see what people are doing, (it’s a really cool website, I recommend checking it out) and someone posted about in enrolling in really cheap chinese classes. 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, for about $150 US per month. not bad, especially compared to the fortunes the universities charge. the guy on couchsurfing was also struggling to get just 5 people to enroll, which means tiny class size. awesome! 

I go in to my first day of chinese. walk in, sit down, take inventory of the other students.  holy crap it’s audrey. the girl who I’d just spent two days in a classroom with is also in my chinese class. what are the odds.  of all the people in taipei, seriously. so that was really cool.

anyway, my chinese is improving, the class is nice, it doesn’t go too fast so if I miss a day it’s pretty easy to catch up.  the tones are still tricky and we’re memorizing more writing than I’d like, but hey, it’s not private tutoring.  man, I really don’t care about reading and writing. what a pain.

okay, back to teaching.  I have a total of three students in my class: amy, ken, and ian. very small. practically a tutoring environment. thing is, it’s not just me teaching. I have a co-teacher. so there’s  3-2 student to teacher ratio.  crazy!  anyway, we basically just go over reading, vocab, and writing. they’re a little behind for their age I think, but we’re working on it and they’re really fun.  I think the kids just need to be pushed. they resist doing work sometimes, but once I insist on stuff they do it and do it pretty quickly.  I really like teaching the class, and I think they like me too!

so basically, things are going really well here. money’s not that huge a worry now, finally starting to learn enough chinese to have terrible conversations with cab drivers and things, and the social life is doing okay!  got a few friends, mostly from work, and I really like this one new guy at happy top, he seems fun. we’re gonna go grab a beer or something later this week.  hooray new friends!