bear has a message for you...
well im flying out of taipei tomorrow and am pretty excited about it. the gmat is done, the 97Litre bag is packed and the redhaired csi guy is being left behind, i hope, forever.

i am going to the philippines in a few short hours where im being met at the airport by mama bueno. i think thats an experience in itself. i'm going to be living with mama bueno, her husband papa nelson and their family for a little while and working in a hospital in a city called lucena 3 hours south of manila. im really looking forward to this leg of the trip and think it will definitely be a unique experience. and hey, why not toss a little election-time violence and targeting of white people to make things a little extra exciting? anyways, i promise that this blog will become more exciting over the next few months than the past several months of bitching about teaching and taiwan has been.

anyways, to rap up the aforementioned bitching about teaching, taiwan and children, the last little while has been pretty uneventful. i was working hard attempting to study for the gmat, and that actually turned out surprisingly well. unfortunately, the test fell at the exact same time as game 7 of the canucks series, so i was getting somewhat frustrated with myself as i would read a question and then wonder in my head if the sedins were still trying to grow playoff beards. i can also honestly say that i was way more nervous opening my computer to find out that score for the game than i was when the score came up at the end of the gmat. i was also much much happier with the result.

went down to kaohsiung this weekend to see a few friends down there. for those of you who are wondering, geoff martin is now completely domesticated, living in the taiwanese suburbs in a 4 story house with 2 dogs, a girlfriend and a cookbook. kaohsiung is much warmer than taipei, similarly polluted and possibly more dangerous with its incredible glut of scooters. i expected the bus ride to be a little more aesthetically pleasing, but i guess when i had that thought i had forgotten i was in taiwan. man have they really fucked this island up. you can tell it used to be quite beautiful, but now it is just a concrete mess from north to south. i suppose i never saw the eastern side with the mountains, but im thinking it couldnt really make up for the rest. i guess that means that i no longer feel guilty for condemning taiwan just because i had only seen taipei. but, i guess taipei is pretty indicative of what you will see elsewhere. and for those of you who were waiting, go ahead and file taipei under "M" for "mother fucking polluted city with unsmiling locals and nerdy, crazy foreigners living under threat of invasion from a large, scary entity". and for those of you keeping track, we now have taipei and hamilton filed under M.

actually, speaking of china taking over, we were all a little confused to hear a shrill siren for about a half hour going off the other day. turns out this is the "china is invading, stay inside and start praying" siren. the hilarity of the concept of this siren i think speaks for itself, i dont even need to make fun of it.

anyways, i have to go to bed, but here is a video of sam, the most hilarious/not the brightest kid i taught. i swear i taught him "what is your name? my name is sam" 600 times over the course of the last few months, but i guess he panicked on this one.

I'm currently doing some studying and it's been pretty impossible to find the motivation and get back into that whole groove. as my job has forced me to speak in dumbed down, ridiculous english for hours on end each day with sentences such as "bear, be quiet" and "giant, no chinese you", ive just felt myself getting dumber and dumber. so i decided to write the gmat, more out of the need to start thinking again than for any specific reason for education. ridiculous i know. anyways, things really took a turn for the worse when the light in my room burned out, and due to both apathy and confusion about chinese lightbulbs, it has not been replaced. so, i have been spending most of my time studying in the dark in my room or studying in mcdonald's, which has yielded a confused mental state centred around coloured spots in my eyes and the smell of big macs. an inauspicious ending to my time in old taiwan.

on that note, i was thinking of the things i will and won't miss about taiwan:
-I will miss looking in my bank account and seeing that I have $82000
-I won't miss realizing a millisecond later that it takes 28 taiwan dollars to get 1 canadian dollar
-I will miss the pasta place I eat at pretty much every day. I swear if they could speak English I would get a "Norm!" every time I walk in there, I'm such a regular. Instead of speaking English however, the proprietors have dedicated themselves to serving up hardcore gangster rap with delicious, cheap pasta. My personal favourite moment was NWA's "Gangster, Gangster" with the immortal line "To a kid lookin up to me, life aint nuthin but bitches 'n' money". ice cube spreadin the message, one asian restaurant at a time.
-I won't miss the same 6 commercials on a continuous loop on the English tv channels (speaking of that, the only Mandarin I've actually learned here is the McDonald's Chinese commercial..."li si piyi wa, Cama da Macdonnels, HEY... or something like that)
-I won't miss channel 67 playing every version of CSI and channel 71 constantly playing canada's biggest export to Taiwan. In case you're wondering, that would be CBC's Just For Laughs "Gags". Inexplicably, this shit is a HIT here. no joke, walk by 3 tv's and atleast 1 will be playing it. This may help to explain why little kids point at me and start laughing all the time, atleast that is what I like to tell myself.
-I will miss getting paid 600 dollars an hour.
-I definitely definitely won't miss stinky tofu. I guess Taiwanese people realized tofu sucks and doesnt taste like anything, so they decided to ferment tofu with what must be a dead cat to create that unexplainable, indelible, revolting smell. And since this is everyone's favourite food here, I think it is an excellent case study in proving that person can become used to, even like, just about anything. seriously, fermented dead cat soy soup.
-I won't miss the unbelievably annoying construction in our apartment building. I haven't had wall neighbours this disruptive since good ol Sanghoon and Eric in first year. we never confirmed exactly what was going on in their room, but given the 15 people who would be in their room at any time, and being woken up by what i usually first thought was someone using a battering ram to enter our permanently locked room, i can hazard a guess. actually, in retrospect, geoff probably didnt know about this because he couldn't hear at night. hey geoff, sanghoon and eric were doing some crazy shit in the room next to ours. sorry, i digress.
-I will miss mini golf in the apartment. When i finally decided to start studying, I spent 2 minutes reading the "So youve decided to write the gmat" section, when i came up with a brilliant idea for mini golf in our apartment. we have 2 holes, one starting in the shower and one in my room. they are both par 18, 2 yards tops, and they are fun as hell.
-I will miss knowing people who have accidentally named themselves after animals.
-I won't miss....Taiwan.

Dave has finally quit his job, and I was pretty jealous with the excuse he came up with. He told his boss that he unexpectedly got into grad school and had to go home. they astutely pointed out that he could easily stay until the end of their semester in July. He didn't expect them to so brightly catch him in his partial lie, so he told them his marks were really bad and his graduate school contacted him to tell him he had to take summer school before he started his master's degree....hahaha, headstart grad school for idiots, this is the only place where that excuse could possibly work.


If you haven't heard it, get Neil Young's "Live at Massey Hall 1971". Incredible.






My countries list by the end of the summer. go to this website to do it, pretty cool.


So my flights are booked. I will be in the Philippines at the end of the month for a few weeks. Incidentally, if you want to read something interesting, check out the Canadian Travel Advisory for the Philippines (except for you mom, do not under any circumstance read this). I'm hoping the writer recently took a creative writing class, otherwise I'm a bit nervous. I personally like the part about the kidnap-for-ransom of white people plots.

This is this city, Lucena, I will be in for a few weeks:


These are the Banaue Rice Paddies, often called the 8th Wonder of the Ancient World, that I'm hoping I get to visit:




If I make it out of there, it's to Hong Kong for a few days and then to Myanmar via Bangkok for a few days.


For some reason I just think this is so funny....

After I leave this country (?), I will legitimately consider going on a murderous rampage if I ever see, hear or think about CSI: Miami. No joke, in the very short span of time when the programmers of the 4 ingrish channels panic and run out of Steven Seagal movies, they toss on the CSI megamix for 16 hours straight. For some reason, the miami one with that cryptic red-haired jackass is on much more than the other ones. I attribute this to the Taiwanese fascination with red hair, above all others. for example, these guys we know had to let a bizarre red-haired guy live in their apartment, and despite the fact that this young man is of the sort that wears checkered green fedoras and needs to listen to television static to fall asleep, he does not want for female attention.

Today was the day I finally got to tell them I was quitting. I've been trying for a few days but i think they knew it was coming because every time i tried to talk to the Academic Director she would pick up the phone and give me a little smile which basically said she knew she was about to screw me over large. Anyways, I was pretty excited to finally do what I had set out to do when I first came here. That is, quit my job. My plan was to talk really fast in an attempt to confuse her, fit in as many excuses as I could in a span of a minute and a half and hopefully have her unknowingly agree to let me leave in 2 weeks instead of the normal 1 month of notice. So, imagine my disappointment when I told her I was quitting and she didn't ask me why. I had to bring it up myself, and I was only able to mention one legitimate excuse and one hilarious excuse: that I was into a few law schools and was going to do that in September and that my dance troupe was in a competition in May. I had all these other great ones about my brother and his wife having a baby that I had to take care of, and my other brother and his boyfriend were adopting a kid that I had to help take care of (I guess that makes you that brother Christian), and that I had been asked to give a prestigious cello recital in Havana. Unfortunately, I will have to save these excuses for the next time I quit a job.

Last week I was lucky enough to teach comparables and superlatives to my class. However, the old John is taller than Shirley, John is the tallest, really just seemed boring. So instead, they got a 2 hour lesson on momma jokes and the like. Bear's mother is fatter than Shlomo's mother. Giant's father is the cutest. I can't wait to get the parent complaints when they see the results of that quiz.

Yesterday was a pretty fun day, which we spent just walking around the city. We accidentally walked to the biggest memorial in the city, a large open area with the National Concert Hall and the National Theater, as well as a massive archway and a large hall with a big statue. That big statue is of the one and only Chiang Kai-Shek, the dude who got shut down by Mao in China and decided to leave the motherland and start the Republic of China on Taiwan, a decidedly similar name to the People's Republic of China being established across the water. If you want to learn more about this somewhat interesting short history of Taiwan which I actually just read about myself, go to the bottom.*

The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial:
The Front Gates:
The National Concert Hall
The Statue of Chaing Kai-Shek
The wheel-chair ramp up to see the statue....OK i don't think that this is what they meant to say, but it looks like they mean this is the wheelchair ramp


After this we walked across the city towards Taipei 101, the tallest commercial building in the world at the moment. We read that this stands for Technology Art Innovation People Environment Identity 101, although we were originally confused when we thought that this was how Taipei the city was named. It speaks to how weird everything is in Taiwan that we actually believed this fact, because it would seriously be the most logical thing I've heard since I've gotten here. It was actually a really cool experience, with an incredible view of the city. However, the crowning moment of this little jaunt was discovering Cool ranch doritos in the basement grocery store of this large building, checkmate taiwan. A view from the top:



By the way, Boner and I rewatched "Lost in Translation" today, and 2 things were very apparent to me: 1)Scarlett Johannsen has gotten a lot a lot hotter in the past few years 2) this movie improves immeasurably once you have lived in asia. i originally thought it was quite boring and uninspired, but we were laughing our asses off the entire time because it was SO similar to what we experience on a day-to-day basis. i dont know if many of you remember it, but the blond japanese talk show host is basically every second guy on the street.

I was talking to a Taiwanese teacher at work, and although she has a Master's degree from UMass and is only 23ish, her parents have her on a curfew of 10PM. No joke, if you are unmarried, a woman and under 35, you have a curfew. It's unbelievable actually. They were fine with sending her to the states for college, but if she comes home at 10:05 she has to come home at 9:55 the next night. And God forbid she comes in later than 10:15, because that means she simultaneously gets grounded and sets a Guinness record for the oldest person to be grounded by their parents. The crazy thing is that this isn't just overprotective parenting, it's pretty much the norm here.

Our desperate attempts to play beerdie continue to be foiled at every turn. it is really really hard to find a suitable table. awhile ago we ran away with 2 old doors we found on the street, giggling like little girls and absolutely overjoyed, but over the course of the nite we managed to misplace them and they werent where we thought we left them later. Last night we were walking by a large exhibition and attempted to negotiate in broken chinglish/chinglish miming to take away a perfect board that was lying on the ground. in retrospect, i think this would have left one glaring hole in a large billboard, but we were still incensed. by the way, for any of you who don't know what beerdie is, either contact me right away or never talk to me again.

By the way, does anyone know what past perfect progressive is? Neither do I, but I taught it to a class full of people who are all atleast 5 years older than me. If I've learned anything here, it's that a thin veil of confidence can be enough to fool anyone into thinking you know what you are doing.

My brother's blog always has interesting stuff on it

My buddies Jeff and Ferg are travelling around Central and South America and Jeff is keeping a slightly confusing, slightly hilarious blog that is extremely well-written.

At the beginning of 2005ish, we had this French guy named Ludovic Hubler stay at our house in Kingston. At that point he was already a few years into hitchhiking around the world, with the goal of spending no money on transportation. He went from France into North Africa, hitched a boat to Brazil, all the way down to the Southern tip of the continent, somehow hitched a boat to Antarctica, then up the west coast, through central america, the states, across canada, down the west coast of the states, another boat across to hawaii and then new zealand, etc.... Anyways, I try and keep up on his progress and was pretty sure he was dead when the last photo was of him sticking his thumb up as he headed into the desert in Mongolia, but am happy to report that he has turned up in Tibet. Check out his website here

If you are into biking or running or just really want to know how far you walk to the store every day, check out this google website, it's unbelievable


I believe I have mentioned the kid I teach named Sam. He is a 6 year old who gets excited and spins around on the floor whenever he laughs. Normally Sam wears sweet baby blue gigolo pants, but the other day outdid even himself by wearing a red sailor's suit. He is the man:

* Chiang Kai-Shek assumed the leadership of the Kuomintang (KMT) after the death of Sun Yat-Sen. He was the wartime leader of China during WWII, and among many other things, Mao Tse-Tung and friends were very unhappy with how this was handled and a large civil war ensued. Yada yada yada, the Shekker attempted to eradicate Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communists, but was very very unsuccessful in doing this and was forced to flee to Taiwan where he basically told everyone he was president in 1950. After completely overwhelming the indigenous people of Formosa (who are nowhere to be seen today as far as I can tell) the Shekker declared Taiwan as the true Republic of China rather than admitting he was a bit of a jackass and had completely fucked everything up. Contrarily, Mao declared mainland China as the People's Republic of China a little while earlier.

So, with the incredible wave of Chinese immigrants completely overpowering the native Formosans, Chiang Kai-Shek was the leader/dictator of the country until he died in the late 1970s. Unbelievably, he actually held the Chinese seat in the United Nations until the 1970s when China became too big to ignore and Nixon switched things up. Ever since then, the rest of the world has given the shaft to Taiwan and pretty much no countries recognize it as a sovereign nation. Thus, they somehow went from the penthouse (The UN Security Council) to the outhouse (A producer of cheap mugs and knockoffs that isn't even a country somehow) much like the Toronto Maple Leafs...actually no we will say the Carolina Hurricanes. The Leafs are more like a middle-of-the-road country that always gives its citizens hope but never actually does anything worthwhile. So the Leafs can be Uruguay.

Goodnite