School Visits

Well, Thursday and Friday we spent going on school visits.  On Monday we have to turn in a sheet with our preferences of what schools we would like to teach at so we got the opportunity to see each one and meet most of the English teachers we’d be working with and the principals.  On Thursday we visited four schools: the two that are the closest to the Teacher Center in Yilan and two that are indigenous schools and today we visited 18 schools.  And let me tell you, 18 schools in one day was strenuous on both mind and body.

Anyway, pretty much all the schools really rolled out the red carpet for us and we received so many little gifts.  Various types of tea were very popular (green teas, black teas, bubble teas) and we just kept accepting them, but it just got too hard to drink them.  We were also given different little snacks, popsicles, postcards, folders, personalized keychains…the list goes on.

I also saw my first cockroach at one of the schools…it was floating in the toilet and I didn’t wait around to see if it was dead or merely faking it, but I simply walked away.  In the scheme of things it was a pretty gentle introduction to the nasty little vermin.  But I hope I never see one again!

Otherwise though, it’s just going to be hard to decide which schools to preference because it not only determines what school I’ll be teaching at but where I’ll live.  There’s a committee that makes the final decision about what school we get, so I would appreciate any prayers about these decisions that are going to be made in the next few days!

Here’s a video of a few students who performed for us at one of the indigenous schools (I was going to make the clip shorter but they were cute and I didn’t know where to cut it off).  Sorry the quality of the filming is fairly poor: