Saturday December 22nd, 2012
The normal 5:50AM is the normal wake up time for school
weekdays and it’s early enough as it is. Pushing it forward to 5:10AM equals a
dead-on-the-inside Andrea, especially when on a Saturday. Now why is Andrea
waking up so gosh awful early on a Saturday? Well, my high school has its 70th
Anniversary celebration today and the students need to arrive the same time
they normally do. Problem is, that time is 40 minutes earlier than I have to.
(The beginning school period is for testing which I don’t need to attend, hence
why I arrive after it) It doesn’t help either with how far away I live from
school. So I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy this morning. When on campus, I
bought a coffee with 2x caffeine hoping to not pass out on my feet.
For Tatung’s 70th Anniversary there’s an assembly
in the grassy field area where all the students and teachers gather. From what
I can tell it goes like this: each student class individually enters the field
in front of the stage and does a small performance for the principal, like a small
dance to music for thirty seconds. So that takes forever with the multitude of
classes to walk, get into formation, dance, then walk to their assigned field
spot individually. That’s why the rehearsal took a whooping two hours yesterday
when factoring in what I think were student rewards.
But surprise surprise, the two long torturous hours of
rehearsal on Friday (most of which was standing with aching feet) was
completely pointless for me. It so happens that I didn’t partake in it one bit
today because the martial arts club was preparing for our performance all
morning hence avoiding the long whatcha-ma-call-it process. We ran through our
lion dance a couple times, moved our equipment to the field, got dressed (and
by that I mean, put on pants over your school pants), etc. Something I didn’t
except were many little boys and several men, who I assumed to be students of
my master, came to preform along with us. That made the show that much more
awesome!
With my partner, orange lion and fantastic pants, we and the
rest of the lions made our entrance onto the field. We begin with sleeping, yep
sleeping. Sweet little oozy snoozy lions. A drum thump resounds its booming
sound. “Ku-ku-kuuuuu,” called the people operating the lions. I believe that is
supposed to be a rooster crow because it awakes the lions as they stretch/kick
out their legs. Soon after, they stand then run forward close to the audience.
And the dance begins…
Let’s say we learned and practiced at the tempo of 50 (as a
random number). We’ve always done 50 for speed. Out of nowhere with no warning,
the performance tempo was jolted to 85! Holy crud it was so much faster! I was
huffing and puffing to keep up, not to mention my back crying from pain. That’s
another thing. I want my chiropractor to fly over to Taiwan and give me sweet
relief because three days straight of bending over doing a diddly-doo-dance
hurts like the dickens. Despite this, I absolutely love the lion dance! It was
a blast doing it and I wanted to do a second round immediately after the first!
How the show looked from the audience perspective, I’ll never know but people
have told me it was really good. So yay!
The girl in the middle is my lion partner (matching pants as you can see) and the other chica is a club mate. Random green lion head with no relation to either of our costumes, it's just there purely for a rushed picture. ;)
Right after the dance finished all the lions ran out and
their legs quickly stripped off their shiny, fluffy pants and ran back to the
field for the kung-fu routine. In between these two acts, over master
demonstrated some awesome martial arts for just a minute. My clubmates and I
really had to book it to get ready. I had a little trouble getting my shoes
back on so I lagged behind, making me run to catch up and not allow me to put
my hair up in a ponytail like I needed to. When I caught up, my clubmates were
already in formation and as soon as I took my place, we were off!
Stomp one foot, run in place for one or two seconds and then
propel yourself forward. OH SNAP! The audience was hooting and hollering with
all their breath. It’s because a foreign exchange student was among the
performing group. Haha, it was sweet. And no, I’m not irrational concluding
that with a big head. The roar erupted right when I entered the field and
everyone else was standing still. Anywho we did the ‘grasshopper hands’ routine
that we’ve been learning all semester. I had a few mess-ups due to being
distracted by my non-corralled hair. It was flying everywhere. I must have
looked like a wild chica! Despite this, I believe it was a success. As we ran
out of the field, that concluded my part in the show. There were other things
like a sword dance, role play pole fight, a different type of lion costume dance
and the final of a little boy in a cute tiny lion costume being lifted up high
on a pole. (He was the front legs so it looked like the lion was standing on
only two feet) Being given a scroll, he wrestled around until the boy got the
scroll to unfurl out of the lion’s mouth, showing a message in Chinese
characters. Really cool stuff! ^_^
Onto the next part of the festival! One word…’food.’ Food,
food, food and more food. Each classroom had a stand/tent and sold something of
some sort. There was hot chocolate, sausage, ice cream, fish balls, cream
puffs…basically, a lot of stuff. My class sold hot pot for their tent. In the
beginning I just stuck with several girls from my martial arts club and we
grabbed sustenance. One was a smoking soda. Literally it was smoking. It must
have had dry ice in the bottom to make it do that. No, I didn’t eat the dry ice
but I think it was safe to just drink the liquid alone. So far I haven’t got
any mutations yet. :P
This little bugger of a sausage took flipping long to get.
Delicious but time consuming to cook and a crowd of people waiting to purchase
one. We must have waited over thirty minutes in line, left one girl to stay in
line and got our food perhaps 10-20 minutes after. While waiting in line, we
were parallel to a stand that I guess was giving out free food. They would just
cook stuff and pass it out to people. Very nice of them to do so.
All the tents were in a line, maybe twenty in total. The
walk area was very narrow and when you add in the student population, it got
extremely crowded. Sometimes I think I could very possibly become
claustrophobic in Taiwan and not the other way around (and no I’m not
claustrophobic right now. I’ve never had that problem).
One tent must have been a school-run one because they sold
Tatung merchandise. Only one thing caught my eye, which was a school baseball
cap. Not only was I considering buying a hat before (such as for the biking
trip which would’ve been useful) but also I liked the idea of having more
school stuff than just our uniform to show school pride. Heck I could form a
whole wardrobe with the wide variety of things I could buy at KC but Tatung
doesn’t have that much. And then, the
hat said “大同人” (Tatung person) in the front, the mention
of its 70th anniversary on the side, cool design on the cap rims,
nice quality fabric and finally only about $7US. SOLD! And so the ownership of
this sweet hat began. ^_^
As a whole, our
class watched three of our classmates play in a basketball competition,
cheering them on. It’s very strange how they play basketball here. They never
have full court games, only half court games. So if Team A makes a shot but
misses the net, Team B can grab it and try to shoot a hoop right then and there
rather than needing to dribble across the court to the opposing team’s basket.
I don’t know whether a half or full court is better but I’m not used to
watching a competition done with half courts. Regardless, our team got whooped
14 to 4. Oh well, we tried and had fun. :)
All of us then went
to the classroom and waited out a couple hours until released. For me I passed
out easily on my desk to pass the time. It might have been the school but each
of my classmates and I got this pink peach shaped thing. Apparently Taiwanese,
it was a big puff of bread with some red bean filling in the middle. Yummy.
La-dee-da
uninteresting stuff happened and theeeeeen, I’m home! There was a woman that I
didn’t know with grandmother who ended up coming in my room to play with my
hair. She kindly gave me a hair stick thing and tried to teach me how to use
it. I didn’t really get it but I didn’t peruse it because ‘play’ turned into
something else Andrea doesn’t like. Enough said.
Today my church had
plans to go Christmas caroling at a night market to spread both holiday spirit
and the love of Jesus. I can’t tell you how fun and lovely that sounds and how
much I wanted to go. But my host father’s Rotary club had a dinner meeting and
he wanted me to go. Something about Rotary Youth Exchanges is that Rotary
dominates above everything. Activities will collide between Rotary, school,
family and in this case, church and there’s no happy middle. That’s just part
of what I signed up for.
So the Rotary
dinner meeting was just as its name suggests. Two other exchange students were there,
a German girl and Braden (the American boy I switched host families with). The
food was plentiful (more like too plentiful but had some good stuff). Some highlights:
Eggrolls with a delicious sauce
Almond Pudding Tofu! Gosh this stuff is so yummy! It reminds me of my American Mom and sister because they also love it.
All the students
(including me) had to give a speech in Chinese, which shocked the heck out of
me because I was given five seconds of preparation. The meeting went on for
several hours making it really late when they released us. Seriously, there is
absolutely no hope of getting proper sleep in Taiwan.
Night now.
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