Saturday, June 09, 2007

Still raining outside... everyone is just kind of used to it and just rolls with it. I know I talked about/ complained about the weather in the US more than even the normal American, but they just never talk about it here. When I was doing my Language Exchange in the US, there was a chapter about talking about the weather and they said, people in Taiwan never talk about the weather, because the weather is always bad!

Driving is annoying but not too bad. I just put on my rain gear and go. What can you do. A little water always sneaks in but whatever. If it rains medium-heavy and steady all day it's OK, but sometimes it will rain so hard you can't believe it. And then it starts to rain harder. Water starts to stand in the streets pretty quickly although we've been lucky- in most places it doesn't rain so hard for long enough that it really floods. The other day I had to walk just a couple of blocks and you pretty much have to roll up your pants and wear flip-flops- I was walking through water up to my calves. It went down quickly though. I saw cockroaches swimming in the water- yeck.

In a couple of my classes we've been talking about snow- in the one class they have a book called "Same Day, Different Ways" that tells you about the day in the life of a kid in India, Kenya, Spain, and the US. It's so cool! The US kid is in Connecticut and it's snowy there- the kids didn't know that the roads get slippery when it snows. They thought that was so weird! Then in my Focus class (more advanced kids) we were talking about typhoons and stuff and sometimes they get typhoon days, where everything is closed, and I said that in the US we got Snow Days when it snowed a lot. The kids were like "Wow!" We had talked about how boring typhoon days are because you basically have to stay inside and I said that when I was little snow days were great because you could go outside and make snowmen and go sledding. They just thought it was the coolest thing on earth.

They say that very occasionally it will snow way up in the mountains, and the news crews will go to film it and the roads are just jammed with people wanting to see snow. Can you imagine?

One funny thing about that book is that it makes me hungry all the time- like the girl in Spain ate paella for lunch, and then she went out for tapas with her aunt. I was like mmm, paella and tapas. My mouth really started watering in class! Then the US kid's family went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner and they had fried rice and Kung Pao chicken. I started to talk about how Chinese food in the US is different from Chinese food here, and I asked them if they had ever eaten kung pao chicken before, and all the kids were like "I think Chinese food is better than American food!" I was like, I didn't ask you that! They all got really excited and started talking about why Chinese food is better, and the one girl said "Yes, in America you eat the same thing every day! Every day, all you eat is hamburger and coca-cola! But Chinese food is always different!" So cute...

2 comments:

Lucy said...

That's what I thought before I came to America. I thought they ate the same thing everyday!
Haha!
It's fun to read what you wrote!

Christina said...

That's funny. I guess it's like the Westerners who came here thinking, Of course I can like Chinese food! I like General Tso's chicken, and egg rolls... but all we get is beef noodles and rice.