Lingering in Linkou

So I just got back from roaming the streets of Linkou at 11:30 at night in search of dumplings. I failed. I asked one lady and she shook her head. There weren't many places open so my choices were limited. I headed into one of the night markets that all the locals go to and practically nothing looked appetizing. Hmm...what did I see? Well, um liver, frogs, uncooked goose neck, chicken's feet again, and a bunch of very very odd looking things. I'm going to take a picture of some of these foods sometime in the near future to better explain the "food." On my walk home, I passed a stray dog that I thought was about to start barking at me but instead it started wretching in the street. I went to a bakery too and bought something that I actually liked so I might go there again, especially considering that there's one every block. Lots of the pastries have meat and vegetables in them. I could really just go for an apple pie at this point. Well let's put it this way: when I do get to have an apple pie for real, it'll probably be the best one I've had in my life.

At school today, I had one of my student's come up with a girl. I asked who the girl was and she said "I'm Ruby, Kerry's sister." Then I asked her if she liked her brother Kerry and she said "No, but if I say it he'll hit me." She said this right in front of her brother. Nothing really happened though because I don't think Kerry knew what his sister said. Or they didn't understand what the words meant. Then again, the grasp these 6 year olds have on English is much better than my Chinese. I wasn't even able to eat tonight. I'm boiling water for pasta right now, and I have Prego pasta sauce in the fridge ready to go. I know, very Taiwanese. The other highlight at school was from the test I had to give in two of my classes. There was a question on the test that read "Are you happy/sad today and why?" This struck me as a very odd question. Luckily I got no terrifying answers like "I'm sad because I got attacked by a dog" or something along those lines. One kid said he was sad because he had to go to school. The rest of the kids said they were happy because they were at school and because they had a test. The scoring is pretty funny on the tests too. Because they are kids, you can't give them a bad grade. So if a kid gives a perfect answer he gets a 10 out of 10. If he gives a bad answer or cannot answer the question he gets a 9 out of 10.

Well, that's all the fascinating news I can think of right now. Oh one more thing...the other night I was jogging on the treadmill watching "The Shawshank Redemption" and there's a scene where a guy gets mad while taking a test and he says it may as well have been in Chinese because he got all the answers wrong. I had to laugh as I jogged on a Chinese-brand treadmill in the middle of a Chinese speaking country while watching Chinese TV with Chinese subtitles. Til next time from Taoyuan County...