Family Outings

Maura:
One of the things I was most dubious about before coming to Taiwan was that apparently the families at the school signed up to take us out on evenings and weekends. Socialize with families? That sounds awkward. That would definitely not happen in the US. Won't they just grill us about how their children are doing in the class?

We've gone out with three families at this point and it's actually been pretty interesting. So far, none of the families have been children we are teaching. They're just families with children in the Chinese or English preschool classes who want to welcome us to Taiwan and help us foreigners have a nice visit. The first family spoke very little English, so they invited their two teachers along with us. We went out to a fancy hotel buffet which was very nice. On Saturday, we went out with another family. The mother works up in Taipei and the father works in mainland China, so the little boy lives with his grandparents during the week, and his mom and aunt come down from Taipei on the weekends. This is a pretty common arrangement in Taiwan. The mother had studied English in Boston 15 years ago and was very happy to speak with us in English.

Today, we went with a father and little boy to Lukang, about 45 minutes from Taichung. It had an old market road and a beautiful temple that was over 100 years old.

This is just the main entrance.

This was one of a few interior courtyards in the temple.

One of the many shrines (?) in the temple.

Then we went to the Taichung Earthquake museum. In 1989, there was a serious earthquake here and the museum commemorates what happened and what Taiwan did to improve the engineering and infrastructure after the quake. The hardest part about the museum is that it is on the site of an elementary school that was destroyed in the earthquake. They have secured the building, so you are walking around the ruins of the school and can see how the classrooms collapsed on each other, the bathroom that used to be on the top floor that now lies smashed among the rubble. It was pretty haunting. At least it's good to know how much they learned from the tragedy and all of the safety standards that have been implemented since then.