Mr. Bradford goes to London

It has been a couple of days sense I have updated the blog, but we have been pretty busy, and in all honesty, we are a little tired. For me, it's mostly the fact that I haven't had a day off in quite a while. This has made me a little low on energy. Tami is going strong, but I think she misses cheese. I was able to add a couple more foods to my bucket list that I haven't eaten before; duck blood, not to be confused with pig blood, or pig blood cake, and duck feet. I have to say, I didn't see the duck feet coming. That is the one thing that I would have assumed they would have given up on and decided that enough was enough. After all, they don't eat the feathers.....at least I don't think so. The duck's feet were pickled, and basically tasted like pickled cartilage. How do I know what pickled cartilage taste like? Don't ask. All of this was served to us by the father of our host family. He took the time to make us a traditional home-made meal. Ev...

Today is Saturday, and we are working. Not that I mind that, but we will be pulling something like nine days straight without a break. Originally we were planning on having a break over the weekend, but due to scheduling conflicts we had to go with the current plan. Tami and I went out for our morning run after we woke up and because the streets were less crowded than they usually are, we decided to run around the neighborhood. It was interesting to see that food stands we usually ran past were closed up, or not even there. As we ran we found a string of parks that seemed to stretch east to west through the city. They would be broken up with random apartment buildings, but as we ran, we would come across another park with people doing tai-chi or walking. Overall, a very nice way to start our morning. Tonight we are getting together with the rest of the Footsteps crew and having an American meal together. It should be nice but I will miss my frogs, squid and eels

Yep.... That's eel. Kind of like a slimy snake. But I'll be able to confirm that once we eat snake. I'm guessing that will be next week. In all honesty, it was really good, except for one little bit of gristle in each bite.

Today was a pretty good day at school. I'm able go keep the children busy enough during the class, that when I give them study time, they work quietly at their desk. At the end of the day Tiffany picked us up and we went to have our next culinary adventure. Today it was frogs, eel and something much more mundane, squid. Once again, I was very proud of Tami, who actually had seconds of the frog. The eel was good, the frog tasted more like like chicken than anything else. I believe the secret of eating in Taiwan is to follow two simple rules. Rule one, don't look too closely at the exactly what you are eating. Rule two, remember rule one. I really believe that we have tried pretty much everything there is to eat so far, but I'm sure that I will be amazed!

Today is Saturday, and we are working. Not that I mind that, but we will be pulling something like nine days straight without a break. Originally we were planning on having a break over the weekend, but due to scheduling conflicts we had to go with the current plan. Tami and I went out for our morning run after we woke up and because the streets were less crowded than they usually are, we decided to run around the neighborhood. It was interesting to see that food stands we usually ran past were closed up, or not even there. As we ran we found a string of parks that seemed to stretch east to west through the city. They would be broken up with random apartment buildings, but as we ran, we would come across another park with people doing tai-chi or walking. Overall, a very nice way to start our morning. Tonight we are getting together with the rest of the Footsteps crew and having an American meal together. It should be nice but I will miss my frogs, squid and eels.

Left to right - Sandra, Tami, me, Tiffany, Amy, Mandy, birthday boy, Greg.

Blowfish soup. No one died.

The second course of our meal. Some of the best sushi that I have ever had. We also had steamed crabs.

Yesterday we had the honor of attending the birthday celebration of our host father, at a Japanese restaurant. We ATE. This is an example of the first course. A beautiful platter that had gooey duck, salmon, tuna, some other fish, and sea urchin. It was quite a start to an amazing meal.

The picture in this post is an example of a Taiwanese school bus. I believe that this is what in America would be referred to as the Short Bus. There is no long bus. Because the city is so densely populated, the schools are large and support a huge number of the children. The elementary school near our home has over 2,000 students, the school that we teach at has over 1,500, and that seems to be the norm. In the morning, before school starts you can see children who look like they are in 2nd grade walking the blocks to school. Other students are whisked along on scooters, standing on the floorboard in front of their parents. This morning I saw a toddler resting on her mothers lap, her feet up on the handlebars and a bottle in her mouth, something that would be C.P.S. time in the States, but doesn't even raise an eye here...and no, she was not wearing a helmet. There are a number of other peculiar vehicles that inhabit the streets of Kaoushong. The strangest one and most puzzl...

This is my new lunchbox and my screw together chopsticks. The way lunch is server in Taiwan schools is that the students stay in their rooms and the meal is brought to them. Then they pull out their individual lunch plates and line up and serve themselves. If the kids want more, they go back in like and get more. When lunch is done the students wash out their plates in a sink in the back and selected students take the serving pans back to the kitchen. The meals are great, healthy and cheap. A heck of a lot better than what the kids get back in the states. My lunchbox is the double decker design. For some reason my email is not sending pictures properly. I'll try to upload the image at another time.

We went out to dinner two nights ago and had a type of sea food and pork soup.  The cooking vessel was pretty unique. In the back kitchen the cook loaded up a kind if brazer with charcoal and put a a chimney on top of it. Then clams, pork, oysters, shrimp and anything else that couldn't run faster than the cook was tossed into the basin. At different times during the meal different types of food would finish cooking, and the waitress would continue to fill the basin with more broth or water.  The result was something like a 3 course meal in one container. I would recommend it, if for nothing more than the experience of a "soup BBQ."

The area of Taiwan that we are staying in is heavily populated. The town of Koushain, (yes, I am spelling it differently every time), has a population of over 2 million people. This results in a lot of people and with that large number of people comes the need to transport them. The city is in a portion of Taiwan that I've been told only has rain during the monsoon season, the rest of the time it is fairly dry. This makes the use of scooters very popular. In fact, I would say that the number of scooters on the street outnumbers the cars by about 15 to 1. They zoom around, cutting through any space that is available to them. Think of Sturgis, but instead of bikers there are scooters populated with every possible person that you can think of, businessmen, mothers with children, teens, construction workers, little old ladies, dogs and their owners and everything else you can think of. If it can fit on a scooter, it will be on a scooter. It's not uncommon to see a family of four...

Good days for me! Totally by accident this morning, I was trying to take a picture off the balcony with my phone, and discovered an unsecured wireless signal. This means that I have to old my computer out over the edge of the balcony, but if I do it right, I can send and receive my emails. Thank you random person who hasn't secured their wireless. If I haven't mentioned it it, I did not bring an actual computer along on this trip. When I went to Chile, I carried my Macbook along with me everywhere I went and was able to continue with my blog. This time I decided to see how far I could push "going small" and brought only my iPhone and my iPad. I know that you may be thinking that I am being a total dork and an Apple fan-boy, but I wanted to bring something that I could store a number of books on, get emails, post on this blog and look up information when it was needed. A simple net book would have worked pretty well, but when battery life is at a premium, and ne...

Let me back up for a moment. Because I have been doing most of my "blogging" on Facebook, I've also been very careful about what information I put out. Specifically, telling the entire world that I am on vacation and that if they want to rob my house, now is the prime time to do it. Which leads me to a bit of a quandary here. I want to use my blog the same way that I did when I was in Chile, but when I was in Chile I had nothing to steal, and even if I did, I was living in my sister's basement and she was at home anyway. Fast forward 4 years and here I am, a respectable, married home owner who is not living in his sisters basement, and I find myself trying to share my life with the right people. So, if you are reading this blog, don't rob my house. I'm serious, don't do it, besides, we have a house sitter, who is a former Green Bay Linebacker who was kicked off the team due to anger issues and gun possession charges. You have been warned. The reason ...

This is part of a glass mural that is at one of the subway stations. The mural was a 360 degree dome that looked like it would be more at home on a 70's Santana album.

The one thing we did get to do at the school we will be teaching at, is have an impromptu talent show by one of the classes and then lunch in the room with the students. This girl did some act with what I believe are Chinese Yo-Yos. She did some pretty sweet tricks, including spinning two of the Yo-Yos at the same time. about 4 other students came up and sang or us or did some silly dances. Then we headed back to the class room, collaborated on what we would be doing for the next few weeks and went home with our host families. Tiffany took us out to dinner at a coffee shop and we had a nice time talking and drinking coffee. I'll try to keep these post a little more focused in the near future, but right now, things are just going so fast that I don't really have time to get everything down that I want to. Stay tuned, after the jet lag is gone I'll be a bit more coherent.

The school that Tiffany works at is huge and open. It is four stories high and has walkways overlooking different courtyards or the outside of the school. Here is an example of one of the inner courtyards. The classrooms have windows that can open up and let the breeze from the outside blow through the rooms to cool them down. We were allowed to sit in on a presentation that some high school students were giving to what I believe was a room of fourth graders. They did an entire slide show presentation and story/skit in English to the class, with the children answering most of the English asked questions in Mandarin, but it was impressive that the students could follow the story as well as they did. Mostly the point of the play was about how over fishing and dumping garbage was bad for the ocean and that you shouldn't eat the little fish, but let them grow bigger and then eat them. The high school students did a great job of telling the story and entertaining the students. The o...

This is a picture of our host mother Tiffany. She is a lady that looks to be about 75 lbs and in a state of perpetual motion. She is something like a director of students a the local elementary school and confided in us that she probably could be a principal of a school, if she was willing to move, but she likes living so close to the school. She has three children. A daughter who we have met, and is currently taking her college in trance exams, another daughter and a son, who she seems to drive around all over the place. She also has a husband, but we have not met him yet. She said today that he is shy to meet us because he doesn't speak English. She took us to her school and gave us the grand tour. It's a huge building, with something like 1,500 students, about 30 students to the room. It was the last day of school for her class and most of the classes were working quietly at their desks coloring and watching a cartoon that was being shown on the class's TV. We didn...

Today we had a pretty special treat, we were able to to to our host mother's school and observe the last day of school and a special presentation on "Cry of Sea." I fell asleep at about 9:00 at local time and woke up around 6:00 in the morning. I had no problem waking up like I was expecting to. This gives me hope that I will be able to get on local time as quickly as possible. We were not going to get picked up until 8:00 and we didn't want to sit around in the apartment for the next two hours, so we decided to go outside and see what there was to be seen. The only problem was that we didn't have any key to get in on we got out of the apartment, so we decided to wander the streets and meet up with her at 8:00 in the morning when she came to pick us up. I quick note needs to be said, I think our host mother is a real-estate mogul. She has her own apartment, the apartment we are staying in with her brother and mother and she mentions that she owns and rents ano...

Tami and I snuck out this morning and found a temple a few blocks away!

We were picked up by Dean and David, the preacher at the Bilingual Church here in Gaoshong. We then drove all the way from Taipei to Goushong along highway 1. There seems to be no zoning laws here in Taiwan, something that I have seen echoed in other Asian countries. Gas stations will be build right next to a house, which is right next to an open field with rice planted in it, which is right next to a 30 story business office. Another really interesting piece was the number of farm area there was. If there was an empty lot, there was something planted in it. I don't know if these are family plots or just the way that farming is done here, but to what I'm use to in the states, it's kind of weird. On arriving to Goushong, I know i'm spelling that wrong, we went to the church which is a sign and a door that leads down a flight of stairs to the actual worship/classroom/office area of the church. After unpacking all of our stuff, we went off to lunch at what David referred...