Schoolio, Yo!

It was a good weekend. 

And now, it has been followed up by a good week.  We have students at XingFu (our school, duh!) finally!  Real, live, mostly good with a few bad, energetic fifth graders.  They're getting in bed now, hopefully as tiredly as we are.  

We checked out the final product of the campus on Sunday when we arrived for the week.  It is looking really good, but not functioning completely like it should.  The last pictures below are an example of how cool they make this place look.  The ceiling lights up at night and it feels like you are in a planetarium rather than a dormitory.  

The beds, however, are a total clustercuss! It takes about ten minutes to make one bed because somehow something easy was made complicated.  Once the bed is complete, it is much too hot to sleep in because with all the money they invested in this building they didn't manage to put in air-conditioning.  That also contributed to me sleeping only three hours Sunday night.  It is VERY warm in our room, and no matter how naked I am, it doesn't keep me cool.  Plus, I need a minimal of a sheet over my body to prevent bug bites (I got one anyway).  The school light also shines right directly straight into our room, and I struggle sleeping with merely the power light from my computer exposed.  Additionally, in order to keep any sort of coolness in our room, we must leave the windows open.  This exposes us to barking dogs, cicadas, crickets, frogs and the sound of jets flying into the neighboring airport.  We pleasanted the situation last night by adding a fan to our room which helps keep it cool and less stale while muffling the sounds of the night.

Monday morning found much of the plumbing nonfunctional and the electricity insufficient for our projectors and expensive smartboards.  Somehow they think of everything while forgetting about everything.  It was fixed by class time and the classes all went borderline smoothly along with everything else.  It is really fun teaching these kids.  Most of them are really happy and are enthusiastic to participate.  The food here is great as well.  We were concerned that we would have to go to town to get food that we could be happy with, but the caterers are doing great things for us.

Anyway, Taiwan has eighty new football players.  Some of these kids managed to be blessed with the athlete genes that I 68% lack.  The rest of them are worse off than I am.  It is fun to teach them how to throw and catch a football.

Tomorrow's Wednesday, and we'll be half done with the week when we wake up in the morning.  This is not a bad way to make money.

Made it out to Paris during my weekend off.

Finally a cafeteria full of kids!

The dorm ceilings are incredible.

This lights up when the lights are off and some black lights are turned on.

AWESOME!