School Is A Lot More Fun When You Don't Have To Work, Plus: Sanchong Night Market

On Friday night, we finally made use of our access to a projector and surround sound by spending a couple hours at our school's library watching a movie. We ordered some Dominos (our favorite!) and watched "Christine", an 80s horror movie (the best kind!) based on the Stephen King book. We work with a Christine, we live next door to a Christine... hmm, how did we wind up deciding to watch this?


Saturday was our school's 51st anniversary, so each class set up a tent to sell snacks or to play games to win prizes. The teachers (except me!) operated a haunted house until noon. All day Friday the teachers worked together to dust off old garbage bags and tape them to the dusty light fixtures in Study Room 2 with a homemade ladder. Yes, I know it's December and Halloween was 2 months ago. The English Club ran a haunted house for what seemed like a month in October and it was "very successful" thanks to head club teacher, Nareesa- so by popular demand it was brought back for the school anniversary and over $4000NT was raised for an orphanage made. The school gave us $200NT in vouchers to buy stuff from the kids, so after the haunted house foolishness was over I walked over to the school to check out the scene. I was really surprised at how much was going on at the school... the picture above probably only captures about 1/5 of the tents that were there that day.


The kids were selling just about anything you could think of to eat or drink, and they were pretty good salespeople. When they saw us walk by they ran out to try to get us to buy from them. Frankly, they shook us down! One thing that several booths were selling, which I found quite interesting, was cups of liquid nitrogen with pop or juice poured on top. This made for a cool, smokey looking cup of liquid but a) should 12 year olds be playing with liquid nitrogen? and b) should you really drink it? Mark seemed to think it tasted fine.


There's were lots of ratty looking Disney characters walking around. Check out our photo-op with Mickey's lesser-known cousin, Rickey the rat. Speaking of photo ops, we were surrounded by paparazzi all afternoon! Adults and kids we'd never seen before kept coming up to request pictures with Mel and I. It was a bit much but now I know how Brangelina feel!


Near the end of the afternoon I went to see a favorite student's magic show. I don't teach him anymore (Christine stole him from me) but this kid, Tom, is an amazing little magician. He's only 13 and he put on a 30 minute performance that would put King's County's own Al Bernard to shame. Dude's gonna wind up in Vegas.


Mel and I just spent the afternoon relaxing (she'd had an early morning of haunted house-ing) and then we met up with all the teachers and our neighbor, Christine to go to the Sanchong Night Market. I love going to night markets with Christine because she can read the damn signs and she always helps us order different food and negotiates prices for us. I teach part-time at a school in Sanchong, but other than the street that I walk on to go from my bus stop to the school, I really don't know the city at all so it was cool to go to a new area with our tour guide. This was the narrowest, longest, most crowded night market I've ever been to. At times you couldn't even move! This caused a problem when, in the middle of an un-moving crowd, Mark had to pee.


I was pretty hungry and our first stop was this veggie cart, where the girls got wraps and the guys looked around for something unhealthy.


I wound up getting some cream filled cakes and an "England Potato" from a cart. Man, it was good! Although I had the option of getting a fruit potato, thai chicken potato and tuna potato, I went with ham and cheese. Mmmmm!


One of the neater foods on offer were these doughy grilled rice sticks that came with quite a few topping options- Mel got chocolate- that were really, really good. Will definitely try these again.


At the end of the night Mel had bought a cold papaya milk and Nareesa had bought a bag of organs. Mel's hands were cold from holding the milk tea, so Nareesa kindly offered her bag of organs to warm up Mel's hands. That's what friends are for! We had to go home to pack for an early train ride to Hualien, so we went back to our apartment to get ready for the next day. However, I leave you with this question to ponder:


Does your school have a room with a sign like this on the door? Because ours does. What do you think it's for??? When we asked our boss she responded very sheepishly, "Oh, is a special room..."

What!