We have a place to call home:)

So we visited our branches today and well be working at these for the next year. Emlyn and I work at different branches because it makes taking holiday together easier! Hess is really helpful in this sense!

And we have a new home! Its an apartment on the 9th floor, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and fully furnished...oh and the toiletpaper flushes down;) So we are so happy and very excite. We move in next week and then we will definitely put up some photos. The apartment also has a park right next door, so good for running (although in ths heat its crazy!) and there is a huge department store just down the road.

We will both need to invest in scooters though which is slightly terrifying! But could also be a lot of fun (if we stay alive for long enough). The driving style here can be compared to fish swimming in the sea. You have the whales which are buses and huge trucks, the larger fish like snoek, which would be the cars and yellow taxis everywhere and lastly there are the goldfish which are all the scooters! Oh and do not forget all the walkers! Everyone just drives hecticly but still the traffic always flows and everyone gets to where they need to be! Yes it can be quite scary when you are not used to it.

We also got to meet some of the children we will be teaching. They are so cute and to be able to speak another language well at the age of 3-4 is quite amazing. They do work the children very hard though.

I'm off to bed but Ems headed off to Snake Alley. This is where you can eat snake and drink snake bile and blood.YUM....

Some interesting facts about Taiwan

So we are completely exhausted from training but Ems still found the energy to go party. I'm having a great chilled out night and enjoying the free wireless internet;)

Talking about the internet..this is a definite plus point in Taiwan. Free and readily available, which compared to SA is just amazing. On the downside though, the pipes leading to the sewage in most old buildings in the country can get blocked easily. So you might think that this means that the toilets get blocked often, well no...thats because people do not flush their toilet paper down the toilet but instead throw it in the bin next to the toilet..YUK! But don't worry if you plan on visiting us our apartment will have toilets that flush:) that was a requirement of the place. LoL.

On the other hand, they are very good with their recycling here because landfills are getting too full and so people are very conscious about that. Also, eventhough the buildings are quite dirty looking from the outside in Taipei (because of the humidty mixed with the air pollution) the inside of the buildings are beautiful and the streets are relatively clean.

Well having said that..here's another contradiction...there are these red splatters on the pavement...these come from people who chew a thing called Beetle nut. Its not actually a beetle but a nut or something like that and its a legal drug in Taiwan! When you chew it your mouth and teeth turn red, your mouth also gos numb and your face becomes extremely hot! Truck drivers are well known to chew it. It's readily available and usually sold by very scantily-dressed women!!

Also you can buy alcohol (beer, alcopops, wiskey, etc) at your local 7/11. Well actually the stores stay open later than 11pm and you find one on each street corner! Then once you buy our alcohol you can just walk in the street and drink it! You could even sit in front of the police station and drink...

People here have all been so friendly and helpful to us. They will go that extra mile to try and speak english or explain a certain type of food to us. Our mandarin is slowly improving though and today we actually ordered using some mandarin (ok so we can greet and say noodles in mandarin:).

When it comes to food you need to have an open mind and be prepared to try things you wouldn't usually! There are so many restaurants and vendors here the choice of Asian food is endless! Today we wanted noodles badly and so we finally found one down this dodgy looking alley but the food was soooo good and the people so friendly! And best part is that we got two huge bowls of noodles with chicken for only R25! Yes thats 2 bowls...so we have balanced out spending 300 taiwanese dollars on the peaches:)

Speaking about the fruit here, the local goods are so big in size! Really good but do look slightly different from SA and taste different too. Less sweet I would say.

But talking about sweet...the people here love to eat things sweet! Most of their fruit juice is only 20% fruit and the rest is sugar! There cakes and sweet things are also VERY sweet.

On the other hand, when you go to Burger King and order a meal (yes we had our first Western meal since getting here!) all the places in SA would only have a choice of fizzy drinks, like Cola or sprite, to go with the meal but here you can have ice tea from the soda fountain!!! The ice teas are so popular here, most people buy that in bottles instead of fizzy drinks and the variety is crazy!
One of my favourite is milk tea. Its basically iced coffee but in tea form! Its heavenly:)

Ok, one more interesting food fact...people eat salad here for breakfast. Yes, you read right. They eat lettuce, carrots, etc.. for breakfast. Pasta or noodles are also big and cooked vegetables. I'll stick to cereal or egg for now!

We'll definitely put up some more interesting things as we experience them! We're going to look at apartments tomorrow in Taoyuan...so excited:)

Demo's, kids and ipod

Well its been an interesting few days. Training is very intensive, starting at 8:30am and finishing at 6pm but we can both honestly say that we have learnt more in these past 4 days than over the last few years:) Its really fun though and the people we are meeting have all been great.

Now let me tell you about the demos we had to prepare. We basically got taught the entire curriculum for kindy (kindergarten) in two days and then had to act out a section of the lesson to our group and an assessor. Now anyone who has ever taught children will know that this is not an easy task of simply getting up infront of the class and expecting everyone to read words off the board...these are 4-5 year old kids we are talking about. So we are basically the local entertainers (or clowns if you like) who at the same time have to teach the ABC's, phonics, sentence patterns, vocabulary, songs, math, etc...I don't even think I was ever taught half this stuff at school;).

But its oh so much fun..and everyone is talking to each other like they are 5 year old kids! For example, if Emlyn does something I'll be like, "thats awesome Emlyn, you are so clever!". Oh and DO NOT forget the American accent. So funny!

Another thing we keep doing now is randomly singing children songs! For instance, "there are ten in the bed and the little one said, 'roll over, roll over'". Its also recommended we put these tunes on our ipods since we need to know them off-by-heart. Speaking about ipods...I am the proud owner of a new ipod nano 8GB! This is Taiwan after all and even though this is an American product, still managed to make a nice saving compared to SA...whats new!

OK the last thing that has to be mentioned and had the whole training group rolling on the ground with laughter and shear joy, was our introduction to actual, live Kindy kids. There is a kindy a few floors down in the building we are training in and their teacher brought them up to sing songs for us. Oh so cute and we finally got to see who we would actually be teaching (so also slightly scary). Asian children are definitely cute and the best part was when they started singing! Lets just say very LOUD (screaming at the top of their lungs) and doing the funniest actions to the words:). Then as a reward we got to hand out candy to the children but they had to ask us, "may i please have some candy" which is impressive for a 5 year old surrounded by giant foreign people! The best part was that mostly all the kids only took one sweet! Even when offered another one they declined...'high five' for the manners these kids have! Its going to be an interesting year!

Day 1 of training

Well after experiencing monsoon rains, the first day of training finally came. We met up with alot of people from Canada, USA, Australia, New New Zealand and the UK. A great bunch of people and we became friends with them instantly. The first day took on more of an orientation feel, with the group of new teachers taking a tour of Taipei, and going to many memorial sites such as those of Taiwanese legends, Sun Yat Sen and Chaing Kai Shek. The day was intense and alot had to be taken in. After the training a group of us decided to venture out into town to try some more of the local delicacies. We stumbled upon a tradition of eating called hot pots. Very interesting I must say. You get a bowl of broth, which is boiled on your table (with help of a gas cooker) and various ingredients are given to be added to your stew. We had absolutely no idea what we were putting into our hot pot, and everytime we wanted to sample something, it felt like a lucky draw! Needless to say it was a good experience, however maybe we will give it sometime before we venture back to that fine establishment.

Bring on day 2!

We're singing in the rain!

So we finally got to sleep last night at 5am! Still on SA time me thinks. Anyways we knew the day would be long because it involved us moving from one hotel to another. We left our sweet NTU Hostel for the First Hotel. Taxi fair not bad at all and as we arrive at the hotel guess who we meet...our first HESS friends! Hess is the company we will be working for this coming year.

So a group of us (10 people to be exact) set off to wonder Taiwan. As usual Ingrid had no idea where we were going but was pleased to follow the crowd. So we finally got to a music store where Emlyn felt right at home. One of the guys, Alan who is from Scotland, is keen to buy a guitar and so that explains the visit to the store.

So next we decided to visit one of the famous memorial temples in Taiwan, the National S.Y.S. Memorial Hall, and this required taking the underground Metro for the first time. What an experience... lots of people, fast train and funny cricket noises that indicate when the train doors are about to close. But its an awesome public transport tool which we shall be using quite frequently. I mean for 20 taiwanese dollars (about r4) you can get pretty far!

Ok so after quite a walk we arrive at the temple and admire the beautfil lush trees on the property. Then to our suprise (well not a major suprise since this is a tropical island) it starts to rain..lightly. Well thats not where it ended it started raining harder. At this point the 10 of us had moved under the roof of a wall and i was just praying that we weren't standing on holy ground! Anyways after about 30minutes of waiting for the rain to cease we decided to make a run for it to the actual temple. Well all i can say is big water puddles and VERY wet sneakers!

So we luckily found a nice restaurant, had something to eat and thought we'd wait for the rain to stop. Well it didn't and it became a real down pour with thunder and lightning just for fun!

We had dried up quite nicely at this stage and the rain was only spitting so we made our way across the vast courtyard to the actual memorial hall...Wow not so clever as we got there the rain started again! The moral of the story is that we were drenched from head to toe and eventually stopped running because it didn't really matter anymore. It rained the whole way home but suprisingly no local person was wet!!! But how??? and the looks we got as we jumped onto the Metro sopping wet was well worth everything:) they must have been thinking..silly tourists!

Exciting times and now its off to bed because we have to be up at 7am tomorrow to start our training:)

Talk about being peachy keen.

Well after sleeping almost the entire day trying to get over the jetlag, we had to venture outside to get some food. After the previous days experience we were hoping things would have gotten better, but lets be honest we are talking about Emlyn and Ingrid here. Both of us were very keen on some fruit and saw a stall that sold some beautiful looking peaches, they were large so we only asked for 2. We asked the seller how much it was, and she said "three". First thing on our mind was 3 TWD (Taiwanese New Dollar), but eventually she corrected herself and continued to say 300 TWD!! THAT WAS R100 FOR TWO PEACHES! and we could not believe it, but before we could say NO THANKS we had already given her 500TWD. Let's just put that down to experience.

We also had the pleasure of meeting a Taiwanese local called John (through Ingrids many contacts), who spoke perfect English and explained the ins and outs of life in Taiwan. He is a great person to know here. He took us to a very nice Chinese restuarant, where we sampled some of the local delicacies. An absolutely great meal, which was rounded off with a trip to the tea bar where you can sample an assortment of teas. Day 2 ended very well.

Night markets and ordering food

The night market is a big part of Taiwanese culture. The are several markets in Taipei alone. We are staying in the centre of Guanghua market which is an absolute treat for the senses. Eventhough we were extremely jetlagged, we still managed to get out to the markets (well we had to because we were starving). We were excited about hitting the market and see what bargains we could get but food was high on the agenda. There was only one problem though and that was hardly anything is in English. So trying to order something was tough. It was important to find a stall that had pictures so that we can just point to the pictures of what we wanted. Sounds easy? Trust us it was not!!

After much search we found a noodle bar, and pointed out what we wanted. The server proceeded to respond in mandarin but we did not know what she said, I mean she could have asked us if we wanted beef or dog (lets hope we got the former). Eventually we managed to get a bowl of something and it was actually really good. Great success!!!

Taiwan begins...

Ingrid was so tired on the flight to Taiwan that she kept falling asleep (her head falling forehead the whole time gave it away) but as we entered Taiwan airport the excitement levels definitely started rising!

Wow hot as we stepped off the plane and then the rush to get through passport controls. At this stage all we could think of was whether our lugguage had also made it to taiwan in one piece! Luckily it had! The funny thing that happened while waiting at the baggage claim was that all of a sudden Ingrid felt something rub against her leg and was it was nothing else but a Beagle smelling our luggage trying to determine wether we have somehing illegal! haha such a small dog with such a huge responsibility. He didn't think anything suspicious of our bags but did think the lady next to us had something to hide and so he sat down next to her. It was just some fruit juice though and no one was arrested.

We then went looking for our driver and luckily found him and proceeded to make the poor guy wait even longer while we purchased and activated new sim cards (the parents had to be informed our our safe arrival).

We definitely travelled in luxury..a Mercedes Benz S600!! Wow amazing. We then met the hostel manager who happens to one of the friendliest guys in Taiwan. He even went out and bought us an adaptor:)

Fun times at Hong Kong Airport

Well we were officially tired when we arrived at the airport..but the landing site in Hong Kong is one of the most beautiful places i've eve seen. It looks like something out of Jurassic Park with lush green hills and light blue seas. And then we were even more impressed with the stunning airport. Joburg also impressed us but Hong Kong is definitely in a league of its own. You can get anything from Gucci to Versace and Burger King to hectic sushi!

Ok but I must mention that Emlyn got picked on at the airport a few times...first an airport official comes up behind him and requests quite demandingly that he takes off his cap. You never know what he might be hiding underneath...then everywhere there are extreme measures to curb the spread of swine flu (they sanatize the elevator button every half an hour and wipe down the escalator handles frequently). Also they check for temperatures through a screen you walk and Emlyn must have looked hot because he got pulled aside and had a thermometer shoved in his ear! Lol no swine flu luckily.

We then further annoyed the officials by trying to take our hand lugguage trolley onto the elevator with us..they proceeded to get us off the elevator and leave our trolley behind...its only then we saw the BIG sign stating no trolleys....oooops:)

Otherwise it was great munching on a Burger King Whopper and getting funny stares in the bathroom at we brushed our teeth and washed our faces (hey after a 13hr flight these things must be done).

Then it was on to Taiwan....

Flights....Johannesburg to Hong Kong

Being the first time either of us have flown with Cathay Pacific, we had alot to look forward to. The cabin was not the most roomy or comfortable but at least we had some in-flight entertainment to keep us occupied and take our minds off that. We were both pleasantly surprised to find what was on offer; over 100 movies (new releases and the classics), 70 music channels, hundreds of albums and off course tons of really bad Asian game shows!!

Now lets be honest no adventure involving the two of us goes without incident. And this time was no exception. Both of us were enjoying some inflight movies, when Ingrid decided that after watching a movie she would like to play a video game. A particular game (which at this stage we can only recall as the "dinosaur game") intrigued Ingrid and she went through all the prompts to play it and with one swift press of the enter button.............SHE BROKE IT! Worst part of it all was that we were only 3 hours in of a 13 hour flight! Oh Dear! At the end we eventually started to appreciate silent movies again, as well as Emlyn giving running commentary on "There's something about Mary". Good times all round.

As it was a long flight we thought we might get some much needed sleep on the plane.....YEAH RIGHT!!! Emlyn had not slept the night before and it near impossible to find a comfortable position to sleep in. Ingrid was having the very same problem, although she was fortunate enough to have Emlyn as a footstool. Not a pleasant experience at all.

Finally in this leg of the journey, we must commend Hong Kong for its clean, efficient and beautufully designed airport.

Beginning of our journey....AT CAPE TOWN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

The day had finally arrived but we were not looking forward to getting up at 4am in the morning to make it to the airport on time for our first flight. We caught the 7:30am flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg on British Airways. Emlyn was not looking forward to this experience, but he had to get over his fear of flying because he was due to take three seperate flights to get to the final destination Taipei. Friends and family came to see us off, tears were shed but everybody was happy for us and excited. We are missing you all!

Ingrid and Emlyn

Some Major Cities.......

• Taipei is the seat of the government of the Republic of China and its the center of commerce and culture. Taipei is home to the world's second tallest skyscraper Taipei 101.

• Kaohsiung is the second-largest city on the island. It has one of the busiest sea ports (the Port of Kaohsiung) in the world and it has the island's second - largest airport, Kaohsiung International Airport. (KHH)

• Taichung is the third largest city in Taiwan, and has an abundance of interesting cultural amenities and activities

• Tainan is the oldest city in Taiwan and was the capital during imperial times. It is famous for its historic buildings and snack food.

A little bit about Taiwan

Taiwan is an island nation of about 36,000 square kilometers located off the coast of southeastern China, southwest of Okinawa and north of the Philippines. The island is governed by the Republic of China or ROC. The nation is home to more that 23 million people and is one of the most densely populated places in the world. Besides its crowded cities, Taiwan is also known for steep mountains and lush forests.

One more week!

We are almost out of here! And heading to Taiwan for some hectic weather and training. The temperature is averaging at 30 degrees and training should be intense but surely interesting. Finally 8 months of preparation is coming together. Oh just one more hurdle to cross...the damn new airport rules..aka LAG's...lol.

Ings

Two weeks and counting!

We have been planning this for the last couple of months and finally things have materialized for us. It was a bumpy road to get to this point, but we have been blessed by the support of friends and family. We are truly going to miss you all.

Can't believe it is now only two weeks to go. We look forward to posting lots of stories about our travels on this blog, so check back for updates whenever you can.

Cheers

Emlyn and Ingrid