My Fairy Godmother

Well friends, it's February 10th which means summer is here...well by north american standards anyway. I think it was about 25 or 26 degrees a couple days this week. Yep after two long months it looks like the shorts are just about ready to come out of retirement. Gotta love it. On to an update...

This week i picked up my first private student. Private students are the sweetest deals a foreign English teacher can find. This is because the going rate for one-on-one tutoring is about 30 bucks canadian an hour. In Taiwan this is an outrageous amount of money to spend in an hour. Seriously i feel kinda like a prostitute working for this kind of money except... well I teach English. Turns out her name is Fairy (Hence the title of this post). Now might be a good time to mention that girls here have English names that you'd normally only find at the Brass Rail, Supersex, or your local gentleman's club back home. I teach many young female scholars with names such as: Candy, Angel, Cherry, Chocolate, and CoCo. Oh and I teach a guy named wood. Anyways Fairy is a middle-aged-mom who runs a business out of her home and can afford the luxury of private tutoring up to 5 days a week for an hour and a half at a time. Clearly i am VERY happy about this. As for the actual tutoring session well its pretty great. I show up and she has a magazine article ready to go. I read through it with her a couple of times, helping her with her pronounciation. I explain to her the subtle differences pronounciation can have on a word's meaning. She now understands the difference between celery and salary. I have done a good job. Then we drink tea and talk freely. When she uses bad grammar I write down her sentence and show her how to correct it. She tells me I am a great teacher and I agree. She might even tell her friends about me. I hope this can continue for as long as possible.

I aquired this private through a friend of mine named Joey. She teaches adults and one of her students just happend to be Fairy. Joey is a lady i met who does far more for me then she should. Some western guys ive met have confirmed that Taiwanese women will practically bend over backwards for a man. If a guy calls a girl and tells her to meet him somewhere 90% chance the girl will drop whatever it is she's doing and show up. I have even seen an ugly occurance while shrimp fishing, where a guy got really angry at his girlfriend, threw a tantrum and broke a chair against the wall. He stormed off and like a dog the girl went chasing after him. Shit like that is just fucked up. I think that may be one of the reasons why the locals are so attracted to western guys. We just expect less. We dont expect them to drop everything for us. Someone I met dated a Taiwnaese guy who was always overly concerned about her being on her own. Just an interesting cultural difference i thought I'd point out. I guess I should do something nice for Joey since she has hooked me up huge with this private tutoring gig.

Next week is Chinese New Year which means a 9 day vacation. One of my chinese co teachers has graciously invited me to her house to partake in the festivities. I am very excited about that. The next day, Ill be headed down to the south of Taiwan to a tropical resort called Kenting (providing i can still get a bus.train ticket). There is a beach where i am hoping to learn how to surf a bit. There are also some gorgeous montains and hot springs. There are at least 13 of us going down so it should be a great time. I am very excited about the whole thing. Life is good, and it only gets better by the day