The longer I was there, the longer I wouldn’t have mind staying. The job was long and hard and filled with everything that I least expected. But, I couldn’t have ended on a better note. And in my short time here, I have slowly grown to love this country and its people. I didn’t like it much at first, but with each day, I have grown to love this island once appropriately called Formosa (‘beautiful’ in Portuguese).

My last week was a thousand times better than my first weeks… On Friday, before the kids left to go home, there was a closing ceremony… Most of my students went home Thursday, so on Friday, I only had 6 left. When it was time to say goodbye, 3 of them were sobbing uncontrollably. Even the kid I would have voted least likely to ever cry in public. It caught me so off guard. I wasn’t in a crying mood, and I mean, to be hoenst, I was quite glad it was over, though I did love my students, but when I looked into those crying kids’ eyes… wow. It was so crazy. I didn’t expect them to cry…

This past camp did a much better job of everything I had previously complained about. It was really encouraging, because both camps were run by the same girl (she’s a Taiwanese girl about my age)… so it was cool to see her taking the thing that didn’t work well at the first and making them better for the second. It made me want to work harder when I saw that they really were trying to do what is best for helping the kids learn english.

They also did a MUCH better job of using all the dumb pointless singing and dancing as learning tools. Example. For the songs/dances that the kids learn, they have to shout out certain words during the song that pertain to the motions. Things like, ‘jump’, ‘superman’, ‘cha-cha’, ‘flower’, ‘penguin’, ‘up’, ‘down’,.. and so on. Although dancing and singing is not my style, I can almost buy into it when I see that the students are actually learning something from it and it’s not just a pointless time filler. Something else that I thought was neat, was that before we taught the kids a dance, my TA, Anna, would help me teach the kids the movements by themself and also the meaning of the words they would have to say. Totally different from the last camp. And it was really refreshing that we were pretty much always on the same page.

One of my favorites was the cha-cha slide. Not because of the song itself, but because the students were hilarious about it… You know the part where it goes, ‘cha-cha now yall’? Well, they all thought it was so funny and kept repeating it. BUT, try saying ‘cha-cha now yall’ with a Chinese accent. It sounds like ‘cha-cha nai yo’. And most of us americans thought kids were speaking chinese when they first started saying it…. which is not allowed at camp. It was really funny… they would repeat it all day!

Here’s another thing that was really cool for me… I was talking to one of the Taiwanese TAs… She’s around 18 years old. She attended the camp every summer and winter with her siblings and cousins when she was a kid. She really enjoyed it and said she really did learn a lot of english from it. So, now she’s come back to be a TA. That was really cool… because there were a lot of moments where I doubted if the kids were actually learning anything useful. I’m all about useful and relevant… Like, who cares if you can sing 100 songs in english, but if you can’t use it in life, who cares? When you’re learning a language, it HAS to be relevant, or it’s useless. So, anyway… that was encouraging… that maybe I did contribute to something useful.

Lastly, I loved the people I worked with. On a whole. There’s always one or 2 people that sort of push your buttons. But in general, I have never been with a group of that many Westerners (12ish?), put together slightly at random, where we all enjoyed being around each other for the most part. It was a really nice change from Russia, where I didn’t connect with the majority of the americans that were around. So, honestly, that was one of things I was slightly nervous about. And it ended up being awesome. Like the kid of thing, where you leave and are legitimately sad to say goodbye to those people… and hope that someday you’ll meet again somewhere, somehow. Just a bunch of really cool people… that love traveling, teaching, languages, and other cultures as much as I do. All unique in their own ways, some with very different views on life than others, but a really really cool, eye-opening mix.

I think, for the first time in a while, I remembered how much I genuinely like getting to know people, thanks to all of the wonderful, crazy, fun, unique people I met while teaching in Taiwan.

Now, it’s on to Singapore… I can’t believe it’s finally here… in the making for 2 years. Beautiful.