Vacation or work...hard to say

I am now on vacation. I have time to contemplate what I have been doing, what I have not had the chance to do, what I hope to do in the future and of course to travel a bit an contemplate that as well.
Although I get only this one break all year, I am thankful for just how long it is. Because of the Fulbright conference I got to add three days to my time off work making for a 31/2-week break. You may think the conference would be work but it hardly was.
After holding off a torrid of people wanting to get together with me right before I left Yilan for a while (doesn’t this always happen?) I left with the other Fulbrighters on the Tourist train down to Kending. It was a long ride, we left at 8 and arrived around two, but when we stepped off the train we knew the trip had purpose. The weather had transformed from wet, rainy and cool to balmy subtropical sunny. Though we were followed from the station by a small leathery old woman selling cold tea and god, we managed to hop on the tour bus, thus beginning a love-hate relationship with the maid Taiwanese mode of travel, tour buses.
The first page worthy stop was the aquarium. I would say that this aquarium beats the Shed in Chicago, but is not quite as good as the Monterey Bay aquarium (they had no sea otters). As silly as it sounds, they had successfully themed the exhibits with a sunken ship theme. This would not have mattered if there had not been so many underwater tunnels to walk through and from which to see sharks and huge fish swimming above. From the Aquarium we went to our resort hotel, checked in and got comfortable. Each of us had a whole huge room to ourselves priced at around $230 a night. Yes those are your tax dollars at work. Thank you America.
After a large mediocre dinner we started the conference. We had the choice of making it two days long or having one long haul and a party. It seemed only Catherine objected to this second option, as she hates parties of all sorts, but she kept quiet out of fear of the group. And thus began the long haul. We had a moderator from AIT (American Embassy of sorts) who was to keep our reports at 5 minutes each and to start he did a pretty good job. Oddly the meeting put me through a huge range of emotions. It started with the visiting lecturers and I got excited about their classes and even go the syllabus for one of them (I’m such a dork), when it moved on to the Researchers I was excited about what they were doing and I began again to consider again a PHD and professordom. Then the junior scholars (beginning dissertation/ masters work) began to speak and I got down on myself. They were really doing some cool things, interviewing cross-straits journalists, working for election polls… I felt that they were all things I would never be prepared or confident enough to do and I became a little sad. Then we teaching assistants began to talk. Some were simply cheery while others started bring up problems in the methods of teaching English and with the program in general and with our effectiveness. I recognized many of the issues brought up to be true, but they were things I hadn’t worried about. Sure we often don’t have clear goals or complete plans for a lesson, but we get through it alright and maybe the kids can’t do the tests very well and are still unable to build thoughts in English outside of the rigid and sometimes useless phrases from the books, but I didn’t worry to much about these things. I gave my short talk on trying to effectively show kids that they can use language to communicate using art as a tool, but while everyone else was presenting their issues I began to wonder if I was effective at all, am I really teaching them anything, will they really know any English? The night ended on Sarah who presented her presentation as her implemented solutions to all the things we couldn’t do. I left the meeting at midnight tired and worried and then I made Catherine stay up with me and talk it out.
The next day was more tour bus. Despite my late night I woke with the sun coming though my huge window and went for a swim. We ate breakfast and hopped on the tour bus that took us to the park’s activity center where we saw a long video showing the sights of the park we were supposedly visiting. As we left the auditorium Josh said, “Wow, that Kending place looks really cool, we should go.” We didn’t however. Instead we saw an exhibition about the natural sights around us before getting back on the bus. From there the tour went something like this: Get on bus, get off bus, walk 500m to vista, stand around viewing vista and chatting 10 minutes, get on bus, go to ocean, spend 10 minutes looking in tide pools not at high tide, get on tour bus… The highlight was lunch at a The Youth Activity center. The place is like a youth hostel built in a traditional style of architecture. We had time after lunch to wander around the peninsula where the center was, which was quite beautiful. In the late afternoon one of the last stops was a fish market. Many people were pretty tired of the bussing around by then, but the sun was going down and there was a beautiful light on everything. There was a fisherman sitting in the sun untangling nets. It was really the first time I was so captivated by an image that I felt no fear asking if I could take a picture. I didn’t actually understand his response, but there was a native speaker standing next to me. Apparently he wanted a copy. I eagerly offered to take his address and send him one and after more talk I didn’t understand, it came out that he was from Fujian and he didn’t really want a copy, he was just fooling around. I took quite a few pictures of which I hope at least one will turn out. Back at the hotel I played squash with Katherine, who is just as bad as I am at the game and we had a riot. We then went to the beach and took a dip in the evening water. I was a bit unnerved by the fact that I couldn’t see anything and was seriously worried when a felt something gooey and Katherine (who lived in Tel Aviv and has had this happen before) said I think I got stung by a jellyfish, we got out of the water and went to the same dinner we had the night before.
After the dinner and in lieu of the meeting we had a conference room with some drinks and snacks. There really weren’t enough of us to make much of a party, but Brooke (a Reedie from the 80s who left Reed for the very Reedie reason that there was no Chinese department) got hold of a guitar and I at least spent several hours singing along to Dylan and the sorts. Around ten I headed out to a bar/dance club where some people already were. The scene was a little strange, but there were enough of us to make it fun. A few got a little rowdy, which was funny, and strange from people who had been talking about detailed academic endeavors the night before (This shouldn’t of surprised me, after all I had friends at Reed who presented at academic conferences, just to come back the same day for Renn Fayre). I eventually got bored and went home to bed.The final day we had the morning to ourselves. I had planned to hike up a nearby peak, but was told that was impossible. The concierge offered no other hiking suggestions and I was at a loss. I decided to try to relax, something that for me seems unnatural on vacation. I went to the beach until I got to hot and then returned to my room to read on my fancy balcony. We then checked out of the hotel and it was time for Catherine and I to begin our lone journey Northward.