Ma Po Tofu

Mapo Tofu

Howdy,

This week has been pretty busy, as with every week so far. As Fulbrighters, we are in the mutual selection process, in which we are grading possible elementary schools that we would be teaching at, while the Taiwanese english teachers (LETs), who we will be working with, are grading us. Last week we had actual teaching practice in which we were able to work together with LETs paired together by their school pairing. It was my first time teaching. I've never taught an actual class before, let alone english as a second language, to 5th graders. So it was great practice and a terrific exercise personally, and I felt like I learned a lot from that. 

Sadly, I haven't made much opportunity for cooking this past week. Luckily, Andy (my former Taiwanese roommate) was visiting and we were able to do a little cooking together. 

So here tis, Mapo Tofu:

Taro Seafood

Howdy,

Sorry if this is a bit late, i got hit with a sudden and unexpected 24 hr bug, maybe I ate too much roast duck last night, something I thought impossible... Seems like I'm doing better now.

Friday night we had family dinner. There are 12 fulbrighters all together, so a potluck style meal ended up being the way to feed all of us. For my contribution, I made "taro seafood." It jumped out at me because Yakima isn't the best place for taro cultivation and has been absent from my cooking repertoire in the past, even though I've enjoyed trying it throughout my travels.

One of the best parts about preparing this was purchasing the seafood (shrimp, squid and clams) from the daily traditional market. It's only a 10 min. walk from the apartments. Kaohsiung has fabulous fresh seafood, and purchasing this the day of was pretty exciting.

My seafood, the shrimp have been blanched already
 and the octopus cleaned and cut into strips.

Made It

So, it's my 6th day here in Taiwan, and it's been a very short week. Long days make for short weeks, and we've been pretty busy. Arriving with all of other Fulbrighters on 8/1 was a good day. We've spent the majority of the week organizing our living situations here, getting cell phones, applying for our alien residence cards, opening a bank account, etc.

Fonda and Alex are both employed by Fulbright here in Taiwan and have been terrificly helpful getting us set up. As Paul, one of my buddies, was saying, it's like having a personal guide, who if you ask for something, has a good answer and will even show you where you need to go to have it done, and instead of us paying her, she's paying us.

Being so busy these first few days with living situation, it's easy to forget why we're here, but today we met with the director of the de facto american embassy in Kaohsiung. It was refreshing to remember that we have a pretty great purpose here and the means to make a meaningful impact while we're here.

(shaved ice with mango and condensed milk)

As far as what we'll be doing, we're going to be placed in 2 elementary schools, and have 16 hrs of class a week that we will be co-teaching (english) with a Taiwanese english instructor. My personal project while here is food related. Basically, I hope to use food as a way to look at a culture, so I'm going to be eating and cooking a lot to try and explore this. Sadly, I have yet to take pictures of the food here, but have had some fabulous meals, including a few very Taiwanese dishes like stinky tofu and oyster glutinous pancakes.

Speaking of which, I'm off to explore a night market tonight, so I'm going to get ready for that.

Laters.