Ding Dong! The sitch is Red!

Hello all! Yet another snippet into the life of Clinton. I had to post these pictures because first of all one of them has me with my new very Taiwanese fashion glasses on and also what a night market in Taiwan looks like. This place was huge and was pretty fun to look around though most of the places, me and Daniel decided, were mostly clothing shops for girls. It was pretty fun to walk around though. Definitely have to go back there if anyone of you people decides to come and visit me (just so you know that was a hint).

Well this week has been rife with new projects to be started. First project I started this week was french! There is a teacher here from Paris named Adrien and he comes to our school to teach the French club. Here is a super cool guy and we've become acquainted whenever he comes on Wednesdays. Well at the end of last school year I realized that I have an opportunity that I'm not taking advantage of. I took 2 years of French when I was in high school because I was pretty interested in the language, mostly because girls were interested in the language (they weren't interested in the language perse as much as hearing guys speak the language). Well anyway, any and all such knowledge that was gleaned from those two years has since laid dormant in the recesses of my mind since learning Chinese and using that foreign language to supplement any need of international communication. Well I thought that since there is this guy here that is a native fluent speaker of French and he speaks very good Chinese (with a french accent which is super funny to listen to) I should be taking advantage of this opportunity to dust off my French knowledge and have him tutor me. We correlated our schedules and worked out that he would stick around campus after he taught his french club and tutor me for as long as I needed it every week. We started this week and I'm excited to report that I understood at least 50% of the french that was spoken which surprised me. I'm not sure if it was from words that I remembered from taking it all those years previous or that he was speaking in very rudimentary french or the English-French similarity or a combination of all of them but I thought I did pretty good. Now I was pretty much dumb when it came to speaking but I hope that that will come quickly without too much pain and anguish.

Another project that I'm starting is yet another performance that I need to prepare for. Not only am I supposed to provide a singles conference with a night of Jazz music hosted and performed by yours truly (something that I have never attempted by myself, let alone in a foreign country!) but now the school wants me to do a "music of Christmas around the world" presentation of sorts to hundreds of high school kids in December for an hour. So I've got a little bit more on my plate to collect and plan for the future in my "me" time but I think that I'll enjoy the preparation, and even the getting up in front of those people will probably a thrill as well. I'm just not looking forward to the imminent nervous break-downs that are sure to come caused by worrying about all of the little details that I will want to have perfect that Taiwan people seem so inept at providing comfort for. Maybe that's being unfair. I've only dealt with places and school systems in Utah county for things like this and let's face it, that area is the land of over-achievers so maybe outside of that very accommodating bubble maybe everybody else is just like them. It just drives me nuts sometimes because it is such an anarchy of chain of command! You see, the stress is already starting. Well anyways, I'm hoping that this year's fall semester will not include last year's interesting experience of shingles again. I do think that these things will really make my fall semester full of growth which I can't complain about because that is one of my big goals this year, to take advantage of growth experiences and milk them dry. I pray that while I'm sucking the marrow from life this year that I don't die choking on a bone.