September
5 |
|
| I
woke up and went and signed onto the Internet again but didn’t
see anybody online from the US. I ate breakfast and got ready to go
out for the day. Today, my uncle had taken the day off from work to
take me out. Da-Quan also didn’t have any school and so, he
was going to tag along as well. The atmosphere in Taiwan was particularly
dour today as the sky was cloudy and the rain was pouring non-stop.
It seems, from the news reports, that a hurricane was slowly approaching
the shores of Taiwan. This hurricane would put a dent in our planes
to go to Kaohsiung later in the week. Da-Ging seemed to have forgotten his lunch for school, and so we all were going to stop by his school to personally hand to him his lunch. Before that, we went to this street diner to buy soybean milk and fritters wrapped in Chinese pancakes. The rain was coming down especially hard during this time and I had to be careful not to get my sneakers wet. Everyone else was wearing sandals. Arriving at Da-Ging’s school, my aunt asked me to come along because Da-Ging wanted me to see him in his classroom. Why? Simply because Daniel had seen him in his classroom the last time he went. For an elementary school, the school sure was huge. To enter the school, you had to get by the security guard at the entrance. That meant identification and a reason for visiting; much like trying to get through customs at the airport. |
Inside
the school, it seemed as if it was break time as the children were
running around, yelling and screaming like banshees on drugs. In addition,
the children were wearing the school uniforms so it looked like I
was in the naval academy for small school children; same red tie and
blue and white suit. I was amazed to see that the school even had
a flashing electronic billboard to display school events and special
school dates. All my high school ever got was those plain old-fashioned
boards where you slid in the letters one by one to spell out events.
Anyway, Da-Ging’s classroom was far within the depths of the
school. As we walked down the crowd of wild children, music suddenly
started playing. My aunt told me that this signaled that the children
needed to return to their classroom. The classrooms all looked pretty
old-fashioned though. The walls were adorned with many drawings and
posters. Arriving at the classroom, we dropped off the lunch and headed
back to the car. We then drove toward Tam-Shuei. Incidentally, it started to rain less and less as we kept on driving north. Soon, it stopped raining at all and the sun actually started to shine. My aunt thought this was funny and so she called my grandma to reassure her that our fun wasn’t going to be ruined by the weather. Originally, my grandma had worried about this. We stopped by fisherman’s wharf and got out to |
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