August 2009

August:

The first thing was the intense training at company headquarters in Taipei. Looking back on it, I have fond memories, but I do know that at the time it was hard going and worrying because I didn't know if i'd make it through the training process. I did, and now I have been teaching for three months. yay!

The weather was amazingly (not in the good way) hot! I did manage a little exploration with fellow trainees, which was awesome!

Here are a couple of photos of Longshan Temple in Taipei.

I met my new boss, Betty, during training and was informed I would be in Nantou City. I had no clue where that was or what I was in store for. I had to google it when I got in to the hotel that evening...I had spent the whole day envisaging a tiny little place in the middle of nowhere, but thankfully what I could find on the internet was not so bad.

To cut a long story short, after training and a couple of days in Taichung for further training (which were glorious), I was taken to Nantou and my new apartment. Which is huge! Uncomfortably so methinks.

I spent the first week just about managing to teach the material...time management was a huge problem for me in the beginning. It can still be like that now, occasionally.

I escaped to ChangHua on my first weekend. I managed to navigate the bus system to meet my soon to become good friends Gareth and Geoff. It was a great weekend of food, drink (naturally), and making new friends :D We also visited the giant Buddha that makes ChangHua famous.

Here is a photo of the giant Buddha




This is the Temple that sits behind the Buddha
This is another shot of the Buddha taken on a later visit:
I love this photo: it's of the fish jostling for food in the pond behind the temple. It is amazing to feed them!
I didn't do much else in August...get used to teaching and visit ChangHua at weekends.

Here is a video of me feeding the fish at the Great Buddha Temple :D