"Are you going to Scarborough Fair?"

 For the past three days now, I have been going with my uncle to my cousin's school to teach recorder. Actually it is more like a recorder symphony. There are so many different types of recorders that up until now I was unaware of. There are 5 different types of recorders: soprano, descant, alto, tenor, and bass.
The descant recorder is your standard recorder, it is the kind of recorder that people picture when you mention the instrument. The soprano recorder is just like the descant, but it is about half the size. Naturally it makes the highest sound. Alto recorders are, once again, just like descant recorders, but they are twice the size, (starting to see a pattern here?). The tenor is about twice the size of the alto. The Bass recorder resembles a bassoon. Here is a picture of the five different types and their relative sizes, (courtesy of Wikipedia).


Apparently, one can have a "recorder orchestra" by combining these different types of recorders. This is what my uncle is teaching at the middle school. These kids have some serious dedication, because they come up to the school, on their winter break, for three hours at a time, three days in a row. You simply couldn't do that in the U.S. But then again, my uncle isn't teaching in the U.S. His classes are pretty laid back, and the music that they play is interesting.

Here are the students with all of their different recorders

You can tell that the students really enjoy the practices. They are preparing to put on a performance of "Peter and the Wolf" in a few months, and this is where I come in. They are going to play the music and do a puppet show to an English script. My uncle asked me to find the script online, and rewrite it so that language was more current. This, I did during the first day's lesson. I went home and typed it up into script form, and on the second day, I was tasked with teaching the students the pronunciation. I read through the script and had them repeat everything back to me. Then they recorded me reading the script and doing the different voices. It was really fun. I have always wanted to do voice acting, and this sort of activity is right up my alley.
All of the students are really nice, but very shy. They don't talk much with me because of the language barrier, but a few of them offered to take me to Shilin night market. So, tonight, my uncle and I, along with two of the students, went around the night market. One of the students goes there almost everyday, so she knows the lay of the land there well. She showed us some interesting foods to try. Here is what we had:

This is some serious "fat boy" food. It is like fair food: fried and smothered in cheese. BUT, it tastes really good. It is like a loaded baked potato, but the potato is fried, so the skin is crunchy. It is then topped with ham, broccoli, chives, pineapple (yes pineapple, it was strange yet delicious. It was similar in flavor to Hawaiian pizza), some kind of sauce that tasted like tartar sauce, and tons of melted cheese. I feel like this would sell really well in the U.S.

Literally ladle-fulls of cheese

We also had these fried balls of delicious-ness. They consist of fried dough stuffed with cabbage and pieces of octopus, then they are topped with slivers of dried fish, mayonnaise, and wasabi sauce.

The cook pokes the dough with a stick to turn it in the mold

The guy in the back is filling the dough with octopus.

The finished product

For dessert, we had waffles:

They pour the batter into a mold and cook it so that the waffles are in these cute shapes. This kind of food is perfect for Taiwanese style eating, which is eating while you walk and gawk at all of the amazing sights in the night market.

these are lanterns hanging outside of a temple

Goodnight everyone, I will see you tomorrow!