The Week - In Retrospect

This last week was teacher's in service. Since it takes an hour to get to our school several of us decided to hunker down and stay the week. We packed in our food, clothes, and cologne for the three night excursion. You might be wondering why we only stayed three nights. Well my friends on Monday we did come down off the mountain in order to open our bank account. Okay, so we opened our bank accounts at the local Post Office, which also does banking.

I had gotten a cold last Friday, and throughout the week I had to fight with it. For some reason it just did not want to leave me alone. But once I overlooked the goodness of blowing my nose and feeling hazy, everything was pretty chirpy. Early in the week one of my Co-workers and I did some hiking along a small trail near the school. This trail headed towards several waterfalls, which we decided to hike up. Scrambling up little stream beds and then up steep banks in order to conquer waterfalls is quite fun. The rest of the hike took us past a tea plantation and through some "wild boar" territory (unfortunately I never saw any, but Sandy had the thrill of meeting one on a previous occasion) and then connected us to a narrow blacktop road that headed down to a bend in the river and up to a more prominent road which probably went for miles connecting farmers and little houses in the mountains together - I ventured to say it eventually dumped onto the east coast (though I have not verified this). This whole hiking thing was fun but two things were a bit distracting from the beauty of the area and the enjoyment of nature, they were: snakes and leeches. Okay, let's start with the snakes. Case number one. Two weeks ago I was walking up to our apartments in Shenkeng when I was startled by a little green and white snake (okay, I was actually startled by Sandy who had grabbed my arm, who was startled by the green and white snake - but you know what I mean). This country knows how to grow snakes. There are lots of snakes. In the mountains there are even more snakes then blacktop roads going to large apartment complexes. Case number two. If you do not mind, travel back even further in time with me, more than a month ago. I'm new to Taiwan and very naive. We are all up at the school on a Monday morning. As we come into the office there is a little cage with a snake. This one is a baby and comes in a nice blue color. Please forgive me for being vague, but I do not recall its name. I do recall there was a snake book opened up and the name of a very poisonous snake sat next to this living specimen. Alright, so back to our hike. As you can imagine my mind was constantly thinking about all the snakes out there and the possibility that one will fall out of a tree or slither on the small path (I guess some unfortunately large snakes sit up in the tall bamboo and wait for their prey to wander underneath and then they fall down on them and attack). But then there was the leeches. Now these guys are not so bad, just annoying. So I went along on the little ol' hike and I felt a sort of itching sensation around my ankle. I didn't think much of it, I figured I just got a little scratch somewhere along the way. Well an hour later I finally decide to look at my ankle and there is one leech on my left ankle and four on my right ankle. They decided to crunch down through my cotton socks and start suckling my skin for blood. Ya, my right ankle looked pretty bloody. I picked the dudes off and continued on my marry way. The blood stained socks really had more of a graphic effect rather than anything meaningful. No real harm was done, and twelve hours later the wounds had healed up nicely. I am not sure how soon I'll be hiking in the thick of the jungle again though. I am just to paranoid, and I believe justifiably so! Snakes, wild boar, or leeches - have your pick.

This last week we were supposed to get our videos from the week before to transcribe. For some reason they did not get the videos to half of us, so we were unable to work on that. It would have been a good use of our time however, since the transcribing process takes many, many hours.

Well toodaloo for now my friends. -Andrew
(sorry for the lack of pictures...I keep leaving my camera in places were it is boring and uneventful, I will try to make more attempts to bring him along - so you can see what I saw through the eye of an Olympus)