News from Taiwan

I noticed I've mostly just put a bunch of pictures up lately without any sort of real info on what's been going on here. I'm starting my third week of teaching here and so far classes are going well. No big complaints from anyone yet, which I think is kind of surprising. The kids in my classes are really good and my co-teachers are all so helpful. The co-teachers really make things manageable, I'd be in trouble without them... in fact I teach one class alone for 3 hours Saturday evening with older kids alone. Its really stressful preparing for that class because I can never think of what to do, my other classes with younger kids are so structured that I already know what I'm doing in class next week as soon as I finish this week's class.
On Saturday night a few of us met our neighbors and were invited to eat some food and have drinks with them. It was a lot of fun even though it was extremely difficult to communicate with them. We hadn't been planning on staying up late Saturday night though because we were going to leave early Sunday (our only day off) to head up to a town on the north coast, Jiofen. We ended up leaving at like 12:30 Sunday afternoon and got halfway there and realized it'd be dark by the time we got where we had planned to go, so we decided to turn around. And then we noticed a mountain that didn't look too far away. We figured since we were already there, we may as well see how far up the mountain we could get by scooter. We got pretty high up and ended up in Yangmingshan National Park. It was really nice, and there's a bunch of pictures posted here that I took there. On the way home, we were driving along the coast around sunset which was pretty cool. About a half hour from home my friend got a flat tire on his scooter and after a lot of confusion trying to communicate with gas station attendents that spoke no English (we even called one of the women we do a language exchange with to try and talk to them through her...). We ended up just leaving the scooter there and both took my scooter back home and went and got his fixed the next day. I got a wicked sunburn from riding all day in the sun without sunscreen.
And the latest news here is that there are two typhoons heading our way. Looks like one will definitely hit Taiwan tomorrow and the other (stronger) one may or may not hit Taiwan but if it does it looks like it'd be Thursday. I'm hoping for a few canceled classes!
I've been learning a bit of Chinese through a language exchange where me and two other teachers meet with two Taiwanese women. They teach us Chinese and their English is good enough that we can just talk with them in English. Its a good way to learn some Chinese, and its free!
So, everything is going pretty good here. I'm having a great time and making a bit of money, not a bad deal!