Like so often of late, I haven't had much time to write. And I've forgotten so much, too.
Before I forget again, I would like to direct your attention to a site (or your sight to a site?) - my fellow teacher Jordan not only is a professional photographer, he also has a nice camera. Oh, and nice pictures. I'm not in any of them, of course, because I'm not nearly interesting enough to look at, but they are nice photos - http://www.jordandiamond.com/index.php?category=5 . So that's what some things in Taiwan look like. I even know where some of those things are, and have seen them myself! I have to admit, though, the picture with the tractors in the cloudy moonlit forest is one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen. It's moody - and then there are tractors!
Hmm. Maybe that's just me, though. Keep it forever, Jordan! I want a copy!
My last homestay family, which will remain nameless but awesome for now (mostly because I don't know how to write the characters for their name...well, I guess I could just spell it Guo, which I guess is right) took me to an amusement park two weekends ago now. I really enjoyed my time with them, and hopefully it goes vice-versa, too. I'm going to digress now, as I always do. This family, the Guos (that doesn't look quite right...), consists of a mother who works tirelessly to keep everyone happy (and me so well-fed that I couldn't move to leave them), a father who also works tirelessly doing research and development for a car-parts company (he does transmissions, thus, 'tirelessly' - oh yeah, bad pun!), a son whose age I've forgotten (12, right?), and a daughter named Melissa, whose age (sorry!)I also can't remember at the moment. 14? Oh, well, I guess the mother doesn't really work tirelessly, after all - she is always buzzing around on her scooter buying things and running errands, not to mention ferrying people back and forth in her car, so I suppose if she were working tirelessly she wouldn't get far.
So that last one was a bit stretched. I don't care, because I'm tired. And I'm writing. Get your own blog if you don't like it! Bah!
Before I interrupted myself, though, I was going to say there are two other members of the family - Melissa's two friends. The night I first came over, so did they. And they were both there every night and day after that. I never actually asked if they're always there that often, but I suspect not. They're a lot of fun to be around, though, so I didn't mind, and I guess the family must not either. Their names were Stella and Gina. Not that they only exist in the past or anything - it's just that those are no longer their names. After being there only a few days, they told me that they were unhappy with the names they had - they are sort of common ones here, and they didn't exactly get to pick them.
Oh! I should explain. Every Chinese person I know of picks an English name to go by. I guess they don't use their Chinese names because most of us just can't get the tones right and would end up mangling their names (imagine your name was Melony and people in one part of the world kept calling you "Morony" - you'd probably want to pick a different name to go by there). Many of them pick their names at a fairly young age: a mistake, I'd think - would you want to stick with anything you chose around the age of 12-16? I suspect if we did the same thing, we'd have a lot of guys named "Badass Awesome Death Killer!" With the exclamation mark. Probably more than one, actually. As another sidenote, many Chinese people pick English names that aren't actually English and aren't any easier to remember. Like Korean or Japanese names. Or they'll go the opposite way and pick names that are very memorable for all the wrong reasons. Like Baggy. Or Lamp.
Well, also they're given a very small list of names by their teacher to choose from, so there are a lot of Angelas, and Angels, and Stellas, and Ambers, and things like that.
Back to my original digression. They were unhappy with their noms de...Anglais? (Yes, you're right, I don't know French. But I do know how to use online dictionaries! Well, it's not like they're guerilla fighters, or famous writers, or anything like that, right?) So they asked for me to think of good names for them.
I am not good with names. Remembering them, or thinking of them. So, I turned to my comfort and guidance!
No, not the Internet, though some of you may have thought so. Unfortunately Biblical names for women are somewhat scarce, and either already very popular, or unpopular due to their strange sound.
So I turned to the Internet (you knew it would happen - in addition to the prohibition against turning to any other gods, perhaps it should read, "or the Internet". heh.). This site, specifically - http://www.behindthename.com/ . It's pretty good. I let them scroll through, and when they found ones they liked, I'd give them my opinion as a native speaker - in the end, they ended up choosing the names "Phoebe" and "Reina". Phoebe will tell you I gave her her name, but I only supervised. She did it herself.
Oh - one other funny thing - Phoebe is artistic. She'd seen one other teacher's signiture, and it included a little smiley face, or a penguin, or things like that on occasion. So she asked me if she could maybe draw a little cat with her signature. I told her it was her name and she could do whatever she wanted with it...which was typically thoughtless of me. So now whenever she writes her name, not just signs it, it includes a little cat face on the P of Phoebe. It's got little whiskers sticking out and everything.
That's it for now - I'll write more later.
Friday, September 01, 2006
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