OK so I haven't updated my blog in ages. Why is that? Well, my work got incredibly busy there for a while, to the point that some of the senior managers were legitimately concerned about my health.
Then things got better, but you know the longer you wait before you update one of these things, the more difficult it seems to do. But I enjoy this blog and I enjoy speaking frankly about my life here in Taiwan, so I am forcing myself to continue with it.
Recently my life here improved greatly. There are several reasons for this. First, I recently acquired two beautiful cats from two coworkers who were going back to USA. Their names are Chou Chou 臭臭 and Mei Mei 美美. Both of them were rescued kittens that were abandoned. Chou is ten months old now, and Mei Mei is nine weeks. When I first got Mei Mei, she was only three weeks old, so I had to feed her kitten formula and help her go to the litter box. She seemed so fragile and helpless back then, but she grew up quickly! At three weeks she weighed only 375g, but now she weighs 1.1 kilos!
Anyway, I can’t describe how much more ‘full’ my life feels simply with the addition of these two cats. They love to sit on me, talk to me, get cuddled by me, and play with me. They also love to play with each other which I find endlessly entertaining. But there have been other changes in my life as well.
My workload at work has gone down dramatically. I still teach the same number of hours, but the amount of work I need to do outside of just teaching is not nearly as much as it used to be just a month or so ago. They made some minor changes to the way things are at work that drastically cut down on the amount of time I need to spend working on extra things outside of class time. Fortunately my pay has stayed the same, so I get the best of both worlds.
There’s also been a bit of a changing of the guard at work, as previous teachers have returned to America and new teachers have been hired. Before there was a lot of friction between myself and the other English teachers, and I think part of that was because they knew me as ‘one of the guys’ before my promotion, so they found it difficult to accept me as a manager. But these new teachers haven’t known me as anything but a manager, so I tend to get along much better with them. In fact, several of them came back to my place on Saturday to drink beer/eat pizza/play video games, which was fun.
I’m also making new friends outside of work, including some Japanese friends. This is great, because not only does it give me a chance to practice my Japanese, but also it keeps me in touch with my ‘Japanese’ personality. I don’t know if I can explain it well, but I find that when I speak Japanese, my whole personality and mannerisms change slightly. I feel more entertaining, more engaging, and more charismatic when I speak Japanese. And people seem far more interested in what I have to say when I speak Japanese as well, so it’s great to have these new friends.
I’ll try and update the blog more often from this point onward, but for now I’ll leave it here, and just let everyone know that life is good!
