Posts Tagged ‘family’
Tokeshi Mouri Family Reunion
Aqua has a lot of family in Southern California and one of his uncles organizes a family reunion once every 3 years. It’s a pretty big deal. Everyone brings a dish and there are activities, scrapbooks, group photos, and games.
I’m not sure how this happened but I ended up taking more pictures of Tofu than family members. I met some new family members, and there were also some cute additions to the family, just like me! Except they were babies.
They had badminton set up and I hadn’t played since high school so that was fun. The net was set up too high so you couldn’t really smash it.
There were lots of other dogs too. Tofu was mostly shy and let other dogs sniff her. She’s more comfortable with the smaller dogs.
Some highlights:
Aqua made an awesome pirate doll. He was so creative, from the hook he made from taking out the pipe cleaner fuzz to the peg leg.
Tofu really enjoys the park and gurgling down water from the bottle.
-
- Tofu’s name tag. Very useful!
-
- Picnic table
-
- The awning
-
- Eating lunch
-
- Aqua enjoys the food.
-
- Tofu enjoys the grass
-
- Play with me!
-
- She likes crunching the water bottle
-
- Cool grass
-
- Gurgle gurgle
-
- She has a toy that can hide a water bottle in its body, but she likes to take it out
-
- I made a doll of me in my wedding dress
-
- Arggh
-
- My pink veil. My hair took a long time to get right.
-
- Pose!
-
- What is this?!
-
- The other dolls and monsters
-
- Tofu plays with a volleyball.
Taiwan Day 7: Family time means food too
Yes, lots and lots of food. At this point, I was feeling reeeeally heavy and fat. Every day, lunch and dinner, heavy stuff. If a little starving African kid went on the food tour I was on, he might have died by now.
This day my aunt on my dad’s side and her husband came over to our house to sit around and we later went to 8 Orders (Ba Dian). Their menu contains just eight different entree sets. Mmm Japanese food! Miso soup is refillable. The best part is that these entrees are only 200 NT each. That’s roughly a little less than 7 bucks. Cheap!
Then we drove around Dan Shui.
Finally, we met up with my uncle on my dad’s side, and his family. I haven’t met my cousin Danny in a long time. I don’t meet my dad’s side of the family very often, actually. They’re in Taiwan or Australia, not really in California though. I know my mom’s side a whole lot better. We ate at this restaurant in Dan Shui that is the only restaurant my uncle will go to. He has cancer so he trusts this restaurant to be light and delicious. Emphasis on the light.
Taiwan Day 5: Family food
Day 5! Big family dinner. Everyone came out, except for one of my aunts’ husbands and one cousin, who is in the compulsory army right now. The food was yummy. My little cousin, Karen, was a pretty good girl, but still very lively. My other younger cousin, Stina, who is a few years younger than me, wanted me to go to her university to go to the night market there, but I had told my older cousin, Nathan, that I would go watch his soccer game. It’s the kind of thing I usually do.
It had been raining so the field was muddy and had puddles in some bare spots of grass so everyone got pretty dirty. The other team wasn’t much of a competition and my cousin’s team had beat them before and this game was a rematch. Not much of a rematch @_@.
Then, after going back to Nathan’s house and cleaning up, we, my parents, and his parents took a bus for about 15 minutes to go to some awesome place to eat….sometimes great, but it was closed because it was a sunday! So we went to a nearby noodle house to eat. It wasn’t so bad. I took these with my camcorder, and I realize now that I can’t take pictures up too close with it @_@.
Educated foreign kids
My mom recently told me a story about my little cousin in Taiwan that surprised me.
My uncle recently visited Taiwan, something he does maybe once every two years. He gave my little cousin, Karen (that’s the English name she decided upon in school), 200 U.S. dollars as a gift (red envelope kind of thing. Asian people like to give money instead of presents. It’s practical!)
So Karen recieved 200 U.S. dollars, but she couldn’t use it because it was U.S. money. At the time, it was 32 NT (Taiwanese currency) to the dollar. By the time it was 34NT, she asked her aunt, my aunt, if she could sell the dollars to her. My aunt said she could. Karen waited until the exchange rate was 35NT and sold her dollars to her mom.
The next day, the exchange rate had risen to 35.something NT. She told her mom that she should give her more money since the rate had risen. Her mom said that she had already sold the money, and that if that’s the way she wanted to play, then she would have to give back more money if the exchange rate lowered below 34NT to be fair. Karen kept her mouth shut.
The first thing that surprised me is that she understood exchange rates. How many kids in the U.S. understand that kind of thing? The only time I remember hearing it in school was in senior year during Economics class. She waited for the rate to go higher.
Also, we weren’t seriously doing compound multiplication until fifth grade. Karen was already comfortable with decimals. (And a whole lot more I’m sure).
And, where was Karen getting her info on the exchange rates? It’s posted on the news every night. And she watches it.
Oh, and the class size ratio of student to teacher has always been really high in Taiwan. 40 kids in a class is nothing and it’s an argument going around that I don’t really agree on. Although it might only work in Taiwan because the kids study like crazy and don’t distrupt classtime because they’ll get their butt kicked by both their parents and the teacher.
Not that I wouldn’t like to be hired, and having less kids in a class would probably only help, but just saying. http://www.arthurhu.com/index/classize.htm Found this. Interesting.