Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The Staff

Monday turned out to be a typhoon day and school was canceled. This was unreal for me because I needed to have another day to recover from the rhea. I tell you it still isn't fully gone but today has been much better. Also, I think I got a line on picking up a fixed over here, it looks like they have Friday night riding events called Frider Days, if you want to check it out look at this www.fixedgeartaiwan.com. There is a guy that lives in Taichung which is about 2 hours by bus from here and he builds custom bike frames, I got his number from a guy on the internet and I might pay him a visit in a couple of weeks. Currently I am representing in the back office at Gram, I don't have a class for another 45 mins so I thought I would take this time and introduce everybody to the staff at Gram. Each one of these peeps is quite solid in their own way.

VIVI


This is Vivi, she works up at the front. I guess you could say she is the secretary. She doesn't speak English very well but she does know how to call out on the intercom in English for kids to get ready when their parents come. For example if Jimmy's dad is here to pick him up she will pick up the phone and push intercom and say "Jimmy, Jimmy, please get reeaaaaddyyyy".
It is classic. Oh ya she is also in charge of ordering the food, so when it comes to this I have to make sure she understands what I want. I usually get the dumplings, they are succulent. Once and I while I get the Neo row minh, which is beef noodle soup. Its ok but I think I got turned off of it because I ate that the day I got the rhea.

FANNY

The infamous. Seeing as I gave Fanny her name and everything we are pretty tight, so I got her to pose by the board here. Fanny works side by side with Vivi and another girl named Liv. They kind of do the same job, all of them take care of all the secretarial duties. Liv is the best at English, Fanny the second best, and Vivi is the worst. Fanny drives a scooter and from time to time I see her wizzing by on the streets.


LIV


Liv, another front face taking care of administrative duties. She lives in Banciao(where the subway station is) and also rides a scooter. I think she studies English at university and is really into computer games. Whenever I ask Liv how she is, it is rarely good, she always gets frazzled and blurts out some kind of an answer that indicates she is not good.

TOBEY


You should all know Tobey by now, but here he is just taking care of business. Tobey is serious about success, he likes his Jhonghe branch to be a tightly run ship, and is constantly giving the secretarial staff shite. He drives a Ford Focus and also has a Yamaha scooter, I have ridden in/ on both. He also loves baseball, and doesn't eat beef. However, he really likes soda and baked goods.


TEACHER KATRINA


I just finished a class with Katrina, it went pretty well. I was teaching past and present tenses. For example "Every day, Susan travels to Taipei" and "Yesterday, she didn't travel to Taipei". Sometimes she gives me tips on games to play with the class and also helps me with the photocopier because it is all in Chinese. She doesn't drive a scooter because she is scared, so instead she rides the bus from her house somewhere near the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Jhonghe. In fact it is the same bus I use to get to the subway station except in the opposite direction.

TEACHER QUEENIE



This is Queenie, she is the "Queen of the classroom". She is solid with helping out with my lesson plans. She teaches the little kids so sometimes it is tough to keep them under control. She lives just around the corner and rides a scooter. Her house is about a 5 min walk and she still drives it almost everyday. I give her shite about that on the regular and tell her that she should walk. As you can see she is a hard worker and is always flipping through some kind of book. Her boyfriend lives in Taichung where he is a doctor.

TEACHER MEILING


Ahhhhh, Teacher Mieling. Thats what I like to say every time I see Meiling roll through the doors, I say it like Mr Miyagi says Ahhhhhh Daniel Son in the Karate Kid. Yesterday I was chatting with Meiling about her class because I am going to be teaching it later this week. After we finished with our business discussions I asked her what she got up to on the typhoon day, and I couldn't believe what she told me. She told me that her nephew was in a baby race and she went to watch. Immediately I was puzzled by this so called baby race, so I continued to probe at the subject. She told me that there are crawling races for babies and that her nephew was in one. I immediately pictured this sort of mini dirt track in some underground night club at 3:00am with all kinds of people standing around smoking and placing bets on the babies. $10 bucks on Little Jimmy Lee, $20 bucks on Big Alfred Wang, $100 on Charlie "the bullet" Tsai. I guess I think like this because of that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer got the rooster and named it Little Jerry Seinfeld and starts entering it in underground cock fights. Anyway, the whole idea seems crazy to me and I was dying laughing when she told me about it. So in the end I asked her how the baby did, and she said "terrible", she said when he got on the track he froze and didn't go.

1 comment:

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    ReplyDelete