Thursday, June 17, 2009
I never truly knew how N’SYNC truly felt while going on tour until today. Walking into the high school was one of a kind; there was a tunnel of at least thirty high school girls screaming and giggling through their broken English to welcome us into their school. I was led up a flight of stairs (through more giggling, staring girls) to a conference room where I met up with the rest of my conglomerate, my delegation. After about five minutes of chitchat, a line of girls flowed into the room to assist us with the morning’s activities. We watched a truly thrilling introduction of the school, informing us of the classes, awards, clubs, etc. before we began. Our morning activity was to design our own t-shirt. When the instructor informed the girls (in Chinese) to come pick one of us to help, a young girl named Bonnie rushed up to me. She is in 10th grade at their high school and speaks fairly good English. Being the amazing artist I am…ha, I had no clue what to draw on my shirt, so she told me to write my Chinese name, which was given to me Tuesday at Hsiang Shan High School, it was built around my full name, Ben O’Neill. On the back I attempted to draw a “taiji”, commonly known as a Yin-Yang. To top the shirt off, she wrote her Chinese name, in calligraphy, opposite mine, it made mine look fairly depressing, but it was legit none-the-less. During our creation, we had a nice conversation about many things in both Taiwan and America. One of the highlights, or lowlights, of our conversation was her opinion of America. The first thing she asked was “Do American people eat McDonald’s everyday?” she was dead serious, she was raised to believe America was a fat nation, one thriving off fast-food (an ideal Malcolm held up easily during dinner).
This leads me to a short monologue, so please bear with me. One of the main reasons this delegation was created was to disprove what Mrs. William’s calls the “Brittany Spears” world view on American teenagers, but it also sets out to disprove many more stereotypes, like that of the fat, lazy American that Bonnie ha believed was pervasive in our country. Although we may not be as small as other citizens of the world (The people here are sticks, literally. I tried on a XXL pair of jeans today that were far too small. The girls were shorts so short most Americans would look goofy in while they are still too big! It’s insanity.), but we are not all as large as the world sees us to be. Even though we love our fast food, we need to begin to think about both the world’s perception of Americans and how we act abroad; this is the true meaning of this voyage, to open our eyes to see what other people see us as. We may see ourselves as the sophistication of world ideas, but no one else does, and if we indeed are what we say, we must then prove it.
Alrighty, back to my day, after designing my beautiful t-shirt, we walked to the courtyard to give the school our performance. We get down there to an empty school, relaxing in the scorching summer sun when we hear the bell ring for class to be over. Within a minute then entire courtyard along with every surrounding balcony for 4 floors was filled with girls, jammed in like sardines. We introduced ourselves to N’SYNC-esque, screams, but it’s when the music came on that it got crazy. The minute it began to play all 1,800 girls and maybe a few teachers erupted into high-pitched screams. During the dance, one of the teachers even came out with us and began dancing; it was hilarious! At the end of our performance, we were introduced to an English teacher from Houston, Texas, what a small world! He was pretty cool and we talked to him for a bit later on in the day.
After our performance, we went to the other half of the school to learn Chinese Kung-Fu. We learned that there are three types, slow, fast, and sport; today we learned a little bit of Slow Kung-Fu. It was a very relaxing art form that can also be used as self-defense, pretty nifty. At the end of our lesson we got to play with the freaking sweet ninja-sword, definitely reminded me of Andrew buying the batman switchblade at Willow Bend.
In the afternoon, we joined a girl’s cooking class to cook traditional Hakka (Taiwanese) food, I was stuffed and ate very litte, but the girls were very nice and exceptionally talkative. They even laughed at my pure failure at cooking; it was a grand ole time!
Once school let out, Malcolm, John, and I went back to John’s house while we waited for Vanessa to get out of school. He has a freaking sweet place. He lives in a high-rise apartment complex in Hsinchu that has pool tables, ping-pong tables, a pool, a courtyard, and workout facilities; it’s amazing! During our hour there I whipped both of them in ping-pong, even beating Malcolm one round 21-6, hoorah! We picked Vanessa up and went downtown for the evening. Right after we got out of the car, Malcolm saw what he was craving, McDonald’s. He convinced the group to go in and have dinner, our first American meal since leaving LAX; it was beautiful. I even made some new friends with two girls that were staring at us as if we just landed off of Mars. Our main goal downtown was to pickup the shirts that John and Vanessa had made for Malcolm and I; having Chinese writing on one side and our face on the other, they were legit!
Once this was completed, we walked around for a bit before heading home; it was a successful day.
Song Description (I hope you guessed it…): “Pop” – N’SYNC
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