Day 8 Thursday June 18th

All girls high school today! I thought that maybe it would be different to be in an environment with all girls, but it felt like any other school. We still received numerous cheers and screams everytime we walked into a room, and we still had a jam packed day. The only difference was the extra attention the guys in the group were getting!
The first activity of the day was making t-shirts. I am not a talented artist, so I didn't set my expectations high for the outcome of my shirt. It was hard to feel badly about my shirt though, because everytime I would draw or write one little thing my partner would say, "Good!" After writing in my chinese name, Kala (there is no character for Kay), my partner wrote her name at the bottom. I added some other little drawings and some more color and was finally finished. We took a quick break from making t-shirts to go and perform for the school. I was relieved when I saw the small group of girls we would be performing for, but then I looked up. That's when I saw the many levels of balconies filled with girls waiting to see us perform. I realized there was no point in gettig nervous, because we had already done the dance so many times and none of the Taiwanese students were judging our performance. In the middle of the dance I turned around to see that one of the teachers had joined in with us! She even pushed me and malcolm out of the ending pose so that she could be seen. After more pictures and more compliments from the girls in the high school we heard someone say: "Come on girls, get to class" with a Texan accent. The man was a teacher from Houston who had moved to Hsinchu to teach. Later on in the day we talked to him, and he told us that after college he moved to China and then later Taiwan. After traveling to France two summers ago, I fell in love with the country and developed the dream to one day move to France and teach English. As stupid as it sounds, meeting this teacher kind of gave me some hope for my dream. Anyways, after our performance we went back to the room to get our shirts. We all changed into our shirts before the next activity. They might have been extremely large, but it was still nice to wear something we had designed and created ourselves.
I never truly knew what kung fu was before today. I just thought it was a euphemism for fighting with exaggerated movements. I soon found out that it takes thirty years of training to be able to call yourself a master at kung fu. We obviously couldn't do the moves perfectly with only an hour of basic training, but it was fun to try it. When he asked us to try doing some moves with the sword everyone took a few steps back as each member of the delegation tried the steps.
We went on to a cooking class where we learned how to make rice dumplings. Even though I was stuffed from the huge lunch they had literally just served us, I tried the dumplings after they had cooked. It had an interesting texture to it, but it was good nonetheless.
Rather than go directly with the group right after school, today Mr. Hou picked me up and took me to Yu-Ting' school. She attends World High School, where we were supposed to go on the first day, but due to flight delays we had to miss. Her school is noticably smaller than all of the other high schools we had gone to so far. It was quaint and also beautiful. By the time I had arrived there school was out for the day, but I wish I could have gone and seen it in action. Although it wasn't the school visit I thought we would get, I'm still glad I was able to see where Yu-Ting goes to school everyday.
The plan was to go out for seafood with the rest of the family, but we made a quick detour to go shopping in downtown. We ran into some of the other students from Plano and Taiwan and decided to just stick around and shop some more with them. I went a little crazy with all of the shopping I did, but I am definitely happy with everything I bought. It was too late to go out to dinner after we were done shopping, but Mr. Hou picked up some dinner and brought it home with us. It was my first dinner with my host family (minus her brother). They laughed at me after many failed attempts at correctly using chopsticks, but I didn't mind it. I felt like I was a part of their family, and we were all laughing around the dinner table. As fun as it has been going out to dinner every night, this was probably my favorite meal.

Favorite food/drink of the day: breakfast pizza
New thing learned about Taiwan: almost all of the clothing is one size fits all