American Holidays in Kinmen
Checking in with a last first-semester update on the day my Lunar New Year break begins! Although schools here don’t take time off for Christmas, we have a three-week holiday for Taiwan’s new year celebrations, meaning I will get to travel around for a while before the next semester starts up in February. This week’s agenda at school included exclusively proctoring final exams (I guess sometimes I am really a teacher) which gave me a bit of time to document the past month’s Christmas and New Year’s festivities before I head out for break.
Kinmen Christmas
I was nervous to be away from family on Christmas — yet celebrating the holiday with my students and fellow English teachers in Kinmen was wonderful and full of surprises. On Christmas Eve, I taught my classes about Christmas celebrations around the world and organized some heated games of Christmas-themed scattegories. (Highlights include when, upon hearing about American “Santa cons,” one seventh grader produced an entire Santa costume out of nowhere, put it on, and wore it for the rest of class.)
The night before Christmas Eve, I baked a batch of sugar cookies and brought them to school for my “English Club” to decorate, along with an assortment of icing colors and toppings. In the club, we have been watching an American baking show and learning some cooking vocabulary so it was a great opportunity to finally get to use some of those words in real life.
The students turned out to be better cookie decorators than me and one of them melted two icing colors together to marble her cookies (pictured above).
Night Before Christmas
After all of us finished teaching our Friday classes, the Kinmen cohort (and some of our local co-teachers) got together for a Christmas Eve dinner and celebration. This dinner included many dumplings, many hats and a group read aloud of “Twas the Night Before Christmas” which one of my friends somehow managed to find a hard copy of in Kinmen.
The Christmas celebrations picked up again the next day with a Secret Santa gift exchange, during which I received a bucket hat and golden bullet-shaped water bottle with a wind lion on it. I had actually previously seen one of my students at school with this aggressive-looking bullet water bottle and found it to be quite a remarkable item. One could say that finding it in my own gift bag on Christmas day was nothing short of a Christmas miracle.
After lunch, I went with some friends to go walk around the picturesque Christmas market in downtown Jincheng. There was a massive Christmas tree, many unfamiliar desserts, and upon walking into a local bar, we even found a large steaming cauldron of mulled wine. However, i was stopped short in my tracks when the bartender told us: “This wine is only available if you have one of these red tickets.”
“Where can we get a ticket?” I asked, staring longingly at the wine cauldron.
“Actually, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe if you walk around and ask some people they can help you.”
We thus set off on a quest to find tickets for free mulled wine. After asking many different shopkeepers if they knew where we could find such tickets, I repeatedly came up short — until finally the people manning the “Kinmen Christmas” desk dug three crumpled coupons out of their pockets and for unknown generous reasons gave them to us. We made a triumphant return to the bar where the bartenders provided us with our prizes — one thimble-sized glass of mulled wine each. However, once we started chatting and told them it was our first Christmas away from home, they poured the three of us each our own beautiful fruit-garnished glasses of wine and refused to accept payment. I left feeling a bit overwhelmed by their kindness (common theme of Taiwan if anyone’s picking up on it) and grateful that I am surrounded by people who made Christmas on a small windy island one of the best days of my year.
Taipei New Year’s
New Year’s (the January 1st version) is not known to be too lively in Kinmen so almost all of my cohort decided to spend our New Year’s long weekend in Taipei. I flew in a bit earlier than the rest of the group and spent Thursday afternoon wandering through the Taipei botanical garden, then ended up at a lovely vegan restaurant where the owner sat down to chat with me for most of the meal and gave me a free brownie and cookie. He convinced me to order multiple dishes instead of choosing between two and i inhaled both of them, then he also offered to ship some frozen pizzas to kinmen yet i declined as with the amount of time that takes I was worried I would not even be in the area anymore. Anyway Highly recommend this spot to any acquaintances who happen to be in the area anytime soon🤠
New Year’s Eve meant getting perhaps the most dressed up I’ve been since pre-March 2020. One of my friends found tickets to a rooftop event next to Taipei 101 where we saw insane fireworks and approximately 50 other Fulbright english teachers.
The day after New Years’, we went to the top of Taipei 101 itself, an experience comparable to Disneyland if it was small and thousands of feet in the air. The Taipei 101 elevator has briefly held the Guinness World Record for fastest elevator and made me feel like I was shooting into space. Or on space mountain, perhaps.
On our last day before heading back to Kinmen, we stumbled into a “creative park” filled with art installations and a very cute fruit tea shop. They served us fruity drinks with little handwritten notes wishing us happiness and blessings in the new year.
As I prepare to head out for 3 weeks of travel around the island of Taiwan, I still find myself wondering specifically about the next time I’ll be in taipei — truly one of the coolest cities I have ever been to. Hope you all had a lovely time celebrating this year’s holidays wherever you are :) 新年快樂🎊🧧🪅！
