Happy November! Also, happy birthday to my beautiful wife today 🙂

It’s finally getting “cooler” here. We’ve hit the 70’s! It’s so much nicer and easier to be outside when it’s 75 degrees. I hear it’s getting pretty cold back in Michigan…even some snow? We definitely won’t miss the snow, but Fall sure does look great. Enjoy it for us!

We had a fun week at school this week as we celebrated Halloween with the kids. Halloween isn’t technically a holiday here, well I guess I’m not even sure if it’s technically a holiday back at home, but a lot of people don’t celebrate it here. Our school on the other hand, turns it into quite the event! The week consisted of many Halloween themed coloring sheets, word searches, pipe cleaner spiders, and homemade pumpkin masks. The kids had their English mid-term exams early this week, so it was fun to end the week with all the Halloween stuff.

Friday was the big Halloween day at school. The teachers were given their costumes as you can see below. Sarah was a gingerbread man and I was some sort of Chinese ninja haha!

The kids came all dressed up as batmans, firefighters, and the characters from Frozen…their all time favorite movie. The kids had to try and find candy in the “scary box,” a box filled with fake mice, and a bunch of other icky things. Since the kids don’t trick or treat in Taiwan, the school gave candy to the local businesses to pass out to the kids while they sang their Halloween songs that we learned over the past couple weeks. My favorite part of the day was telling the ghost stories. I’m sure you’ve all heard the “HUMANS CAN LICK, TOO!” ghost story. The one about the “dog” underneath the bed? Anyways, my kids told me they weren’t scared of anything, so I told them that story with the lights off and a flashlight under my chin. Let’s just say the toughest boys in my class were scared crapless at the end! The kids had a blast and it was a nice change of pace for the teachers as well.

Friday night we joined the hordes of all the other young people downtown Xinyi. Most of the bars had costume parties so we checked a few out with our skeleton and demon costumes. We were getting lots of crazy looks on that MRT ride in!

Today is Sarah’s 25th birthday! We celebrated with going out to eat to an All-American restaurant so Sarah could get a giant salad with…RANCH DRESSING! She’s missed that so much being over here haha.We also went to our favorite food stand in our local night market to get one of our favorite meals.

Sarah walks around Bihu Lake every afternoon, and she’s become good friends with a guy we call Terry. He is the owner and cook of our favorite food stand! It’s always fun to interact with their grandchildren and eat a delicious meal 🙂

Until next Sunday…see you!

Kyle and Sarah