I'm coming home for Christmas.

Who's in?

So I teach for this woman who runs classes out of her house - she has a classroom set up in her living room. Ghetto, I know. Anyways, she's like, "Your Chinese is pretty good, do you want to enter a speech competition?" The competition is for foreigners speaking chinese and the topic "public health insurance".

I was mad hesitent, but she said that there's only one other person. It was more like a favour than anything, because her sister was running the competition. Oh and she said that she'd write the 5 minute speech. And because there was only one other person, I'd automatically come in second place and win $3000nt ($160 cdn). So, I said - sure. why not?

With 1 week to go, I got my speech - written in Chinese. Dammit - I coudn't read it! So I had someone read it to me and I wrote it out in pinyin (Chinese written with English letters). But my pinyin sucks, so it took a long ass time. Memorizing this thing was a biatch too. Someone basiclly was reading it to me and I was saying it back, exactly the way they were saying it. It was also hard because, I didn't know what some of it meant.

Then I found out that there is not just one other person, but now there are 7. GREAT. Just GREAT!

Day of the speech. A lot of my friends came to support me. I watched the first speech, one of my buddies who's been in Taiwan for 6 years, and felt... damn... I'm out of my league. I went into the practice room. I was the last one to go up - #7. Well it turned out to be #6 - the guy before me chickened out.

My turn-

eye contact...
keep talking...
move your hands...
make people laugh...
good...
good...
shoot, what's next???
dammit, forgot...
look at the cue cards...
keep going...
almost finished...
done!
*sigh*

Wasn't expecting anything.
My buddy came in first place.

Some Japanese lady who's been in Taiwan for a while came in 2nd (she sang a song in Chinese - suck up)

I was 3rd.

nice!