We Won Them Over With Ice Cream

Until I have money, this may never become what you'd call a "travel blog" -- at least in the traditional sense. However, when other people visit here from foreign lands, I can always write about their trips.

This summer my friend and former co-worker, Andrea, got a pre-grad-school gig for teaching English to Taiwanese foreign exchange students. It was a group of about fifteen, ranging from 11 to 27 years old, but most of them college-age. Andrea asked for volunteers to visit her class so her students can practice conversing in English, and there were also opportunities to showi the folks around Colorado Springs outside of classtime. I joined in a couple of excursions, the highlight being the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.




"Jeffrey", the oldest, demonstrably had the most cajones of any guy in this group if only for his ability to purchase and wear this hat.





Many of them chose to go by their selected "American names", some of which weren't really names but rather English descriptors they favored. A particularly fluent girl, "Wonderful", had to explain that one to me. The two of us would discuss sports and cultural traits of the U.S. and Asia. I learned some new things from her:

... "I didn't expect people in Colorado to be so nice. So helpful. They say hello to us and smile."

"Really?"

And she had some things to learn from me:

... "in fact, until this generation, soccer in America was mostly seen as a sport for girls."

"For GIRLS?"

The most difficult American custom for the Taiwanese students to come to terms with, at least from Andrea's and my perspective, was the ability to voice criticism without fear of certain punishment of some kind.

Here's a scenario. When I first met the group back in June, I walked into the class while they were watching Ken Burns' edge-of-your-seat "popcorn" documentary, Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery. My interruption seemed welcome. I love a good Ken Burns doc (The Civil War, Baseball, etc.), but when it amounts to 240 minutes of foreign gibberish laid over panning and zooming illustrations of trees and canoes and bears, it then qualifies as assisted suicide.

Andrea flipped the lights on as the second hour came to a close, and judging from the students' groans of wooziness, lights off was clearly preferable. She then asked the class if they'd like to see the other half of it later. They nodded.

"No, no, see, you don't have to watch it," she said. "If you guys don't like it, we can watch something else. I won't be offended -- I only checked this one out from the library because that's what they had."

The students glanced at each other, muttering in hushed Mandarin.

"If you thought the movie was boring," she continued, "it's okay. You should tell me so we can do something more interesting."

I chimed in. "If we think you like it, we will make you watch the rest of it."

"No!" they rang out. "No, let's do something else."

If you'd talked to the Taiwanese students during their first month in the U.S., they'd set out to convince you that everything was just sunshine and hamsters. Though I know they mostly enjoyed their stay, it wasn't always exciting considering they had no ready transportation -- a punishing handicap to have in this town.

Once they opened up and were more confident in disclosing their collective impressions, the group became much easier to cater to. From what I could tell...

They Liked:

-Manitou Springs: the #1 shopping destination for wooden lighters, saltwater taffy, and little bitty buffalo figurines. They bought these in excess on their last-day souvenir blitz , for which I tagged along. It was like participating in a drill. After "William" was checked out for a pair of silver earrings, his classmates waved him along like he should steal home, and we'd dash into the next shop that had a standing cowboy-slot machine at the entrance.

-Ice cream: Five minutes into that segment of the barbecue, it was clear that we didn't buy enough quarts of Josh and John's.

-Metallica, Tom Petty, and a song called "Earthquakes and Sharks" by Brandtson: These were tunes on a mix CD in my car that they'd clap or bob to the most. They weren't familiar with any of the artists, but if I had a Beatles CD, it would have been much different.

They Did Not Like:

-Hiking: At least not after a religious volunteer group decided that these greenhorns could get a good gosh-darn warmup by scaling Mt. Silverheels. Which is something everybody does their first week in Colorado, and I was apparently unaware.

-Downtown Colorado Springs: "Everything is too expensive."

Overall, the students seemed to have had a good experience here. Not sure if any of them will make a return visit to the Springs in years to come, but that's just because there's so much more country you'd want to experience before retreading this place. They'd have to experience a lot more than just Colorado in order to get a good picture of what is America.

But the same can be said to me.