Ann: Here is the plan for Friday. The teacher sent it this morning.
| COAST WALK · Grade 8 |
|---|
| Friday, meet 7:40 at the classroom |
| Bus to the coast, then walk 6 km to the waterfall |
| Back at school by 16:00 |
| Bring: flashlight, water, lunch, one bag only |
Ken: A flashlight for a day walk? That seems strange.
Ann: The last part goes through a short tunnel in the rock. It is dark for about three minutes.
Ken: Now it makes sense. I will borrow my brother's.
Open 6:00 to 18:00 · Free · About two hours
The path is level for the first kilometer and then rises. If you have a young child who needs to sleep, or find walking hard, the first part and back is a pleasant hour on its own.
There is one faucet with clean water, at the middle point. After that there is none, so fill your bottle there. A babysitter is not needed: children over eight who can follow the rules may walk with a group, but somebody in the group must be an adult.
Dear Miss Wu,
You asked us to write about a place that has changed. I chose the beach below my grandmother's village on the west coast.
When my mother was a child, the sand went out about two hundred meters. In an old photo she is standing far from the water. In the golden light of evening today, the sea reaches the road, and the small temple that used to be behind the beach now has water at its back wall twice a month.
My grandmother does not say the word climate. She says the sea has become greedy. I am not sure the two ways of saying it mean different things. I would like to write about this for the class project if that is all right.
Lin Chia
Every hill and river in this country carries a name, and most names were given twice. One name came from the people who lived there first; another was written later on a formal, official map.
Sometimes the two are close. Often they are not. A river called Clear Water in one language may be named after a person in the other. When only one name is printed, a memory quietly disappears.
Some towns now put both names on the sign. It costs almost nothing and changes nothing on the ground. But a child who reads two names learns something a single name can never teach: that this place was here, and full of people, before the map arrived.