March 27, 2022 Why I Left Colorado After only ten months (maybe eleven) in Colorado, my husband and I packed our bags, hired movers, and left the mountainous state of Colorado. Part of me was a little sad, but most of me was happy. Now don’t me wrong–I loved seeing the mountains every single day, but there was something missing. Since we had arrived in Colorado, it felt like something was just off. There was a big of *magic* that was just absent.
February 27, 2019 Twists and Turns Recently on Halloween, I released my first book, Homecoming, as the first of my Trescott Series. If you haven’t checked it out yet or would like to do some last minute holiday shopping, click here to check it out. Thank to everyone who purchased and indulged in my first published novel! I love hearing your feedback and I am excited that this Wednesday, on the 19th, you’ll be able to access more of the shenanigans the Trescott kids are up to.
February 6, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: The (Not so) Skinny on Street Food If you’ve ever been to America, grew up, or lived in America at some point during your life, chances are you have been to a farmer’s market or two. You’ve walked along the street, glancing at all the fresh produce and baked goods, and tested a couple of items before you decided to purchase something, or maybe walk over to the corner store to pick up something different. Open air markets, from my experience, were not a plenty in Taiwan. Which is why upon coming to Taiwan, night markets were one of the most amazing spectacles I’d ever laid my eyes on.
February 3, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: Learning the Lingo Ah, Mandarin Chinese. I’m sure many of you know that it is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn, for speakers of alphabet based languages, that is. Here in Taiwan, Traditional Mandarin Chinese is spoken. It is nearly the same as Simplified Chinese when you hear it spoken, but taking a look at the characters, you notice the difference. Traditional Mandarin Chinese has more strokes and more complexity to it. Taiwan has kept the traditional writing alive despite China’s transition to a simple version of the original language.
January 27, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: How to Pack To Move Abroad When I accepted my job to Taiwan, I was over the moon ecstatic. Living abroad was something I’d always wanted to do, ever since I could remember, and it was finally happening. There were so many things to straighten out and prepare for, but by God, the most annoying of them all was packing. Yes, that’s right. Packing.
January 23, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: Health is Wealth When I came to Taiwan, I was fresh out of working job that involved manual labor, sometimes longer than eight hours a day and six days a week. In a word, I was exhausted. I spent the two weeks I gave myself off from the job laying around, catching up on all the things I didn’t have time to do when I was under the blazing sun. And like in years past, I seemed to gain back all that I had lost during the ten weeks I worked, and then some. And then couldn’t shake it off me.
January 20, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: The Unexpected Bonuses For those of you who keep up regularly with my blog, you’re probably familiar with my fun experience in the ER a little while back. I’ve never been a fan of the doctor–as I am sure not many people are–but honestly, visiting the doctor in Taiwan is one of the many bonuses to living here. As an expat, I definitely have a different experience than the locals when it comes to daily life, but there are bonuses to living in Taiwan, and perhaps living in Asia in general. So let’s break down just a few of the pros to moving to this island:
January 16, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: My Lizzie Moment Growing up as a late 90s to early 2000s kid, Lizzie McGuire and Disney were all the craze. Honestly, I think everyone wanted to be Lizzie McGuire at some point in their childhood. She had Gordo and Miranda, and then she even got a movie where she met a handsome Italian pop singer (who turned out to be terrible in the end, unfortunately) and she sang in front of thousands of people, and still got Gordo in the end. But mostly, I wanted to be Lizzie McGuire for one solid reason: that Vespa ride in The Lizzie McGuire Movie.
January 13, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: How to Be Happy When I arrived in Taiwan in 2016 the second time, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I was all dimples at training when they explained the more tedious details of our duties as teachers. I grinned as we drove around Taipei, checking out the sights, getting our medical tests done so we could get health insurance, and I even cracked a smile when I moved into my apartment and ran some numbers to budget.
January 9, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: The Buzz About Buxibans Not less than twenty-four hours after touching down in Taipei the second time, I was sitting in a lecture hall among forty other men and women. Some of them were the same age as I was, while others were older with far more teaching credentials than I had. Exhaustion filled me, mostly because I’d spent much of the night chatting with my roommate and one of my now good friends, Rona, after she arrived as well. We awaited our training leaders to start what would be a week’s worth of learning how to teach and more about the HESS curriculum.
