November 30, 2019 Sparks Fly Coming up the front steps after my parents, Sam and Luke were both tugging away at a black Guns N Roses t-shirt. Both of their eyes shone gold, brighter than the lights above them. They both turned to us, dropping the t-shirt to the ground. Mom glared at them and crossed their arms.
July 6, 2019 Shiver Me Timbers The river pulsed with more strength than I think any of us expected. The closer we came to the dark rushing water, the more deafening it became. My ears twitched as the five of us stood at the river bank, all glancing to each other. All eyes remained on Sam, the oldest of us and the most trustworthy, ironically. Leave it to my brother, the werewolf who had been here all but one time to be left to make these kind of dangerous decisions.
June 22, 2019 On the Road Again It was only two hours into the road trip and due to poor decisions, both Arie and Sam were curled up in the middle row, snoring and sound asleep. If Mom and Dad weren’t here, I’d consider drawing on their faces in permanent marker. But Mom and Dad sat in the front, talking about what music to play and what we were going to do when we got there. The only thing I cared about in their entire conversation was the topic of lunch. Breakfast had been nothing more than bagels.
February 17, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: It’s Time to Chase By the time you read this, it is long past the new year’s resolutions and the hype fading away from us, even if we try to help it. It’s inevitable: all around the world, whenever December ends and January arrives, people set aside their bad habits, their fears, and they do their best to make new goals, plans, and resolutions. But why is it that we often fail to follow through on what we set out to do?
February 13, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: Hiatus in Hsinchu Most days, I feel like I am on a speeding train, with no stops in sight. I have, fortunately and unfortunately, made it so my life is bustling with activities and tasks to complete, which I am grateful for 98% of the time. It’s true: I love feeling like there’s always something to do or work towards. Without a goal or a destination, I feel aimless and I get restless, and then get irritable. But I made sure that upon 2018’s end, there would be no such hectic planning or too many commitments to attend to. New Years’ was more or less a hiatus from the norm.
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 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.
January 2, 2019 Taking on Taiwan: The Start It’s a new year, and it’s officially (when you read this, not as I type this) 58 days until I step onto the plane bound for North America. Believe me, I find it hard to believe that my time in Taiwan is coming to an end. It seems that it was only yesterday that I stepped onto the plane to move here, to start working as an English teacher. Honestly, I had no idea of the places and people I would encounter along the way. That is precisely why in honor of my time in Taiwan and all the memories I have collected along the way, this blog post serves as the first in a series I am releasing, titled “Taking on Taiwan”. And there’s no better place to start than right at the beginning, in October of 2015.
