Bring on the Heat!

Some summer fun!

I finished working at summer school this last Friday. Super exciting! I couldn't have asked for a better summer job. I've spent the last four weeks with these students, so I'll definitely miss them, even the ones who purposely tried to get on my nerves. More exciting news, I'll be working there again next year and hopefully get to plan and teach some math lessons/activities myself.

I'm a fairly light packer. For 7
weeks, I think this is pretty good.
Let's be honest too; how much
could I realistically carry? Haha.

It's finally down to the last few days! I leave for Taiwan on Thursday, and I'm as ready as I'll ever be. (That 13-hour time difference though...no one is ever prepared for that.) This past weekend has been about packing and catching up with some friends. I've got a suitcase filled with tank tops, shorts, summer dresses, sandals, and sunscreen. Did I mention the weather in Taiwan is HOT and HUMID?!? It's subtropical weather. Imagine Nebraska summer heat but way worse. I know, crazy. So, I suppose bring on the heat, or perhaps, better yet, let it rain! I've got an umbrella, a light jacket, and a pair of tennis shoes in my duffle bag, and my backpack is just filled with fun school stuff.

I've also been squeezing in some Chinese lessons online and with my parents. I am nowhere near fluent but at least I'm headed in the right direction. Recently, I've had a lot of people ask me what languages I speak, and I've never realized how (crazy/cool/different/etc.) my response was until some of them pointed it out. I speak English, some Taiwanese, some Chinese, and a little Spanish. The first three languages are kind of fun for me because in any given conversation with my parents or my two brothers, I will speak either just one of them, a mix of two of them, or all of them combined. Sometimes, I start a conversation in one language and end in another, but often times, I just say the word in whichever language comes to my mind first. As a result, I speak with sentences that use all three languages. Ummmm...confusing! I think I can't even tell the difference after awhile, since my brain tries to sort the three pretty rapidly. My goal though is to eventually speak all four of these languages fluently!

Side note: I find languages quite fascinating. So, in case you were curious, Taiwanese is a popular spoken dialect in Taiwan. It was what every student learned in school before the country adopted the Chinese language. (This was a significant and necessary change, since it is impossible to write in Taiwanese.) I usually compare Chinese and Taiwanese to English and Old English, although I've found that with the latter two languages, if you can understand one, then you can try to understand the other. When it comes to Chinese and Taiwanese, you're still out of luck. The two are quite distinctive.

The next post will be when I'm in Taiwan! Thank you for all of your love and support!

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