New Adventures and Current Doings
I’ll be leaving very soon on a three week adventure (hospital check-up, vacation, and then a conference) and I’m kind of excited and sad. I’m going to miss here, but I’m also excited because I know that I will be meeting my family on my vacation! I’m also a little sad because I know that when I come back, a few changes will happen. Right after my trip (like, one day after) I’ll be moving into a new apartment. I will be living with another young woman on a different team here (us young’uns have to stick together). That means I will be leaving my wonderful local family that I’ve been staying… Read more >>
Real Talk
It’s a lot more lonely here than I expected. I don’t really have that many friends, and I don’t really know how I can make new friends. It’s been a hard month because of that realization, but the main problem is that I’m not sure how to remedy that. When I really started feeling a sense of loneliness, it made me very unhappy, but now, since it hasn’t really gotten any better, it just feels like a heavy, dark cloud that I carry around with me. Each day, I just go around doing what needs to be done, but I have lost a lot of motivation for a lot of things. And thinking about it, I think the… Read more >>
Food, Glorious Food!
Here's a deeper look into what I'm eating over here. I eat with my family four times a week, and so far it has been really good food and language learning. We eat sitting on floor cushions around a low table. If it is not a soup dish, there are usually one or two big plates of food for the whole family that we all eat from (we usually eat with spoons or our hands). There is always "non", a round, somewhat flat, bread, as well as some sort of "salad" (usually pickled carrots or cucumbers). Usually, for dessert, there is fruit (whatever is in season, right now it is melon) as well as some sort… Read more >>A Week in the Life
Well, now that I’ve been here almost two months (what???!!! So crazy!!), a routine is starting to form. I think it feels more like home and a real life now, which is good. Days continue to march on, and it is amazing to me to see how quickly the days pass. Each day somewhat differs from one another, but I will share about a whole week, since overall, they slip into a pattern. Right now, I am a full time student, which means that I try to get up to 30 hours a week in language study. Three times a week, I have two different language classes. One of my teachers comes to where I live and works… Read more >>