The Moment of Dream Come True

hi 

Sorry, my friends!  I haven't updated my blog for almost a month since I've dedicated myself in job searching.  It took a great deal of time sending applications or filling out my resume onto employeers' HR system.  In addition, i have been quite anxious and stressed out, since the time is running out.  Part ot the reason I didn't write my blog until now is the things i always want to share with my friends are positive and happy things.  I want to tell you "I've found a job!" instead of negative things.

Today, after talking with Jill this morning, I feel quite relaxed and NEVER EVER worry about my job at all.  Thanks again, Jill!  I love learning English but i couldn't spend much time on that due to my tight schedule, and esp the final is comming in two weeks.   Thinking spending a summer in a language school where i can work on stuff i really want to concentrate on would probably be a great treat for me.  I want to have a very good accent which is hard to improve without a lot of work or starting at a young age with native speakers and a focus only on spoken, not just written.  Besides, this would make a good use of my summer and give me a chance to remain in the US.

好感動哦! 因為太感動了! 我一定要寫中文　
我今天第一次吃到飯耶! 這是來美國二個月半來我最豐盛的一餐(外食不算)
有二菜一湯還有飯耶! 哈　我自己煮的哦! 小鼻，我會做飯了!! 哦　耶耶耶耶

Jill: when you can deal with stressful situations

It was such a tough week for me.  I don't like and am not used to writing down negative feelings and that's the reason why I didn't update anything for this past week.  But i do want to keep you, my good friends, updated about my life here, so i am posting my conversation with Jill via Gtalk, so you guys can sense a bit the situation.

Thank you so much, Jill!   After talking with you, I really feel much better.   I suddently realized I was very immature and dependent.   Now I knew how to adjust myself to the new environment and what attitude i should have towards the people i don't get along with.   Thank you, Jill!

Hi!

This's my room, small but nice and comfortable.    Especially, I have a good view from my window - will upload the widow view some other sunny days.

Actually, being too lazy and too busy, i was not used to writing blog while in Taiwan, but right now in the US, I just want to write, to keep a record and to memorize all of the touching and pleasant moments, so I'm trying to write more.

Today I took part in an activity which is so called TGIF, Thanks God It's Friday, which takes place every Friday, from 3:30pm to 5:30pm.   It's an activity for people to make new friends.   The most important, during this period, all of the meals and drinks are free!   Fantastic!  Why there are no such social settings in Taiwan?  I made many new friends from all over the world wherever I even don't know.   We happily talked, made jokings, and introduced yourself whenever there were new friends joined.   They're all very nice, friendly, and active.  I'm happy that I made many new good foreign friends today.

Today was my first day going to the class in the U.S..    Iheard many people said that they suffered a English difficaulty during their first semester, but things will become getting better and better in the future.  However, I just only have one semester.   I'm really afraid that  by the time I'm fitting into the class, it's gonna be the time i need to go home, so i feel a bit nervous when I'm gonna go to class.

Fourtuntely, i am so happy that i'm well-survived.   I could comprehend almost 90% of the teacher's talking besides some words I don't know.   Now I suddently realized vocabulary is really the key.   I neither understood the JUNO, the movie I went to see in Monetery with my Ameircan friend, nor the guide tour winery and introduction to sea otters in Montery's world-famous aquirium.  Most the words they used are quite specific, mechanical, and biological.    It's very frustrating at that time.  

So I think vocabulary is really the key if you want to improve your English to a higher advanced level.

 
This is gonna be the most inspiring and wonderful news never then ever besides admission to the exchange program.  
 
To turely understand a language and to speak like native speakers including both speed and accent (my goal), I think 4 months is not enough.  That's why I was eager to extend my duration of time in the United States.  However, before I came here, all of the information all told me it's not gonna be possible to extend my J-1 visa, which made me upset for a while.
 

This is my second day in Boston since I travelled to California for five days and just arrived here yesterday. 

Fortuntely, everything went pretty well. One of my American friends came to pick me up in the San Fransisco airport and we travelled in San Fransisco for two days and stayed in my friend's house in Monterey for the rest of three days. I was so exciting about everthing.  I read street signs, learn lots of very American expressions and wrote down every new vocabularies I learned on that day. 

Burning Paper Money

 

The burning of “ghost money,” the paper regarded as an offering to inhabitants of the netherworld, is a common practice in Chinese society for thousands of years.  People in Taiwan, most of whom are Buddhists and Taoists, believe that the more mock money they burn, the more good fortune they will have; as a result, they are used to placing tables laden with a variety of foods, fruits and beverages in front of their premises to worship their ancestors, gods, and ghosts during several important festivals, such as Tomb Sweeping Festival, Ghost Festival and Chinese Lunar New Year.  However, nowadays, an increasing number of the environmental protection authorities are calling on the public to avoid burning paper money due to the pollution it brings.  While many people argue that this long-hold tradition must be conserved, there is some evidence that the practice of burning paper money yields negative results. 

 

Opponents of breaking burning ghost money claim that burning paper money is a demonstration of sincerity, saying that if the ancestors receive sufficient financial support from their descendants, they will have a better life in the heaven or in the afterlife; consequently, the descendants will be blessed with good fortune, a happy marriage, a healthy body or a year of prosperity.  The more paper money they burn, the more blessing they will obtain.  However, this belief is a complete superstition.  What really matters is the sincerity of prayers; what they bear in mind is much more important than what they burn.  No matter how much paper money the worshippers burn, if they don’t possess benevolence or kindness in mind, they won’t be blessed by any god or ancestor.  Furthermore, putting one’s hands together with his most sincere heart in prayer is enough for his ancestors or gods.  “The gods will sense that,” said Huang Lu Ching-ju, a director of Taipei City Government’s Department of Civil Affairs.

The Exploration of the Documentary Daughter from Danang

A heartbreaking drama that greatly upsets people’s perspective on happily-ever-after, Daughter from Danang is a complex emotional documentary about longing, identity, expectations and the vast gulf between lifestyles.  Born in Danang, Vietnam in 1968 but reared in Tennessee in the U.S, Heidi Bub is the mixed-raced daughter of an American soldier and a Vietnamese woman.  Fearing for her daughter’s safety at the war’s end, Heidi’s mother sent her to the U.S. on “Operation Babylift” at the age of 6.  Although born in Vietnam, Heidi is an “all-American” girl.  Discovering that her birth mother had been searching for her just “like finding a needle at the bottom of the sea,” said Edward Guthmann, a Chronicle Staff Writer, she couldn’t wait to fly to see the person for whom she had also been longing for over 22 years.  While most stories have happy endings, Daughter from Danang ends in an extraordinary, unexpected, and tragic way.  The consequence that the mother and the daughter never saw each other in the aftermath of the reunion can be attributed to two reasons: false expectations and cultural differences.

 

To begin with, false expectations were the direct causes of conflicts between Heidi and her birth mother.  Initially, Heidi, with a cheerful, idealistic and clueless personality, didn’t think that the world would be any different after she met her birth mother.  Due to her innocence, and her unloving and abusive childhood, Heidi was merely eager for “healing” and an intimate, affective and unconditional love that had long been missing in her life.  She indeed enjoyed the lush affection and hospitality of her birth mother during her earlier days in Vietnam, but after the excitement and happiness faded, the tension gradually built between Heidi and her mother.  Heidi’s Vietnamese birth mother, however, scarred by war and living in poverty all her life, saw the reunion differently; she had hoped that Heidi would provide her with a better material life, support her, and take her home to the States to live comfortably for the rest of her life.  Sensing the real intention of her birth mother, Heidi became stressed and uptight since in the United States, the children are under no obligation to financially support their parents when they grow up and move out.  What is more, her half siblings and a number of relatives’ obvious and intense requests for money increased the tension between Heidi and her birth mother to a boiling point.

Understanding Earthquakes

The houses were shaking; the books on the shelves were falling out; pots and pans were going right down to the floor!  Everything was shaking.  Frightened, shocked, and screaming – people awoke from their sweet dreams and found it was an earthquake.  Forgetting all the safety rules taught in school, residents hurriedly escaped from their houses.  Finally, the houses stopped shaking; as a result, some people were relieved and started to go back into their houses.  A few minutes later, a fateful disaster occurred - the earthquake was back again!  Before the residents could respond, all of a sudden, the buildings collapsed, the bridges were destroyed, the roads split and thousands of people were buried under piles of bricks.  The whole island suffered blackouts at the moment.  This was the scene on September 21^st, 1999 in central Taiwan that is known as the 921 Earthquake.  This disaster renewed fears about the catastrophic power of earthquakes and made people in this land start to think about the importance of earthquakes preparedness.  To understand the 921 earthquake, it is necessary to comprehend how an earthquake occurs and develops.

    A sudden release of energy stored in the Earth’s crust creates earthquakes.  In general, an earthquake is caused by tectonic plates getting stuck and putting a strain on the ground, which is also called a tectonic earthquake.  The strain becomes so great that rocks succumb by breaking and sliding along fault planes.  When a failure at a fault plane results in violent displacement, the strain elastic energy is released and seismic waves are radiated, thus causing an earthquake.  According to the United States Geological Survey, this process of strain, stress, and failure is referred to as the Elastic-Rebound Theory.  “It is estimated that only 10 percent or less of an earthquake's total energy is radiated as seismic energy,” explains Spence William, a distinguished geologist.  Most of the earthquake's energy is utilized to power the growth of the earthquake fracture and converted into heat.

How did the devastating 921 Earthquake happen?  The quake, whose epicenter was in Jiji Township in Nantou County in central Taiwan, hit the island at 1:47 AM and measured 7.8 on the Richter scale.  It happened mainly because two huge fault lines – the Chelungpu Fault and the Damaopu Fault – extruded each other intensely, and Jiji Township lay directly on the intersection of those two fault lines.  The fault stretched along the foothills of the Central Mountains in Nantou and Taichung counties.  Some sections of land near the fault were raised as much as 7 meters (23 feet).  Near Dongshih, near the northern end of the fault, a 7-meter tall waterfall was created by the earthquake.  It is noticeable that the greatest devastation of destroyed buildings took place not in central Taiwan, but in Taipei city.  The collapse of the Tong-Hsing Building in Taipei caused the 87 deaths and the 138 severely wounded.  The reason that the biggest fatalities in one building happened far away from the epicenter was proven that since the Public Works Department of Taipei City Government didn't carry out the building code, allowing the construction company chances to use cheaper materials, human factors contributed hugely to the deadly and unexpected collapse of the Tong-Hsing Building.