Amelia's Travel Blog : 9 Month Report

Friday, May 24, 2013

9 Month Report

Wow, my last report. It still feels unreal that in just 17 days I will be on a plane going home. It's simply hard to think about! I'm trying to view returning home as the start of a brand new adventure. New challenges, new goals, a new start. I know I will miss Taiwan very much, but I am also excited to re enter "reality". At the beginning of this year living in Kinmen just felt like a dream. I always thought that when I returned to America it would be like waking up to the real world. I now find, after living here for 9 months, that is the complete opposite. I have adapted so completely to life here that my old life now feels like the dream world and here, my reality.
This month went by extremely fast. I went back and forth to Taipei so much and became so busy, that for awhile I actually forgot that June has almost arrived. During the middle of the year I felt that time really went by slowly, but now it's starting to speed up. My parents came early this month, I had my mandarin speech competition, and I had the Southern Taiwan bus trip. For the speech competition we all had to just get up and speak for about 2 minutes. Speaking in front of people is definitely not one of my strengths and speaking mandarin in front of a bunch of Rotarians and Rotex was really scary for me. ( I was also the last one scheduled to go!) so the speech was my big challenge this month. But I'm happy I got through it and I think it really helped me with my public speaking. This month we also had the bus trip. We went to Kenting, Kaohsiung, and Tainan. It was such a fun trip with a bittersweet ending. I had to say goodbye to many of the other exchange students. Although I only saw them once a month, it was still extremely hard to say goodbye. This month I also "graduated" from Chinese cooking school, and my Chinese language class. This was also really sad because it meant more goodbyes would be coming. This is definitely the hardest part of being an exchange student.
Soon I will say goodbye to the ones who I have grown so close to during my exchange year. But I will take with me all the moments and friendships that truly made an impact on my life.

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Notre Dame

Today we visited notre dame. Notre Dame is a gothic cathedral in Paris. Once we got to Notre Dame we had to stand in a large line. it took about 15 minutes until w actually got inside. Right away we started to climb the 400 steps to the top of the church. We climbed and climbed and climbed and pretty soon we got to the first level. it was a pretty good view but the top was much better. Once we got to the top we had a spectacular view. Not as good as the Eiffle tower, which you could see, but still a view of the river and below Notre Dame. Inside the church the priest was preaching and there were candles lit everywhere. We walked around and looked at statues like the sculpture of Joan of arc. Once we left we headed on looking forward to the rest of the day.

The Patisserie

Today after we got back from are big museum walk my brother, sister, and i went to the Patisserie to get dinner and dessert that night. We walked around the corner towards a little shop that was down the street from our apartment. they had decorated treats like pie with the fruit in beautiful designs and they had treats that looked like they were a big glob of whip cream. We ended up getting one tiny pizza and a bunch of little pieces of pizza. For dessert we got to pieces of berry pie and 2 pieces of apircot pie, also an apple pie. The pie looked so pretty you didn't want to eat them to destroy the designs. they tasted just as good as they looked. when we got back we feasted on pie and pizza.