Always an Adventure...

As I mentioned, I was in a Chinese speech contest this past week! It was the same one I participated in last year, but my result this year was slightly better! Last year I got the award for "Most Interesting Speech" which was a separate category from the winners. This year I got third place overall! I was really happy with the result, even though I didn't get first. Both of the girls in first and second gave excellent speeches. The topic was "Having Fun in Taipei" but as I suspected, many people had similar speeches, either about their own experiences, or highlighting certain places. Having been a contest judge enough times myself, I knew that I needed to put some kind of creative spin on it in order to get the judges' attention. This past year there's been a classical story, which is sometimes referred to as the Chinese Romeo and Juliet that has grabbed my attention. Last semester, a group of my students performed it in English during an English drama c

The speech went well, and I made it to the final which is this Sunday! I'll post the video next weeek. For now, here's a song I've been listening to a lot lately: One line from the song I like is "So I wait for you, Oh Lord, like the watchmen wait for dawn." They're waiting for something they know will come. It comes each day. They're not waiting with uncertainty but expectation. A lot of the things we wait for in this life are uncertain, a promotion, a husband/wife, an opportunity, we hope they'll come, but we can't be sure. But to wait on God is to know that He will come. Maybe we won't know how. We don't know if the dawn will be overcast, or filled with colors. But we know it will come.

I'm really looking forward to a trip to Phuket, Thailand for the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival long weekend! In other news, I am competing in a Chinese speech contest TOMORROW! Wish me luck! More details after!

I forgot my cell phone charger in Yilan yesterday, and won't be back until Saturday. Fortunately, you can now charge your cell phone battery at certain 7-11s in Taipei! So besides mailing letters, paying your electric bill, using an atm, making photocopies, and getting pictures developed, you can also pay 20NT to charge your battery for 10 minutes. It doesn't give it full power, but will last for a bit if you only make short phone calls. So I'll be visiting the 7-11 a lot over the next couple of days.... can you remember what life before cell phones was like? How did we survive :P

I got a sweet suprise on Tuesday night when I went to visit my favorite family for language exchange. Their oldest daughter, Esther's birthday is just a few days before mine, and for her birthday party they made a huge treasure hunt.  Since I was in Taipei that day, they made a special one just for me! Those girls are SO creative and thoughtful...I want my kids to be just like them someday! They've been really into Blue's Clues lately, and made a homemade blue paw print stamp out of an eraser.  They then drew a treasure map of the entire first floor of their house/church with stamps where the treasures were. The items themselves also had a paw print mark on them! It was a lot of fun searching for the "treasures" especially since the two youngest girls got SO into it!  There's no better sound than that of a child laughing and squealing in joy. Gloria, 4, could barely contain her excitement and showed me where two of the treasures were before the hunt even start