Happy New Year everybody!!!

 

I figured now that I finally have internet for the time being, I should send in a qiuck report for December. On the 4th, I moved into my new house. I live with my great-grandmother, grandmother, mom, dad, 13 year old sister, livein maid, and the cutest dog ever. My and my sister share a room, which is fun even though we're both always busy and don't talk too much.

 

I now live out of downtown Hualien but am still pretty close, about a 15 minute bike ride. I'm also a lot closer to my school which is a 7 minute bike ride on most days. Almost every weekend is spent doing stuff with either my classmates or the 3 other exchange students I'm with. The weekend before Christmas, we had to go to Taipei again for another Rotary thing. This time it was our Mandarin speech contest which I had been in denial that I was even going to until the day before I left, so I wasn't very prepared and while it wasn't bad, it wasn't nearly as good as the kids who had been working on it for weekes and having their teachers and familes check and fix over and over again. Someone said that while the Yilan and Hualien kids' speeches weren't great speech wise, they sounded like we wrote them ourselves more then the others and that they didn't sound like something we had just written and read of a piece of paper. That made me feel pretty good.

 

On Christmas Eve, Lora, Colin, Abi, and I had a sleepover and at midnight they sang Happy birthday for me in Chinese, English, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Japanese. It was so much fun. We stayed up until 4 in the morning talking and then had to wake up at 7am for school. Yes for the first time in my life I had to go to school on Christmas and my birthday. It was the weirdest thing ever.

 

We left school ealry, around 3pm, so that we could help my old host mom prepare for the party she was throwing for us with some other rotarians and the school in celebration of me and Corinne's birthday. What are the chance of 2 girls, with the same birthday, from completely opposite side of the States, being sent to the same city in Taiwan. Probably a million to one but it happened.

 

On New Years Eve, Abi and me went with some classmates to celebrate. There was the normal BBQ, chit chatting, wrestling, and fireworks that I see every year. I still find it amazing how thousands of miles away and so many things are exactly the same. It just goes to show that know matter where you live, what you look like, or what language you speak, we're all just people looking to make the most of life.

 

Thank you, Rotary, for giving me this chance to see that and to experience all the wonderful things I've been through these past 4 months.

 

<3 Alicia