his love endures forever;

Saturday, July 24, 2010

This year has been filled with a lot of goodbyes. Goodbye to the kids in cgm, goodbye to the kids in creative O, goodbye to the students in Thailand and today, the saddest one, goodbye to all my friends in Xinzhu. No idea why I actually cried the most today compared to the other goodbyes.

Anyway, Taiwan trip has been really awesome. The first one being that almost all the American teachers here are Christians. So I unknowingly ended up in a camp with a lot of fellow brothers and sisters in Christ and we also sang Christian songs and told stories from the Bible(not in a really obvious way though). And I really learnt a lot. Their enthusiasm, initiative and 'highness' are contagious:) I ended up volunteering for many things like night duties, playing sports, learning new skills and even acting for stories. I don't think I would have done so many of that if I had been in a camp in Singapore and surrounded with a lot of people I know. I would never volunteer myself to be on stage, acting as a cat or some other character impromptu lol. I somehow learnt to be more confident? And not to bother so much about what others think. Not sure if it is really it though cuz firstly the people here don't know how I normally am and secondly all of them are acting 'crazy' and high so it seems normal when everyone is doing it :) Hopefully it will last even after I return to Singapore.

I think that the environment that we grow up in plays a really important part in moulding our character. Singaporeans are taught to be efficient and to do our best in everything we do. We have high standards and also complete things very quickly. Americans(at least those I met here) are very encouraging and they always give others a chance to do something to make them feel included or to let them show their strengths and they are very friendly. And I was very surprised to find out that Americans have a lot of siblings. Almost all of them have like 6 brothers and sisters o.o I thought that having 31 cousins was a lot. Jarita, Cami and Bobby have 75 o.O

And also, this is the first time that someone actually said that Singlish is cool and that our Singapore accent is awesome:) Singapore governement has always given Singaporeans the impression that Singlish is not good. It is not formal enough, it sounds coarse, it is looked down upon as something that people speak when they cannot speak proper english etc. But over here, the Americans were like 'Your accent is so cool! I want to learn Singlish'.

Ok, I shall stop here for now. I miss going to 7-11 with them every night sometimes for absolutely no other reason except that we wanted to get out of the school...

trumpets forever - 11:16 PM :)