With the year up, I wanted to say thanks to the blog. This blog has helped me in a lot of ways. So thanks for…
…letting me get some time away from Chinese. With day in and day out Chinese study, some time with English is a welcome escape.
…helping me to keep my schedule. One of the most important things to study is keeping to a strict schedule, but for that, the other things in your life also have to be on a set schedule. So things like the blog, and my exercise time each day helped to keep me on the schedule I needed to be able to keep going with my studying.
…reminding me that there is an outside. There were times when I’d go weeks without leaving my neighborhood. The blog was a good motivator to go out and explore.
…pushing me to go to new places. I think we all have lists of places in our area or a bit out of the city that we want to go but we don’t because we know we can go whenever we want. The blog pushed me to finally go to those places. It also made me look up new places that I didn’t even know existed before.
…teaching me new things. Having to write up a blog post, meant I really had to take the time to double check my info, This would invariably send me down a rabbit hole of researching one thing pushing me to research another. The blog itself might not take long to write, but sometimes I would find I lost an hour or two just learning about Taiwan.
I’d also like to thank some people. My parents for being parents, i.e. wanting to know what I’m doing, so starting this blog was a way to try and satisfy their curiosity. Friends who were sick of reading my long blog posts and requested pictures instead (sorry for still writing a lot). The strangers who take a look at this blog. I never really intended anybody to read it, but having a few people I don’t know read it, pushed me to make sure my facts are right, and not make every post a complaint.
Speaking of which, I hope I didn’t complain too much or seem overtly negative. Taiwan like everywhere else, isn’t perfect, but I do feel the fact that I live here is a clear indication that while there are problems, it’s not a terrible place. Also a lot of my anger stems from the passion I do have for the country. And sometimes no matter where you live, you just need to get some stress of your chest.
On another note, I said it before and I think most people realize that many times I have to make generalizations in order to write posts that aren’t pages and pages. In Taiwan just like anywhere else, there are special cases and unique individuals. Although it is still fascinating to see how like minded people are in a country where there isn’t the cultural and racial diversity of a place like America.
Finally I’d like to thank my computer, for still being alive. It’s an eight year old laptop that I bought here in Taiwan and it’s died a few times over the years, and now it looks more like a Frankenstein’s monsters of parts needed to keep it going, but I’m grateful that it keeps on truckin’.
Oops! I can’t forget all my Taiwanese friends who were kind of enough to take the time to go places with me, or who looked up information for me so I could write some posts. And of course I can’t give out thank you’s without thanking my dog. So thanks to her for always pulling or pushing me right when I’d have the perfect shot lined up, forcing me to miss more than a few pictures. Such a team player…
The picture is of her in her bucket (yes i know it's a box) under my computer desk. This is usually where she hangs out when I'm writing the blog, not lifting a finger to help me research something online.
