Blog 1: A country I would like to visit

 

Hello dear students. I hope you are having a good day. Today, in this first blog session, I will talk about a country I would like to visit.

Before my travel to Mexico this year, I was quite skeptical of traveling abroad: I always thought it was a very expensive and luxurious experience that I, an English teacher, would never get to live unless I considered the idea of studying abroad.

Despite this mindset, I have been interested in working and living in China. Yes, you read it correctly: your English teacher wants to cross the Pacific Ocean to teach English and live in a whole different culture.

At the beginning, my first approaches to this economic power were related to learning a new language: since I had realized that knowing English was no longer an advantage regarding my work field, I decided to study Mandarin Chinese. Oh god, it was such a mind-blowing experience. This language has 4 tones that are very distinguishable, but very difficult to acquire; also, since we don’t share any commonalities with this language (since both languages come from different families: Romance and Sino-Tibetan), it was a challenge to remember basic words as “hello” or “My name is…”. (Even with the romanization system of pinyin!).

I also took an online course about this country and its history and, despite the fact I am not a huge fan of history, I was drawn to understand how Chinese people became from this agrarian land to such a worl superpower.

If I ever decide to visit this country, I wish to go to the Great Wall of China, the Terracota Warriors, and the Zhangye’s Danxia Mountains.

Finally, even though Chinese cuisine is quite different from Western cuisine, there are a few dishes that have caught my attention: Hotpots,  sweet and sour pork, Zhajiangmian, and dragon’s beard candy.

 

What do you think?

Have a nice weekend!