So, if things go as planned, we’ll be going to Taiwan in August. We’re applying to teach English there, and we’re bucking our trademark spontaneity (”Hey Mom, we’re getting married…next month”) and actually planning and preparing.
We’ve been going through our stuff, deciding which books we really want to keep, considering whether there’ll be storage space for our favorite-enough-to-keep but not favorite-enough-to-schlep-on-a-trans-oceanic-flight things, and figuring out what to do with the stuff we don’t want to keep, which we figure should be most of our worldly goods. What good is a (hopefully) life- and consciousness-changing experience if it doesn’t make one at least a little less attached to material possessions?
We’re also dealing with the fact that we will be going there with nothing more than the language school’s crash course in Mandarin, with jobs that consume as much as 32 hours of each week. There’ll be a bit of free time, it would seem. So although we’ll certainly want to spend a lot of time immersing ourselves in the culture, learning the language, (there’s one-on-one peer tutoring and classes in addition to the default immersion by way of just being there,) there’ll be days when we’re just homesick, too, and need some brainless sitcoms or zombie-killing action. So I’m (slowly) ripping our DVD collection to the computer, with the intention of tossing it all on a portable hard drive, and watching it there on a laptop. It’s a slightly wonky process under Linux, in some ways more straightforward than under Windows, but with slightly less predictable results, particularly with regards to file size. I won’t bore you with that right now, though. I’ll do it some other time in another post. A looooong one.