pop-u-lar! you're gonna be pop-u-lar...!

...And if you know what musical that's from, you get an A+ from this teacher!

Anyway, my social calendar is starting to fill up from absolutely nothing to having to choose between many good things! As much as I love being alone and doing things alone, my inner extrovert has been pouting in a corner, waiting to go out and play.

This weekend my plans are as follows:

Friday night after teaching I will go to a mountain-top cafe in LongTan with my two new friends, Vivi (an Indonesian woman in her 30s who speaks English) and Jin (a Taiwanese girl, my age, who speaks a little English but is good with her pocket translator). They both work at a small clothes shop that I walk by on my way to work in LongTan. I stopped in once and ended up talking to them for a long time, and the rest is history! Today I showed them some pictures of my family, and they concluded that my parents look like movie stars. To be specific, Dad, you look like Nicholas Cage! After sipping "kaife" from high above LongTan, I will spend the night at Jin's apartment, so that...

Saturday morning (early) we will leave for the beach in Fulong, which is northeast of Taipei. Ohhh, am I excited to see the ocean! Jin's boyfriend and several of their friends are coming, too, for a day of sand volleyball and doing what everyone does at the beach. I am looking forward to hanging out with a group of people my age, despite the communication barriers. Beginning some relationships with Taiwanese people is something that's high on my priority list. I need to start learning some Chinese too--there's nothing like immersion!

Sunday, Vivi will take me to her family's Indonesian restaurant for lunch. She moved here when she was 18 and is married with three children. It should be wonderful--a culture within a culture! Sunday night I will go back to Taipei for a ballet class...

I continue to see God's faithfulness to me in this endeavor. At times I can't believe I went through with this and am still not quite sure how I ended up at this point. It's interesting to think about--the events that have led to me being here, playing sand volleyball on a beach in Taiwan with Jin and her friends during this 4th of July weekend (maybe we can get some sparklers, haha?). It's like one of those "choose your own ending" books that were all the rage when I was in elementary school... only in life, you never get to go back to Chapter 1 and re-do the whole adventure. You can only look over your shoulder and see the little twists and turns and curlicues in your path that, with some distance, look less like confused meanderings and more like intentional, confident progress.

My life is beginning to blossom again, here. Thriving in the humidity, spreading out and taking root in the fertile space left after a destructive stormy season. Now there is room for this. I find myself smiling for no reason, laughing often, feeling joy just being near my bright, beautiful students. Falling asleep satisfied and waking up eager. There is clarity to appreciate the past for giving me this present.

"Behind everything beautiful, there's been some kind of pain." -- Bob Dylan

"What we have enjoyed, we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us." -- Helen Keller