Hiatus

As I prepare to leave for Korea for the next year,  I am working on a new website and blog to keep track of my journeys, which means I will hardly have any time to post on this blog! 

If you have the urge, check it out and subscribe for updates! I recommend it! :)

www.adventuresofanamericannomad.com 

Birthday Blog Recap!

Friday, April 13th was my 22nd birthday! I don't feel much different now than I did at 21, and I'd like to think I'm right where I'd like to be: I've already graduated college, I'm working now, and in 4 months I'll be living halfway around the world.

Anyways, I think I celebrated 22 the right way. Max and I went to the Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium! It was amazing; I missed the zoo, and Max had never been there! My family used to have a membership when I was growing up, so nostalgia probably influenced my decision to go there, but it was such a wonderful decision!

Me with the elephants!!!

Max with his favorite animal-lemurs!

I was very disappointed when I saw that the Komodo dragon had died, as he was one of my favorite animals! But I very much enjoyed the elephants (of course I did!), and the baby gorilla was delightful!  The aquarium is always a wonderful place too, with all the colorful beauty that exists underwater! 

Max and I side-by-side with the polar bear statue outside the aquarium.

After getting some cookies and cream Dippin' Dots ice cream on the way back to the car, we went home and baked a Romanian sweet bread for my internship showing of a Romanian film entitled Best Intentions the next day. The bread smelled delicious, but alas we did not get to try any of it! :( But all was well, as we didn't spoil our appetite for dinner!

For dinner, we ventured over to the North Side for Thai food at Nicky's Thai Kitchen. It was some of the most incredible Thai food I've ever had!! Major thanks to my co-worker who suggested it!  We got the spiciest Tom Yum soup ever, and it was AMAZING! I also got spicy basil fried rice with lump crab meat, and it was phenomenal.  I'd definitely go back ASAP.

After dinner, we went back to the house to dress-up and get ready to go to Static Nightclub in the Strip District to dance the night away! I had a brand new dress from Forever 21 that I had been waiting to wear to Static. We got a private table, and we got to see all of our friends who weren't attending beforehand, when they came over to our house to help us pregame! It was a great night, even though my feet killed me afterwards!

Toni and I in our birthday dresses before Static!

 22 is bound to be a great year, and I can't wait to see what will unfold!

My Next Life

I don't think I could put this any better myself:

Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival

Every year, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) puts on an International Film Festival, in which over a dozen films from all over the world are shown in various venues throughout Pittsburgh. This year, the theme is 'Faces of Others,' which, in the words of our director, Jolanta Lion is defined as such:

"How do we define the Other? The term Other can be defined as anyone or anything that is not us. At first a seemingly simple notion, under careful consideration the term becomes more ambiguous and complex. An Other can be identified as anyone of a different culture, language, religion, gender, appearance, sexual preference, personality, world view, the list could go on. In contrast, an Other can also be something very familiar to us: our family, our desires, or even ourselves in times when our thoughts and actions do not seem to align with the person we thought we were.

In the midst of these musings, our minds begin to wonder. Is it possible to understand the Other? Is it possible, in a world full of binary relationships, to know who the Other is: the citizen or the foreigner, the parent or the child, the audience or the film? Perhaps most importantly, can the Other even exist? Or is the Other just our mind's creation used to explain that which is different from us?"

I find these words to be beautiful, and I have learned, and am continuing to learn more and more with each event. I found myself especially attracted to the internship, as "Other" is a huge facet within cultural anthropology. These films have added another meaning to the word, as I watch the stories play out on the screen.

This weekend three of the directors will be in town, and it will certainly add a new dimension to the film to be able to have a question and answer session with the director following the screening. I encourage anyone and everyone to check it out: www.cmu.edu/faces. On this site, you will find the event schedule, ticketing prices, locations of the theaters and more!

I've also met a lot of wonderful people through this internship. Not just the director of the festival, or the film directors, or the guests, but also my fellow interns. They are all such great people from both CMU and Pitt, and we have worked so well together to help this festival run as smoothly as possible. Check out all of the interns here! That video is shown to introduce the major events of the festival to show all of our hard work, and displays our individuality-even though we all worked together, we are each an "Other" ourselves.

Come check it out!! You won't regret it!

Why Americans Can't Learn Foreign Languages

I found this interesting posts in my adventures through Stumble Upon, and I found it rather interesting, so I wanted to share it. Although it is from 2006, I believe there is still much factual truth in the article's main points:

WHY AMERICANS CAN'T LEARN FOREIGN LANGUAGES

What struck me most of all about Lawrence Henry's piece on accents was something Mark didn't even mention. Mr Henry notes that in American English a totally unstressed vowel is reduced to a sound usually written down as "uh" (the sound linguists call schwa); and he goes on:

It's a rampant American fault and accounts for our relatively poor performance learning foreign languages. "Effect" becomes "uh-FECT." Cassette becomes "kuh-SET."

An accurate enough phonetic observation: the first syllable in these words is pronounced with a schwa, whereas many other languages have no schwas at all, in any words. My horse laugh at the quoted remark comes not from this phonetic fact but from the astoundingly dopey idea that it is a "fault" that provides the key to the riddle of why Americans don't do so well at learning foreign languages.

Steve Jones points out me, for example, that western varieties of Catalan do not have schwa, but in Central Catalan (of Barcelona) there is reduction that makes schwa the most frequent vowel in actual speech; yet this doesn't correlate with any perceptible difference in language-learning ability Catalan speakers from different regions of eastern Spain. Henry's remark about how vowel reduction to schwa "accounts for our relatively poor performance" really is astoundingly dumb.

Why we Americans, with our staggering wealth of resources and (for example) the most highly ranked graduate schools in the world, do so poorly by any measure on our command of foreign tongues is a complex question with a mainly sociological, political, historical, educational, and social-psychological answer. (Never forget that John Kerry is said to have had to attempt concealment of his fluent French to avoid bad press during his Presidential run, and Nebraska in the early 1920s had a law making foreign language instruction illegal, and in that very same state as recently as 2003 a father was threatened by a judge with loss of the right to visit his child if he didn't speak English during his visits... This country could not exactly be said to be uniformly friendly toward polyglotism. Nor does it always honor the accomplishment of those immigrants and Native Americans who speak a heritage language at home and English elsewhere — in fact punishment of Native American children for speaking their Amerindian language while in school used to be commonplace.) It's certainly quite a bit more complex than anything traceable to the reduction of unstressed vowels to schwa. Don't give up on taking foreign language lessons simply on the grounds that as an American you are doomed to failure by your learned vowel reduction habits.

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at November 23, 2006 01:34 PM

Dancing My Way Into a New Job

I feel like a lot has happened since I've last posted, and I keep wanting to post to catch up on everything, but instead, something else major happens. Which not only pushes back me posting, but also leave me with a lot more to post about!! I barely know where to start.

Max moved back to Pittsburgh and is currently living in my room with Autumn and I. It's really nice to have him around, even just for the stupid little things, like having lunch together or falling asleep watching a movie on the couch. He's starting his own company designing websites, and I can't wait to see where it goes from here!

Max arrived back in Pittsburgh January 28th, so on the 29th, we decided to have an adventure! Jess, Anna, Javid, and Andres joined us as we galavanted through Scheneley Park, colored beautiful artwork, and watched an epic snowstorm roll in from the vantage point of Javid's roof.

In the photos below, Anna and the boys have a conversation overlooking the pond in Scheneley. It was such a beautiful day, and although cold, we managed to all stay warm and happy together! Below that, you can see more of our adventures through photos. Jess had a yo-yo that she loved, and she also brought a bubble wand which I danced around with as we watched the bubbles land on the surface of the lake and float off far into the distance.

Andres moved to Delaware to start his new job about a week after that, so it was a nice goodbye sort of thing.

A little over a week after our big adventure, on February 8th, a group of us went to a Rusko concert in the Strip District at Club Zoo, which is right next to Static, an awesome dance club and bar. Jess, Max, Javid, Sveta, Intaek, his girl Julia, and myself went and had such a blast! We danced the night away and even got the whole way to the front!

I seriously love this picture of Jess and I, with our sweet glow sticks! It was so hard for us to stop dancing long enough to get a picture together!!

The boys, all sweaty and happy, at the show during Rusko's performance!

And the man himself:

The next day, I had an interview with Adventure Teaching, and at the end of the interview, I got offered a position teaching English in South Korea for a year! I am almost positive I am going to go, as it is a dream come true, and I would definitely regret it if I didn't! Anna also got the position, and we are trying to live together over there so we can travel and explore Asia together!!

Other than that, it has just been work and hanging out with friends. Andres came back this weekend, and we all had a great time going out with him!

Oh, and Happy Mardi Gras!! :)

College Life, Post Graduation

I've been back in Oakland for 9 days now, and the new semester seems to be in full swing. All of my friends are back in classes, and I'm working about 20 hours a week in the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science department of the Swanson School of Engineering, along with a new babysitting gig I just picked up, and, of course, those birthday parties at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. There is a nice rhythm to life right now, so I'm very hesitant for anyone to come in and change that.

This past weekend was certainly a whirlwind welcome-back-to-the-dirty-O, full of incredibleness. (Yes, I'm making that a word.) There was dancing: like a white girl, on table tops, with an adorable old man. There was drinking: beer, wine, rum, vodka, tequila, gin. And my personal favorite of the weekend, there was a crate race!

Let me explain. A crate race, in this case, consisted of teams of six people, with no more than three guys, and a case of beer (30 cans), two forties, a box of wine, and a fifth of liquor (at least 70 proof). Originally, we had at least four teams participating, but when it came down to it, we only got two competing teams: the United Kingdom (consisting of our friends Mike, Bruk, Becky, Lauren, Emily, and Tata*)(*Tata killed their fifth of rum in literally like 5 minutes. It was unreal!) and our team, the USSR, which was, from left to right in the picture below, Tom, Javid, Jess, myself, Anna, and Andres.


We thought we had this on lock, but Tata's performance was a little scary. But we ended up pulling through and winning! It was epic and so much fun! Here's us about three seconds after our victory:

In actuality, everyone ended up winning, because we all had such a good time, and we all got to hang out and drink and socialize. Even though a few of us may have been in pain the next day, it was definitely a pleasurable experience, and I would love to do it again soon!

To quote my friend Jess at the crate race: "Sometimes, I look around, and I'm so proud of what my friends have become." I agree, I really do love my friends, so I am one of the luckiest girls in the world.