Just As Freeeeeeeeee, Free As We'll Ever Be

haha You have got to have a cheesy lyrics title whenever anything of great significance happens. These were the only words that popped into my head when we walked out of the restaurant after out final presentation today. This is from The Zac Brown Band song called "Free." Love it.

Anyways, I ended up getting about 4 hours of sleep last night. Woke up just in time to change clothes and make it to where we were supposed to meet for our presentation on time. We walked into the conference room and just had to laugh. Our Chinese caligraphy that we had done, random pictures taken on various trips, and some artwork with Taiwanese idioms and pictures we had drawn, as well as a diary entry about going to the zoo and tea farms were hanging on the walls all around the room. They expected us to have 3 hours total of things to present, different skits, songs, conversations, etc. We thought that we had no chance of even getting close to that. We ended up not having enough time and actually enjoyed the presentations. We all did a really great job, and I think that our teachers could tell how much time and effort we put into them. Our teachers each gave little speaches after and each gave us various gifts like a bag of Chinese candy, costume shoes that I am wearing right now that I will definitely be wearing all of the time this year, a few CDs of traditional Chinese music, a scarf, happiness charms, and my sweet new friend, Cloud, gave us a very small little bottle with red beans in them. These mean that someone is missing you. After a few surprise presentations and revisiting a few embarrassing sound recordings from the beginning of these 5 weeks, we went to a little cafe called Mr. Pumpkin where we had our ending ceremony. It was good food and good company. We all sat with the TAs and teachers and had a wonderful time. After taking about 1000 pictures, we walked back to campus. Little did we realize that we would have to say goodbye to our new Chinese friends so soon. It was very sad saying goodbye to them. We have spent everyday together for the past 5 weeks and have gotten to know them. Our time here would not have been near as fun without them. Sad :(

This is a picture of all of our TAs and all of the MSU students at lunch


Some of the girl TAs: Kelby, Helen, Stella, and Cloud and I

Our Chinese class with our teacher Lan Laoshi( laoshi means teacher)

Well, we have about 2 and a half days left here until we take our trip around the island. Which means that anything that we wanted to do and haven't will probably get crammed into the next 72 hours.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 8:38-39