July 22-26

July 22 and July 23 I didn't have any exams. Besides going to classes, I ended up doing work at home for my internship. Both nights I ended up sitting in my room staring at my laptop translating a paper about the recent US-Taiwan military trade agreement. I realized that I've been writing English papers with complex sentence structures that make it difficult to translate into Chinese. So that had been giving me some headaches.

July 24 I had my first midterm exam of my classes. I had two exams, both for my main class. I definitely felt as if my second exam was much easier than the first, but then again they were both relatively easy exams. Nothing particularly exciting happened in classes, however, my teacher did give me the information for the next few lessons because Thursday we began book two!

I think I came to the realization during class today that I'm starting to loose steam. I'm beginning to get that feeling that you get when a break is coming up, and the end of the semester is near. I definitely know that the last few weeks are going to be a little bit more of a push to stay on top of the work while still enjoying my time and having fun.

Wednesday I headed into work because my 老闆 (boss) got back from work travel and I was excited to hear about the trip as well as get some feedback on the paper I sent him. I believe I came to terms that where I work simply always has press videoing and taking pictures of something. I'm just in that type of office where important stuff happens!

The rest of the day at work went reasonably well. I sat and did my translating diligently.

At the very end of the day in the office when I was packing up to leave I actually took a little bit of time and talked to my 老闆. He was unpacking some of the gifts that he had gotten from his trip to India (they were gorgeous), and we were talking. Then one of his coworkers (the Director of Public Relations, my boss is the Deputy Director) asked me what religion I was, and from there we had a very unique (but interesting) discussion. To say the least, I was very happy that I sat and shmoozed with them for a little bit before I left.

I didn't realize this at the time, but June 24th was my last day of work at the office. I'm going to go in one more time to say thank you and goodbye, but this summer at the DPP was definitely an interesting and memorable experience.

July 26 felt like an extraordinarily long day. It was difficult to get all the way through classes because it was finally Friday and I had a really long break from classes ahead of me, so I was really excited.

As a nice way to finish our week of midterms, some of the CET students got together for dinner. The plan was to grab some Mexican food, but unfortunately the Mexican place had run out of food. However, my neighborhood in Taipei has so many restaurants and places that we didn't have much trouble finding our way to a Szechuan Restaurant.

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This week was good. It is sad to think about how quickly things are coming to an end and I know that I really need to really reflect upon what I have seen and the last few things left that I want to make sure I hit during my time here.