Update on Asia and New Books!

After my groundbreaking (for me at least) decisions that prompted the last post, I informed a few close, and very trusted people to see what they thought of it all. Overall, the response was encouraging and positive. I felt extremely relieved by the feedback I heard. Obviously there was some concern that if I chose to do something like this, that it's for the right reason. I truly think it is.

So, with that said I started narrowing down where I would like to end up. For now, I think the best place to end up for me would be in the Fujian Province of China. The area is beautiful, the climate is perfect, and one of its major cities: Xiamen was named as the '2nd most suitable city for living'. That is, or course, if I decide to live in a city. I would also love to live in a more rural part.

The Fujian Province also contains in the north the Wuyi Mountains, which have the distinction of the centuries-old tradition of tea cultivation on terraced hillsides. This farming is still done by hand and has maintained the traditions of the local communities. Fujian Province also borders the strait that leads over to Taiwan. This area was closed off from the rest of China for a long period of time, and because of that the area is considerably more sustained and rich in heritage than the other parts of mainland China. Many of it's early traditions are still maintained and practiced to this day. It has also suffered a lot less with regards to environmental degradation due to the rapid population growth in China because of this. I am also very fortunate to have a colleague with ties to this area and Taiwan. So it would possible to receive some assistance in getting into the community with his contacts. I am very fortunate because of this access.

So, once I decided on China, I went ahead and checked out what kind of language learning methods I could start to try out. I ordered the Oxford Beginner's Chinese/English Dictionary. I figured I would need that no matter what. I then looked into what sort of free online offerings were available. Live Mocha seems to be a good place for free lessons and will be a great fallback solution for me. It will only be a fall back because of the discovery I made next. I came across a great resource available to anybody with membership to the Plano Library system (which I have). They provide access through their site to the mango suite of online language courses! Membership to their courses normally cost around $350 a year. I think this will be my primary language learning tool when I start really investing some time in learning Mandarin Chinese (which will be quite soon).

Well, that's all for now. In fact, it's much more than I planned on writing today. Ah well. Until next time...

Cheers