Happy New Year in advance folks!

Today, I am bringing some festive melodies from Appalachian Chamber Music Festival (only a few short clips, and these melodies were believed to be common and famous Christmas songs), and a short introduction of the Harpers Ferry Historic National Park. Highly recommend check out its official website for the Top 10 Tips to get the most out of your visit, along with parking tip which I personally deem as super important.

One coolest thing is, The Point, which seems to use to call the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, which span across the three states - WV, VA, and MD. So, it gives you a chance to peak a portion of each state.

Thank you, all, for 2024. Happy 2025, everyone!

Most people think cross-cultural relationship is challenging.

Last episode, we had Lily, who moved to the United States from Taiwan 12 years ago, now has her sweet family with her husband, Quacy, living in Denver.

Today, we are so honored to have them on the podcast together to share their story - How they met, how they navigated the challenges, whether culture-wise, food-wise, throughout their relationship and marriage.

And if you are curious, they share the most important and successful tip for their relationship, which might apply to not just cross-cultural relationships, but all relationships.

I met Lily and Kinny at the same time when we all prepared TOEFL exam to study in the U.S. After more than 12 years, I am glad my podcast brought us virtually together again.

Lily now has a beautiful family in Colorado, after spending 4 years living in San Francisco. I am so honored to have her on the show to chat about her journey.

Hope you will also be inspired by her positivity and like her interesting story with a open mind and a open heart.

Me and Kinny met in a English school in Taiwan, to prepare us to attend the TOEFL exams to study in the US. She is a Japanese majored student, and she went to the UK to study Marketing in 2013. She's now in Taiwan, and learning Spanish. What a cool girl she is to have Japanese, English, and Spanish under her belt, let along Mandarin. Let's have her talk about her opinion to learning more languages, and if she has found these languages benefited her career and her dream.

I always appreciate native English speakers who are willing to learn other languages, because English is so widely-used globally, and it's just so convenient to use English to communicate.

In this episode, we are giving credits to my friend, Gio, who are not only willing to take the initiative in learning Spanish, French, Japanese and Mandarin, but also maintaining a long-time pen-pal relationship with his Japanese friend. Happy to have him talk about these adventures and maybe challenges in language learning!

Best wishes to Gio's visit to Japan soon!

I had spent a couple months in Australia where me and Pat connected virtually. We have been friends and chatted online for a couple years so far, and today's episode was the first time we spoke directly. It was a huge pleasure to me to have Pat participated in the podcast to talk about her language learning experience, mainly English, and shared her insights abut how to continue learning multiple languages with a positive mindset.

One of the most obvious characteristics about myself is, English is my second language. So, today I am inviting one of my friends whom I met in college and can speak more than 2 languages as an American, Reid, to the podcast, and let he share his opinions on language learning, and how this experience impact his profession, for example, sports commentary. That's really cool!

Some resources I talked about in the podcast below. Sorry I did not do a good job organizing this podcast(maybe spent too much time in writing in my own language).

I talked about how excited and uplifted by that I picked up writing in Mandarin, which I did feel bad that I cannot describe what I usually write the same in English(because my English is not that good), though the same kind of talking about miscellany, but my maneuver of Mandarin could make differences that I saw others like my articles (one article I wrote that the kiwi I bought took a long time to ripe, the article only has 2 paragraphs, I finished in less than 10 minutes, got 4 likes - none of my friends nor family know my blog), which is not something I can do in an exotic language in a short time.

Have you ever wondered what caused the many dialects in the United States? And what are the major accents?According to a renounced English teacher, Karen Chung, in National Taiwan University (NTU) . What she suggested was - Time.

Here is her academic page, including her interview with one of Taiwan's KOLs via Youtube, and her own podcast about her learning Mandarin. Her parents were German and Sweden descendent, so she can speak German in a young age.

This was one of her phonetics courses for English-majored students in NTU, now available online for the general public. In the beginning of the video, she explained what the role Time plays in nurturing language variation.

Highly recommended check this out! Maybe you would start develop some interests in language learning just like me!

Imagine you walk into the sauna and a person follows you in and starts to smile at you. Would you responded?

You said, "Of course! What if this person is my Miss Right / Mr. Right?"

Yes, that could be. But that could also possibly a subsequent heartbroken / grieving if that Miss Right / Mr. Right leaves you in a couple years. If you politely ignored, you could end up the day with a peaceful driving at home cuddling with your lovely pets.

This is Zhuangzi's Philosophy - Nothing is really good nor bad, it all depends on our view points. Zhuangzi focuses on the peaceful minds more than anything else - We have the chances of missing out a perfect love but also the chances of avoiding a torturing and suffocating love. You never know. And the only thing Zhuangzi wants us to bear in mind, is to protect our heart.

Zhuangzi said - Understanding is more important than love. Simply love without understanding is meaningless. Zhuangzi wants us to put our focus on ourselves instead of others - When we do so, we are keeping ourselves healthy and happy, and at that point, we do not need others to echo on the fact that we are good.

Zhuangzi did not mean to be cold or not engage social activities; he asked us to put ourselves first, and those people who really care, they would approach with a good understanding of you, that we do not have to respond to anyone's greetings just out of fear of missing out. Who knows how many "missing out" we are actually grateful for.