Member Susannah Rosenblatt, a Wake Forest graduate, has this nice essay in her alumni magazine about engaging the modern world. From her article:
My undergraduate experiences overseas primed me for my most challenging trip yet: moving to Taiwan, where I just finished a year living with my husband, Aaron Winter (’02). Aaron took a job as a visiting professor of American literature at National Tsing Hua University while I worked as a freelance writer. He, too, spent a semester at Worrell House. But it was the semester before me, so the two of us began our courtship through transatlantic online chats. Since then, we have traveled to more than 35 countries, together and separately; traveling is a shared passion that has brought us closer. (Perhaps closer than we’d like at times — four showerless days hiking the Inca Trail can do that.) We arrived in Taiwan bumbling and illiterate, pointing at indecipherable menu listings and hopping on buses whose destination could only be guessed. Mandarin, a tonal language with thousands of non-alphabetic characters, is not something you just pick up. But little by little, we were able to make ourselves understood, and make friends.
True, I once asked a worker in the campus cafeteria for a job when I wanted juice. True, I inadvertently made sexual advances to strangers, not realizing the slang expression “I like fried rice” meant something quite different from what I intended.
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