Tet Holiday ^_^

Tet is the most important holiday in my country, Vietnam. It is the celebration the Lunar New Year. It is the time for family reunion, time for children to receive lucky money and time for people to wish the best to each other.

Tet officially lasts three days, but people usually celebrate Tet for six or seven days. When the clock points 00:00, fireworks will be played, hands in hands people wish the best for themselves, for their families and for their friends.

The first day of Tet is family gathering. After breakfast, they will play Tet music to heat up the excitement of the atmosphere. First, the people in family make ceremonial offerings to Deities. After that, the children will wish successes and happiness to their parents. The parent give lucky money in a red envelop to the children for a successful studying. Then all of them will visit relatives to wish and have happy time together.

The second day of Tet holiday is reserved for the ancestors. Everyone’ soul comes back to meet one another on this day. Traditionally, no matter where they are everyone comes back to home and spends time with their family. They will sit together and enjoy “Banh Chung”, a special cake which is made from pork and salted onion, and talk about their woks and family affairs.

During Tet holiday, people usually stay in their home, thus the streets are quiet. However, the Tet atmosphere is festive. Red, the symbol of luck and happiness, is seen everywhere. There are also lion dances on the streets to make the atmosphere fabulous. Lion dances will bring luck to families throughout the year.

Furthermore, Tet is a time for visits from family and friends. Students come to their teachers’ home to visit and wish them. The first visitor to a home is important according to the Vietnamese tradition. A tray full of fruits and a vase of blossoms are placed in front of the house symbolizing good luck and prosperity.

Tet holiday is always an important Vietnamese holiday. It is held on the first day of the Lunar New Year. It is the beginning of everything of the year. That is why Vietnamese always esteem and reserve this tradition.

A Time that I was depressed - -

Now if you asked me what I wanted to do, I would be more than happy to give you a big hug and say, "Please take me home. That's all I want to do now. To go home!"
I was completely stressed out. The fact that I am babbling would sufficiently prove how pathetic I was, or at least how lame the situation I was in. Being stuck in a team I did not personally have a liking for was one thing. Getting heads-on and constant clash with a big idiot who claimed himself team leader without any formal consensus from other team members was another thing. The latter was more of a pain. How could there possibly an overconfident person who thought the world was his oyster, and everyone else was his pearl. If only I could be more self-assertive to the point that I could tell to his face what an idiot he was.
That was how I felt when I had a group project during the second year of my high school. The project named “Group 4 project”. It was a project that my partner and I needed to come up with a new idea about how to use and recycle energy. He rejected all my ideas, modified all my researches, and excluded all my work in the project. He did all that merely for the sake of smirking at me at the end and fakingly sympathizing "Jimmy, I'll let you have credit for this and this although you actually don't do it." I took comfort in knowing that at least the professor understood the differences between MY work and HIS. He should have learned his place in the universe.
Moreover, we had to do research on the internet and whoever designed that blah blah blah website would never sympathize with people with slow Internet connection. The entire training web site was slow to load. My TWO PCs both crashed during my exam. I screwed the entire thing up. I got 79% when the passing grade was 80%. I had to retake the training session, which would be another three hrs of eyestrain. I never felt worse.

Valentine day

On this Valentine day,

You learn to love a stranger
A beautiful stranger in your eyes
A stranger who will be by your side when you’re alone
A stranger who will make you smile when you’re sad
You see friends without a love

You wish for them, sooner or later

Your significant half will come..."

You try to make her happy
You take her to dinner
A luxury restaurant with no money in your pocket
Red wine, Beefsteak with sparkling candles
Cheesecake for desert
Surprise her by a sheaf of beautiful roses

You bought for her a gift
The gift of her dream

You bought the gift not for you, not for her

But for you two's love

For its growth

For its warmth

For the look on her face

For the smile she wore
For the hug she gave
For the kiss she took
For the love she keeps
For the true fact that you know she's proud

Of having you...

Why I chose business for my career

Economic or business is the lung of the society. A country develops when its economy develops. When the economy develops, the standard of living of the people in that country will increase. That will help a country achieve economic growth. Therefore economic or business plays an important role in a country, in specific, and in the whole world, in general.
My parents are both business people. As I was I child I had my first idea about business. Growing up in my family, every day I acquired knowledge about business from the reality and from my parents. My parents are selling electronic products such as TVs, refrigerators, DVD players, etc. They have different kinds of relationships with many kinds of people in the society because relationship is also important in business. Therefore, a businessperson is the person who is keen intelligent, he has a wide visibility, has wide relationships with other people. Sometimes at nights, I saw my father was thinking about how to sell more products because the competitions in the market were getting fiercer. As my parents said, “business world is a battlefield”. Being a businessperson is not easy; he also needs to be a risk taker. All those properties of a businessperson infiltrate to my body and my mind and those properties are the same as my characteristics. Therefore, when I came to Texas Christian University, I chose to study accounting. Day by day, I learn economics theory and compare it with what I learned from my parents. I realize that economics is interesting and I like it, thus I decided to become a businessman. When I become a businessman, I can help my parents develop their business specifically and my country generally. Vietnam is still a developing country now, therefore I hope that with my business skills I can contribute a small part of the whole development of the society. Those are the reasons why I chose to study business and become a business man.

An Experience that I would never forget

“I’m so tired,” I thought while in the New Zealand airport. After a great holiday with my parents and old friends, I was returning to New Zealand to continue my studies. At 4pm, I was back at the AIC tower where I was living.
Two hours later, my friends asked, “Jimmy, can you go to play soccer because our team doesn’t have enough players?”
“Sorry,” I replied. “I’m so tired. I just came back from a 12 hour-flight, can you ask someone else?”
“Ok, I will try.”
However, I began to question myself, thinking “I’m still fine; I am the leader of this soccer club and my team does not have enough players. I should go to play with them.”
Therefore, I agreed to join the team.
In that game, although I was tired, I still played really well. My friends said I was the best player in that game. I had many chances to score and indeed succeeded in two goals. Then on one occasion, I tried to take the ball from another player, who was big and tall with curly hair and deep blue eyes (specific characteristics of New Zealanders). We were confronting general players in Auckland, not just student teams. Hence, our team was the “smallest” in the league. In trying to take the ball from the “big” player, we struck each other. Crack...!
Unfortunately I fell, hearing the crack coming from my leg. It was so painful. I was escorted off the field by teammates and supervisor. They took me to the hospital. I thought that my leg just sprained, needing a slight treatment. After an X-ray and a two-hour wait, the doctor told me that my bone was cracked and they needed to put a plaster cast on my right leg for one month.
My leg, in extreme pain, prevented me from walking, showering. It drove me crazy. That was the first time in my life my leg was broken. However, instead of feeling angry and sad, I was happy and proud of myself for fulfilling my responsibilities and performing my best for my club. I did the best I could to help my club excel. I am proud of my leadership. That was an experience I would never forget.

My room at home

Do you ever wonder why certain places mean so much to certain people?

When I think about the place that is important to me, my room pops up in my mind first. My room is cozy and I always have a comfortable feeling when I am in my room. My room was painted white and my blue-sheet bed is at the right corner. My brown – yellow study table is behind the window, where people will see it first when they enter my room, and I like it that way. I like how the sun came to my table every morning. I like how I am sitting at the table and looking at the rain. I like how I am studying and distracted by what is happening outside my house. On the wall, there are David Beckham posters. He is my favorite player. I always try to make a pass or get a free kick into the goal like him when I am on the field, playing soccer with my dear friends. However, there is my family picture right in front of me. The picture was taken about two months ago when we went to one of the most beautiful beaches in my country. Smiles appeared on our faces. Whenever I look at the picture, I am just like encouraged by my parents, especially time when I am stress with my works.

My Giant-Mattress-with-blue-sheet bed is where I want to jump onto first when I come to my room. I have a full-size bed with two pillows and a big body pillow. I cannot sleep without my body pillow. I don’t know why but I always have good sleep with it. I cannot express my feeling when I am lying on my bed and listening to music. I like that feeling after a hard working day or at the beginning of the day when I wake up. Time stops. Everything stops going around. Forgetting about school works. Forgetting about exams. Forgetting about whatever bad happened. I just want to enjoy myself. A lot of times I just lay down and close my eyes and daydream about places I'd like to see or think about things that make me happy.

My room is always important to me. It always give me relax and happy time. It always to place I want to go first after a hard-working day. And I always love my room.

Meeting with my new partner :)

Last Wednesday, I had the first meeting with my new partner at TCU bookstore. Last week, we could not meet each other because he had something to take care of. I was so happy that I could meet him this time. At this moment, I was more confident than when I met my first partner because I had an idea about how everything was going. I also had asked Alex about Joez, my new partner, thus I had a good idea about my new partner as well.
It was a beautiful afternoon with cloudy sky, so we met outside the bookstore. With a nice weather, I felt that our meeting would be going well. I had not met Joez yet, so I just imagined in my mind about how he looked like, how he dressed and how he talked. However, it turned out to be completely different as I imagined. Joez was a big and tall guy about 5’8 height and 200 pounds, I guessed. He wore a Polo polo-shirt, with an Iphone in his hand and a D&G sun-glasses. Wow! Did he work at the physical plant? I wondered. It was totally unexpected from me about him.
We started our lessons about GED. He told Alex and me that the other partner helped him about Math and English. He thought that it was easy because he was good at Math and the first lessons of English were easy as well. So he did the exercises without any problem. By the way, his English is pretty good. Therefore, we decided that Alex and me would teach him about science and history (I did not know that there were actually many things in GED test, I thought there were just Math and English). We gave him some exercises of Biology and History to do at home and next meeting we would check them.
It was a good meeting for all of us, I hope that our next meeting would be ever better.

Truth vs Fact

In Pico Iyer’s statement, I think that he wants to show us the different between fact and truth. Fact and truth are different from each other, even that “you could make every word of an article true…and till not come close to the truth at all”. I believe that facts are undeniable, concrete, confirmable, something that can be proven with hard evidence and through various sources. However, truth can be divined from a single fact or set of facts. Truth is how people interpret those facts and can be proven by a combination of fact and logic. Therefore, people can make others believe in a wrong truth based on true facts. Each person has his or her own interpretation about the same given facts.

I think in the essay “The Karheef”, it is a mixture of facts and truth. What the author is writing are facts based on what he observed, what he had seen and what he had been through. By his combination of facts and logistic, he also wants to show us the truth. Readers can see the truth from the essay by looking in to the way how he observed and got the facts. As at the conclusion, it shows clearly the differences between fact and truth. The fact is that the US was attacked on 9/11. However, the truth is that the kids were still playing on the street without knowing anything; there were also people who had relatives in NY and WTC. Moreover, with those facts that he shows us in his essay, as a reader, I can also see that there are more about truths beyond the facts.

A New Beginning!

“I’m sorry! I cannot practice and learn more about English with you in the next two months because of my pregnancy. The Doctor said that I needed to stay at home for the next two months to prepare for the baby. I want to focus on my baby because he is going to be my first child. I’m sorry but I will let you know when I get back.” Clemencia told me that on the phone when I called her. “It’s ok. Now you need to focus on your first child rather than focus on working and learning English. I wish all the best with you and your baby. I will see you later.” I replied with a mix of happy and sad voice. I was happy because my partner would have her first baby. I knew how much she loves her baby. When she had her first baby, it would be the turning point in her life. I wished all the best to her and her lovely baby. However, I was a bit sad because in the next two months I would not have any partner for my community service.

Luckily, Alex, one of my friends in English class, helped me out about the partner, Jose Casaraez. Alex told me that Jose asked her to meet one more day to practice his GED test but she did not have time. Thus, last Wednesday, I went to the bookstore with Alex to meet her partner. I was so excited about this. I understood that it would be difficult to start all over again but I was ready for it. I was a person who always wanted to have challenges and tried my best to overcome it. That would make me become a well shaped person.

While, Alex and I were waiting for Jose to come because he told Alex that he would come about 15 minutes late, I asked her about Jose. I asked her about how he looked like, what he wanted to study and how we would teach him. I found out that it would not really difficult to teach GED but challenging. Nevertheless, he did not show up. I was disappointed - -. My first meeting with a new partner was not as I expected. However, I still looked forward to see him next week.

Finally, second meeting with my partner!

Last Wednesday, I had the second meeting with Clemencia, my partner for the community service. I was more confident than the first one because my partner and I had a perfect start last time. Last meeting, we just introduced and learned about each other. In this meeting, we were focus on our main purpose – learning how to use internet and learning English.

I was waiting for her at the computer area in the Rec Center. I powered up the computer and checked everything to make sure that our meeting would be going well. Here she came!
After a brief “Hello” and “How are you?” we started our first lesson. She asked me to teach her how to check and send emails. However, she did not remember her password. I thought “well, this is not good, not good at all!” Password was the most important thing for email like keys to open the doors. Luckily, she found it after going through all of the small folded pieces of paper in her handbag. Now she could log in. “Oh! My God! You have 1047 unchecked emails in your inbox.” I could not believe in my eyes. Therefore, I needed to show her how to delete all the unnecessary emails first.

After deleting all the unimportant and expired emails, she asked me how to send emails to other people. I showed her how to do it step by step and asked to repeat doing it for two or three times so that she could remember it. After remembering it by heart, she composed her first email to her Dad. I was moved by her piousness. She showed me that family was always important to her. I believed that it was not just only true for me but also for everyone. She told me that “my Dad will be surprised when he receives my email.” With a big smile on her face, I realized how happy she was when she sent her first email to her Dad. I felt proud of myself for helping her. I did such a tiny thing but it was a huge happiness for her.

After showing her all about emails, I showed her how to read the news and look for weather. She had an idea about that already, so it was easy for me to teach her.
At the end, I showed her some good websites to learn English. I asked her to do some of the exercises and she did them pretty well. I gave her some of the exercise to do at home and we said “good bye! Have a nice day to each other” ^^

Leaving the Rec Center with a big smile, I felt really happy because I could help her a lot. Those things that I helped her seemed simple but it was necessary and important to her. From now, she could use emails to community and build relationships with her friends and her family. She also could improve her English as well. It was such a successful meeting.
P.S: I also recorded how she was doing her emails, hope everyone enjoy it. :D

First Meeting with my Partner ^^

My first meeting with my partner last Wednesday for the community project was truly successful. I was walking to our meeting place, the Rec Center, with many thoughts in my mind “How do I know who she is?” “How will our first conversation go?” “If she doesn’t want to speak up, then what should I do?”… However, all my thoughts had gone when I met her. When I was walking toward her, it was just like magical! Suddenly, in my mind, I thought “that is her!” and I was sure that she had the same thought as me. “Hi! Are you Cemenca?” I asked (I couldn’t say her name properly at that time - -). “Yes! Are you Jimmy?” she answered (Well, she said my name correctly ^^). That was how we met. Easy going, eager to speak and practice English was my first initiate thought about her.

After brief introductions, we talked more about ourselves. She told me that she was from Mexico and had live in the U.S for 9 years. Before moving to Fort Worth, she lived in Santa Barbara, California. As matter of fact, the cost at California was so expensive compare to Fort Worth. However, California’s weather was much more beautiful than here. Right now, She has worked for TCU for almost 2 years at the residential services. Her main job was cleaning and checking the hallways, restrooms, etc at the Greek houses. She worked from 7am – to 3:30pm. When I heard that, I responded with a surprise voice “Wow! That’s a hard work”. However, s he told me that it was way better than working at the restaurant because she was paid more and had more benefits, etc. She didn’t do anything much after work that was why she thought that this was a good chance for her to practice English and widen her knowledge. Not only for her but also this was a good chance for me to practice and improve my English skills as well. She has been pregnant for 8 months but she didn’t have a name for the boy yet. For a moment, both of us realized that I was so excited about her that was why I was asking her so many questions. Thus, now it was her turn to get to know more about me.

About 10 minutes after that, I started trying to get to know why she was lack of confidence when speaking English in front of people, although her English was truly good. She was telling me her story deeply and slowly that she went to Paschal high school (the one that was right behind TCU). During those high school years, she was teased and made fun of her English ancient. Since then, she was scared of speaking up. However, I explained that TCU students were very nice and easy going. Therefore, “don’t be scare and just talk to them!” I told her with a confident voice. “Everybody has their own accients. I have my own accient as well. So just talk to them and your English will be improved!”.

Then, we was dicussing about what would we do the next day. And finally “Say Cheezz!! Picture time ^^”

The Street I grew up on

Crowded with all the “pin-pin” noise from motorbikes and busy people walking is my first imagination about the street that I grew up on. There is a huge difference between my home country and the U.S that in Vietnam people use their houses for living and also for business, small private business. Therefore, during the day, they open their houses to sell their products. By the end of the day, they enjoy family activities. In contrary, in the U.S, business buildings or offices and homes are separate. On my street, all the houses are next to each other, so neighbors know each other well enough to have an idea what-time-they-do-what :D . My three-floor house is in the middle of the street right opposite to a CDs store, a teenage fashion store and about four or five different kinds of restaurants. Yes! We love eating at restaurants that’s why there are lots of them on one not-too-long street!

My family’s business is about selling electronic products such as TVs, DVD players, etc. The funny fact is that on our right hand-side and left-hand side, they also selling electronic products! The same as us! Competition is going on and on… However, that is not unusual in my home country. You can find three or four stores that selling the same products are next to each other or facing each other! Even though they are each other’s rivals, they live happily together. I usually played soccer with other kids in late evening when all busy works were over. During night, it is time for family activities. Parents take their kids to restaurants, parks, etc to relax and enjoy their time after a hard working day.

I left my unforgettable street for almost five years. However, all the memories are still in my heart. Although, I come back every summer, I still hope that one day I will live on my busy-crowded street again.