In Chinatown, there are many apartment buildings that all look similar. Next to the street level entrances, there are usually many stores. The street I live on is dirty. Garbage is strewn everywhere.
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The most anticipated day of my sophomore year finally arrived: it was the expedition to Altos de Chavon, the captivating village featuring decorative ironwork, antiquities, and enchanting buildings.
Read MoreI believe the ACES program contributed a great deal to my appreciation for other fields outside the scope of my major; for example, my interest in Jazz and politics. This made my college years more enjoyable!...
Read MoreHaving taught programming for almost five years, I am a strong believer in experiential learning and using technology to focus on other subject areas. I want students to find purpose in my classes. For K-4 classes I partnered with subject matter experts to design interdisciplinary courses, providing students with ample opportunity to take creative control of programming to better understand other subject areas. Last year I taught a game design class to third graders. In one lesson I asked them to use their programming skills to design a marine environment and then set up an equilibrium such that bigger predators like sharks won't go extinct...
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Madina is the biggest market in Conakry, Guinea. It is located in the middle of the capital and anyone can go there and shop for whatever they need. As you approach the market, you see tall brown buildings and colorful rainbow umbrellas; you also start hearing noises because there are lots of people everywhere. Guinea is not always clean, some places in Madina are very dusty or smell like garbage. However, the majority of the population are use to it, therefore, it doesn’t bother much. Furthermore, whenever I heard about Madina while I was growing up, I used to smile brightly; it was the place my parents used to buy me pink and purple toys because these were my favorite colors. They also used to buy me clothes such as skirts and picture books of animals and little princess that I used to enjoy coloring. Because Madina is the most popular market in town, most Guineans interact there while shopping for all the things they need.
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I had been in FuJian Province for fourteen years and had never gone to other provinces in China until this past summer when I went back to China with four friends who I’d met and gotten to know in America. I was so excited, because this was the first time I was going back to China in four years. I was also happy to be traveling with my friends without my parents’ chatter. We planned to travel to some renowned tourist attractions by ourselves. However, we didn’t have much money. We finally decided to go to West Lake in HangZhou City, ZheJiang Province, which is near FuJian province. West Lake has a long historical significance to Chinese people, and there are many well-known myths associated with this place.
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I moved several times while I was in Mexico, from Atlixco Puebla, in Chalco in Mexico city, to Tochimilco and to Guadalajara, Jalisco. In Mexico, I felt free and I didn’t have any barriers. We used to have our own house, our own room, and our own space to do the laundry. We didn’t have to worry about whether the owner would want to rent us the apartment or not. We used to go to the Tortilleria two or three times a day to buy hot tortillas, or to the store without concerns about safety. Now that I live in Brooklyn, I feel that I am trapped, because there is not a lot to do. I don’t always feel secure around my neighbors, and the language barrier holds me back from participating in activities. Because of this, it’s hard to say that Brooklyn feels like home to me, though it is hard to say where home really is.
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My mother and I often traveled to Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia, when I was younger. We traveled twice by airplane and the rest of the time we took small buses that carried four or five passengers. Usually the night before the trip, when I arrived at my house from school, my mother had already packed all our belongings, including long, warm jackets and coats for the cold temperatures. They were always folded neatly, inside two large black suitcases that seemed about to explode.
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