Thanks to @SamToBenkyou and @JGComm for giving helpful advice on my last post.
At the end of my university, I planned to go to a graduate school to learn software programming. I needed to pass the graduate entrance examination. One of the four examinations was an English level test. I was confident in my English, so I had only prepared vocabulary. I spent 3 months memorizing 1500 GRE vocabulary using spaced repetition. At that time, I didn't know about flashcards. I used a software based on a famous retention curve to remind me to review certain pages of my vocabulary book. At last, I got a high English test score without any preparation for grammar.
At the age of 24, I got my master's degree in Engineering and entered a big Chinese International company. Some of our colleagues were foreigners so we would text message in English. But I still struggled to read long English articles, and lacked confidence in speaking. But I didn’t spend time on learning English any more, busy working as a software engineer.
My second employer was a South Eastern company. Our product managers mainly worked in the Singapore office but they could speak fluent Chinese with me. All of our company documents in the workspace were in English. Some of my Chinese colleagues would use Google translate to turn them into Chinese. But the translated result was not satisfying, so I preferred to read the original English and look up unfamiliar words.
After COVID, travel abroad recovered. I felt kind of tired of the closed media environment and strong government supervision in China. I want to know what foreigners’ lives look like. And I also want to practice my English to achieve fluency and find a remote job for foreign companies in the future. Having been stuck in office and with facial masks for 2 years, I want to walk outside and be open to the world.
So I quit my job this June. I spent one month taking English language classes in Philippines and then traveled to Bali, Indonesia. Next, I will spend one month in Penang, Malaysia, two months in Qiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand and 2 weeks in Laos. Then I will go back to China to attend the visa interview at the US consulate in China, for my following trip to Latin America.
Wow, that's a lot of travel! I would like to travel more, but it's very expensive and I have trouble getting time away from work. What has been your favorite experience so far on this trip?
For the expense of travelling, you can refer to this website. It is cheaper than that we usually think. One thousand dollars per one month is enough in most Southern Eastern Asian country.
In Philippines, I was touched by playing with local kids on the beach. We gave candies and biscuits as the reward for games. That was an activity hold by one of my teachers and she also had participated in this kind of activities when she was a kid.
In Indonesia, the rice fields is amazing. Walking in the rice fields at dusk is enjoyable.
I also posted some videos of trip in my Instagram which you can find in my bio.