Exercise 1: Question 5

Earth day is celebrated on the 22nd of April. To preserve the sanctity of the earth from pollution and destruction, one must think of the earth as themselves. Imagine you're very sick because you smoke cigarettes every day, you must get rid of the bad habit in order to stop the sickness. Same principle applies for the earth, we must not pollute or destroy the earth because it is our home and we should respect it. Earth day is the perfect day to change our bad habits such as littering on the streets, burning rubbish in the open, and throwing rubbish into the river. It is also the perfect day to start some good habits such as recycling and doing charity work related to the environment.

Bread and Butter

About three weeks ago, The Buddhist Society had organised a trip to an orphanage for disabled kids. The plan was to sing songs and teach them how to draw, but the plan didn't quite go as intended. When everyone had arrived and it was time to draw something, I had a very happy greeting from some of the orphans. They couldn't speak any languages so I did the best I could to communicate with them. Although, I did not understand anything at all, they were still very kind and friendly. When the drawing started, I took my drawing pad and color pencils out. I was in charge of two kids, one boy and one girl. I gave them color pencils and paper to draw on but they just started scribbling on the paper. At this point it was very hard to teach them to hold the pencil properly and not put it in their mouth. In fact, everyone was having trouble teaching them to draw. So I just followed along with what the two kids were doing. (I'll name the boy Bread and the girl Butter). They scribbled on the left, I scribbled on the right. They simply can not focus on one thing at a time so it was easy to get their attention but easier to lose it. Nevertheless, they were very happy and I was happy so it was all good. You have to just go with the flow with these children. After the first half of the session, it was time to sing songs. Obviously, they couldn't sing but they could make noises in the tone of the lyrics. Bread and Butter didn't really know what was going on so I sang to them. I don't think they knew what I was trying to do but they were very, very happy to hear me sing. Just to clarify, my singing wasn't good, it was just talking. After calming down from all that singing, we all shook hands and hugged one another. As I looked back at them while walking back  home, I could see that they don't get a lot of visitors and were sad when I left. I look forward to the next visit and hopefully Bread and Butter will recognize me.

Butter holding the paper and Bread with the collar shirt.

A Day in Hokkaido

My trip to Japan was a memorable one. I went to a couple of places in Japan such as Hokkaido, Osaka and Tokyo. On the more exciting day, my family and I had landed at the airport. The first thing we saw outside the window of the plane was SNOW. Sadly it wasn't the fluffy soft snow but instead the thin fake-looking snow. It was still a great sight to see white wherever we looked. We had to take a bus to our hotel in Hokkaido. It was a 4 hour drive but on the way to the hotel, we could see the terrain slowly change from windy wet weather to heavy snowfall. Snowflakes were all over the windows of the bus. It was around -5 degrees Celsius. After we had finally reached our destination, we were allowed to go to the bathroom at the hotel's souvenir shop. Right when i got off the bus, my feet were immediately planted into the snow. The view was breathtaking, seriously, it was hard to breathe. After keeping our luggage in the rooms, we decided to finally for the first time in our lives, play in the snow. Let say if you were to take off your gloves and make a snowball with your bare hands, you're gonna feel that pins and needles feeling instantly(WEAR GLOVES). We followed a random path that lead to a storage for all the snowmobiles. On the way however, we aggressively threw snowballs at each other non-stop just because there was so much snow. It's actually quite hard to hit someone with a snowball. I was very inaccurate when throwing snowballs at my family. We also pushed each other a lot. The snow was as soft as can be so there was really no harm done. Therefore I did not feel guilty when burying my own sister in the snow...and my brother. When it started getting dark we finally decided to call it a day and slowly crawled back to the hotel. It was really cold......