Day 30: Pomodoro Method

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08.06.23

We had a free day today so I was able to sleep in a little. When I woke up it was POURING outside and it really made me not want to leave the dorms. I had a pretty busy day ahead of me so I mustered up the courage to leave and do some work. 

    

I had planned to spend the morning/afternoon at a local coffee shop, but decided to go to the on campus coffee shop, Louisa, instead. Regardless, the walk over was treacherous. I huddled under my yellow poncho and umbrella, but my shoes could not be saved. I walked into the coffee shop with my shoes soaked and socks sopping wet.

I ordered my classic Brown sugar latte (1/2 sweet, 1/2 ice- the barista probably gave me a look for this). I settled down and began to work on pulling together information from the survey's for my paper on Mental Health Dispositions in Students from Taiwan. When I study, I like to use the Pomodoro Method: do focused work in increments of 25 minutes and then take a 5 minute break. The timer helps me to stay focused and the break is a reward for staying on track. Have you tried it?

On one of my breaks, Savannah, Sam, and Annie came to join me to study. Here’s us pretending to do work for the blog photo op and then taking our break (加油!).




After studying I got ready to go meet my brother (named Peter) and our family friends at the the Flower Market. We got food, stir fried noodles and stinky tofu, and winter melon yakult tea. I enjoyed catching up with my friends and seeing my brother!

                                                    

We then walked to Big City to watch Barbie and meet up with some other students from the program. Interestingly enough, there was a concert set up outside of the mall and a heavy metal band performing.

Da wei got to meet my real brother.

The Barbie movie was in English but had Chinese subtitles. It was cool to see some of the vocab words that we learned in Chinese class such as 孤单 (gu1dan1) and自由 (zi4you2- freedom). I’m so glad that we finally got to see Barbie and overall, I did like the message of the movie. 

After Barbie some of us went to karaoke to celebrate Ryan’s birthday. I realize, in some ways it's important to live life with the Pomodoro Method in mind, my hours of hard work followed up by a rewarding day of seeing my brother, and hanging out with friends.

~爱荣


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