This week’s Carnival of Beauty will be hosted by Amanda of following an unknown path, who is currently living in Taiwan. How interesting! I decided to look up Taiwan on a map because I’m a little rusty on my geography. I’ve never been there before, and so I’m sure I’ll enjoy exploring Amanda’s blog to learn more about why she’s there and where exactly she makes her home.

Seeing that map of Taiwan brought back memories of something I haven’t thought of in over a decade. When I was living in Japan, I rode my bike every Saturday morning to a little community center to study Japanese. My class was only three people: me, a businessman from Malaysia, and a college student from Taiwan. We had a wonderful volunteer teacher who truly loved teaching us her language and enjoyed taking us on “field trips” all over Osaka and Kobe. She also cooked us dinner in her home — where we all had to practice the language lessons she’d been teaching us!

My Taiwanese friend was named Ryu — I’m not sure if that’s spelled correctly in English! He was really proud of his tea ceremony technique. I remember my friends gave me a little birthday party when I turned 25, and Ryu had an elaborate tea ceremony for me — showing us how his family has made tea for centuries.

I’ve lost touch with those friends, and I hope they’re all doing well. Amanda’s blog looks so refreshing! I can’t imagine how different my life might have been in Japan if I’d kept a blog. Instead, I spent every night in my room writing letters — by hand. I searched the stationery shops for interesting Japanese writing paper, and I made several trips to the post office every week. I always looked forward to checking my mail!

The topic for this week’s Carnival is “The Beauty of Serving.” Amanda says to send our post link by 3 pm on Tuesday, which will be 6 am on Wednesday in Taiwan. I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with. Would you like to submit something?

Don’t forget to stop by Sallie’s site at Two Talent Living — she’s the official sponsor of the Carnival, but she’s taking a break. I certainly enjoyed her recent post about why she’s pulling back from “gadding about” in the blogosphere — since I’ve only been blogging four months, she gave me plenty of food for thought!

P.S. I just discovered Amanda is also a FlyLady fan — she’ll have to come visit me on Fridays here in my blog so we can encourage each other. I liked her post on how FlyLady helped her change the way she sees time.