Things I do with my free time Today's topic is "my hobbies". Well... let me start with dancing. When I was a child, I was very shy and never thought I could like dancing, but somehow I got into it when I came across Samba. I started samba with no intension of continuing as I was invited to try out just for a month with a friend of mine. Then I met this lady, my samba teacher. Unlike the other dance classes I had seen, she started the class just putting the music on and telling us to close our eyes and move our bodies freely to get on the rhythm, no instruction, no choreography. This groundbreaking method of teaching just grabbed my heart and helped me break my shell and throw myself into the rhythm. After moving to Spain, I have tried flamenco for 2 years as I could not find samba class and now I am dancing belly dance. Another thing I enjoy is swimming. Unfortunately I can't swim often anymore as I now live in a small town and we don't have a heated pool here. However whenever I go to Granada I take my swim suit and go to the public pool near the place I usually stay. I started swimming when I was a child and since then I have been swimming for entire my life. These days I have been enjoying making some origami earrings. It can be frustrating sometimes as it requires a lot of patience, working with small pieces of paper but somehow it relaxes my mind and makes me feel good when I finish making them. Right now I am thinking about selling them on the Internet as they are just sitting on my desk. Although I have never tried, I am also interested in scuba diving. I would love to try that when I go to Australia :)

Living in a foreign country Today's topic of my essay is "living in a foreign country". While some say that living overseas gives you opportunities to communicate with people from other cultures and can broaden your horizons, I personally have mixed feelings about this experience. As those who support this idea claim, one of the advantages of living abroad is that, in a way, you are forced to meet new people and experience different lifestyles, which helps you learn about other cultures. I myself have learnt some individualist attitudes while I was in New Zealand, which I was not used to due to my original cultural background, a collectivist mindset. This definitely allowed me to take advantage of the situation by assimilating benefits from both sides. On the other hand, I have struggled and I still am struggling with language and cultural barriers, which are inevitable when relocating in another country. As I currently live in a small town in southern Spain, I often get frustrated and feel homesick for New Zealand, being isolated from the local communities as they always treat me as an outsider due to the language barrier. Lifestyle difference is another issue that has been putting me off. Here in Spain, people eat much later compared to universal eating time and stay up so late to socialise with others, to which I still struggle adjusting myself. On balance, although there are some significant gains in life abroad, experiencing new environment and learning another language, there are difficulties people often need to overcome to be able to gain comfortable life in a foreign country due to some cultural barriers or differences in customs and behaviours.