Reads For The Road: "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafron

by Lindsay Shapka in , , ,


I started reading this book because it was recommended to me by a friend that I met while travelling. He pulled it off his bookshelf and told me that it was one of his favourite books in the world. When someone goes to the trouble to tell me about a book that matters to them and recommend that I read it, I do. I find that reading things that people that I know have loved helps me to get to know them better, and the fact that they want to share that with me is pretty darn cool.

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Why Do People In North America Wear Poppies in November?

by Lindsay Shapka in , ,


November 11, known as Remembrance Day in Canada and the other Commonwealth Nations of the world, is a day that has been observed since the end of World War I to remember the men and women who died in the line of duty. (Many non-Commonwealth Nations, like the United States, also treat this day as one of remembrance, as November 11, 1918, was the day when hostilities officially ended in WWI.)

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8 Fun Facts You Didn't Know About Halloween

by Lindsay Shapka in ,


Did you know that Halloween is actually an Irish holiday? It comes from an ancient festival called Samhain that marks the day when the undead are thought to walk among the living. It also marks the end of long, sunny days and the beginning of the darker half of the year. The holiday was brought to North America by Irish immigrants in the 1840s.

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Why Teaching English as a Second Language Isn't Easy

by Lindsay Shapka in , ,


Despite the fact that my sole purpose for going to South Korea was to teach, I hadn’t really ever thought of myself as being a real teacher. I had my Bachelor of Arts in English and so was more qualified than some (you just needed a degree, any degree, to teach English in South Korea at the time), but I had never been professionally trained in the teaching trade.

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The Hangul Revolution: How The Creation of A Written Language Changed South Korea Forever

by Lindsay Shapka in , , ,


Poo-doon-mao oh don gee yo was my (phonetic) address when I lived in South Korea, and one of the first things that I learned to say (once it had been written out for me of course) in Korean. I was told that it meant something like, “the brownish-orange buildings with numbers in the 500s on them.” All I knew for sure was that when I got in a cab and said it to the driver, I would end up in the right spot.

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Reads For The Road: "The Social Life of Ink" by Ted Bishop

by Lindsay Shapka in , , ,


I don't know about you, but I am one of those people who always has at least one pen rolling around in the bottom of my bag. Even though I rarely take notes during interviews anymore (thinks voice recorder), and use the note function on my phone when needing to jot things down quickly, I still hold out hope that I'm going to have time to actually sit down, pull out a notebook, and put pen to paper.

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Reads For The Road: "The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving A F#CK" by Sarah Knight

by Lindsay Shapka in , ,


If the title of this book — The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F#ck — sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it is a hilarious parody of the bestselling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

The concept of this book is to teach you "how to stop spending time you don't have with people you don't like doing things you don't want to do" aka STOP PEOPLE PLEASING!!

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