People & languages in an inter-connected world

Stumbled across a website with an amazing idea. It’s a language exchange: but instead of finding a penpal and exchanging emails and the like (I’ve tried something like that before but the site didn’t seem to work very well), in this one you treat the site like a blog and post up entries in any language you’d like. Other people correct your posts, and you in turn correct posts for other people who wrote entries for themselves in your native language. As a bonus, because it feels like blog-browsing, I’ve been able to learn a lot about people living in other parts of the world. I think it’s an amazing system, and I’m looking forward to seeing how well it turns out. (Lang-8, if anyone is interested)

It also has been really nice to be able to write posts and share them, something I’ve been reluctant to do with this blog lately – probably because it’s entirely open to the public. The older I get, the more I think to myself ‘oh, I shouldn’t write my views about this or that, because it might get seen by my future boss - - - oh, what if I become a politician’ … There were good points to being young and naïve!

One thing I’d like to write about, though, is that recently I met old man that I got along well with, who invited me for tea and cakes. We must have had very different backgrounds, and were obviously in rather different stages of life – so it was nice to chat. When I mentioned my ‘I wanted to get out and see the world’ sentiment (per a post below) he threw in his thought that “it feels like everywhere you go, no matter how different the place is, people are the same: and you’ll find some that are just like you and some and are not”. No matter how easy it is to connect with people across the world now, people are the same – perhaps.