14. A Language Adventure. My First Real Job
Returning on my bicycle from a late night bowl of onion soup at Les Halles, the produce market featured in the movie Irma La Douce, I found a letter in my mailbox advising me that I had been accepted into the Canadian Foreign Trade Service. A friend of mine had persuaded me to write the Foreign Service exam at the Canadian Embassy some months earlier, and here I was now with a job!
This same friend and I had been planning to travel around the world on Honda motorcycles if Honda would sponsor us. The Foreign Service opportunity looked more promising.
As wonderful as my stay in France was, I often felt homesick for Canada. Going abroad allowed me to better understand and even to better appreciate my own home and original culture. Learning another language and culture does not take away from the enjoyment of your own background, it only intensifies it.
Yet I was destined to live abroad for many more years in Asia before finally settling down in Vancouver.
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The Linguist Book
This is a part of The Linguist: A personal guide to language learning which you can buy online at TheLinguist website. The paperback is available in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese and the downloadable PDF e-book is available in English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean.
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