International Student Identity Card 國際學生證

Sample ISIC card

An International Student Identity Card (ISIC) can help you save lots of money when traveling. You can save money on train fare, you can get into museums at a reduced rate and enjoy lots of other benefits. Read about them right here:

https://www.isic.org/

If you're in Taiwan, you can apply for an ISIC card here:

Civil Wars and Coups in the Americas: A Numbered List

Although many of the countries in the Caribbean Sea, Central and South America are blessed with natural resources, they have long been plagued with a lack of infrastructure, high illiteracy, dictatorial governments and outside interference. As a result, these countries have often suffered from coups and civil wars. The beginning of the 21st has seen a marked improvement, however. Countries that used to be too dangerous for tourism, such as Colombia, are now slowly returning to normal. Let us hope that this trend continues.


Below is a numbered list of coups and civil wars in Central America, the Caribbean and South America, arranged by country:

Panama Canal-1

The Panama Canal lets ships travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Here is a two-minute time lapse video of a full crossing:

A longer (almost six minutes) and much more informative time lapse video set to music (Chitarra Romana) appears below. This video will help you learn quite a lot about how the canal works:

破解瑪雅密碼 Cracking The Maya Code

Here is an interesting video presentation that explains how Mayan writing was deciphered. Don't forget to turn on the Closed Captions (CC) to see bilingual text in English and traditional Chinese.

 
Chinese explanation appears below:

Mexican Music: Malagueña Salerosa

This is one of the most famous Mexican songs, about a poor Mexican man who is in love with a woman from Málaga, a city is southern Spain. The three versions on this page are all by Mexican singers. If you check on YouTube, you can find versions by singers from Spain and even Italy, but they don't feel so authentic.

The version below is sung by Javier Solis:

The version below is by TrÍo TiracurÍ:

Here is a karaoke version:

Please note that each singer changes the words a little bit to suit his own style, so you might find that the lyrics don't match up 100%. The Spanish lyrics appear below, along with my own literal English translation.Sigh! The Spanish sounds so much more beautiful!

Tourist Spanish-4

There are two ways to say "Do you speak English?"

1 ¿Habla Inglés? (Formal) ("Formal" means "serious": this is how we speak or write to older, or more important people)

2 ¿Hablas Inglés? (Informal) ("Informal" means "relaxed": this is how we speak to friends or other young people)

Notice how printed Spanish questions use two question marks, ¿ = upside-down (at the beginning), and ? right-side up at the end.

Tourist Spanish-3

Hola = Hi! Hello! (Be careful! In Spanish, h- is silent)

Buenos días (Pay attention! There should be an accent mark on the “i”, not a dot. They don't show the accent mark on the video: this is a small mistake)