Melissa
My blogs
| Gender | Female |
|---|---|
| Industry | Student |
| Occupation | Silk Road Ensemble & Institute Assistant Director |
| Location | Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy |
| Introduction | Hello! Hola! Konnichiwa! Bonjour! Salaam! Ni hao! Namaste! Tashi delek! In case you couldn’t tell by my multilingual greetings, I am fascinated with foreign languages. My 6 year-old self’s proclamation that “I want to be an anthropologist when I grow up” was met with no shortage of raised eyebrows from skeptical adults. Since then, I've continued with a life of passionate fascination with world cultures. After graduating from a public high school in rural Chesterton, Indiana, I went where no CHS student had gone before: I took a gap year (a what? This phenomenon, while virtually unheard of in the Midwest, is popular in other parts of the world: basically, taking a year off between high school and college, most often for work and/or travel) to go beyond the Land of Cornfields and spend 6 months studying and traveling in India. Now, as a student at Indiana University, I’ve charted my own course of study- Inter-Cultural Arts Programming & Performance- through IU's Individualized Major Program. And I'm charting new territory again: as part of working towards my goals, I'll be spending the next year studying abroad in China & (situation permitting) Tibet. |
| Favorite Movies | Amelie, Gandhi, Whale Rider, Life is Beautiful, Goodbye, Lenin!, Water, Turtles Can Fly, Cinema Paradiso, Hotel Rwanda, Shakespeare in Love, Lagaan, Monty Python & the Holy Grail, Motorcycle Diaries, Mulan, Hero, Raise the Red Lantern, King of Masks, Salaam Bombay, Kandahar, Bandit Queen, Vizontele, Kekexili |
| Favorite Music | World Music (Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Indian, Latino, Chinese, Gypsy-style, Greek traditional, Irish, Central Asian... in short, pretty much any music not made in or modeled after the U.S.) |
| Favorite Books | Siddhartha, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, MacBeth, Hamlet, Death Comes for the Archbishop, God of Small Things, pretty much anything by Salman Rushdie, The Inheritance of Loss |
You have to dig a hole to China. Where do you start?
Well, I'm already here in China. And since starting elsewhere that hole might take a long time to dig, why not just start digging?