Greenheart Travel is excited to send a group of amazing travelers to study and volunteer abroad as part of our 2017 Travel Correspondent and Global Explorer Scholarship awards. To help introduce our inspiring writers, we are doing a series of spotlight interviews to help you get to know a little more about who they are, where they will be headed and what inspired them to travel abroad.
Read on to meet 18-year-old, Ruiwen (Rachel) Shen, our Greenheart Travel Correspondent from Houston, Texas, who’ll be traveling abroad to study French at our Teen Summer Language Camp in Canada!
I enjoy photography, cooking, exercising, exploring, social events, and trying new things with my friends.
Yes! I have been to China and Costa Rica.
I have taken French throughout middle school and high school, and I wanted a first hand experience in the language.
I am most excited to meet new and diverse friends to improve my French and to also see the beautiful city of Quebec at my language camp. I want to explore the culture more firsthand.
It’s important to travel to a new place and learn a new language to expand my view on the world. Different cultures allow people to understand each other better. There is direct translation between languages, and certain languages hold histories behind words. Learning a language can help me understand those who struggle with my native language.
I am nervous about being in a completely new environment in a foreign country with a host family and speaking French with everyone around me.
I speak Chinese to a basic level since my parents spoke Chinese with me growing up. However, my French is very limited since I only learned about it through classes at school.
I think that I will be able to gain a first hand insight into a new environment, and I will be able to expand my view of other cultures in the world. I think that my French will definitely improve and as will my understanding for the Quebecois culture.