What goes around comes around

One day a man saw an old lady, stranded on the side of the road, but even in the dim light of day, he could see she needed help. So he pulled up in front of her Mercedes and got out. His Pontiac was still sputtering when he approached her.

Even with the smile on his face, she was worried. No one had stopped to help for the last hour or so. Was he going to hurt her? He didn’t look safe; he looked poor and hungry. He could see that she was frightened, standing out there in the cold. He knew how she felt. It was those chills which only fear can put in you. He said, “I’m here to help you, ma’am. Why don’t you wait in the car where it’s warm? By the way, my name is Bryan Anderson.”

Well, all she had was a flat tire, but for an old lady, that was bad enough. Bryan crawled under the car looking for a place to put the jack, skinning his knuckles a time or two. Soon he was able to change the tire. But he had to get dirty and his hands hurt.
As he was tightening up the lug nuts, she rolled down the window and began to talk to him. She told him that she was from St. Louis and was only just passing through. She couldn’t thank him enough for coming to her aid.

Bryan just smiled as he closed her trunk. The lady asked how much she owed him. Any amount would have been all right with her. She already imagined all the awful things that could have happened had he not stopped. Bryan never thought twice about being paid. This was not a job to him. This was helping someone in need, and God knows there were plenty, who had given him a hand in the past. He had lived his whole life that way, and it never occurred to him to act any other way.

He told her that if she really wanted to pay him back, the next time she saw someone who needed help, she could give that person the assistance they needed, and Bryan added, “And think of me.”
He waited until she started her car and drove off. It had been a cold and depressing day, but he felt good as he headed for home, disappearing into the twilight.

A few miles down the road the lady saw a small cafe. She went in to grab a bite to eat, and take the chill off before she made the last leg of her trip home. It was a dingy looking restaurant. Outside were two old gas pumps. The whole scene was unfamiliar to her. The waitress came over and brought a clean towel to wipe her wet hair. She had a sweet smile, one that even being on her feet for the whole day couldn’t erase. The lady noticed the waitress was nearly eight months pregnant, but she never let the strain and aches change her attitude. The old lady wondered how someone who had so little could be so giving to a stranger. Then she remembered Bryan.

After the lady finished her meal, she paid with a hundred dollar bill. The waitress quickly went to get change for her hundred dollar bill, but the old lady had slipped right out the door. She was gone by the time the waitress came back. The waitress wondered where the lady could be. Then she noticed something written on the napkin.

There were tears in her eyes when she read what the lady wrote: “You don’t owe me anything. I have been there too. Somebody once helped me out, the way I’m helping you. If you really want to pay me back, here is what you do: Do not let this chain of love end with you.”
Under the napkin were four more $100 bills.

Well, there were tables to clear, sugar bowls to fill, and people to serve, but the waitress made it through another day. That night when she got home from work and climbed into bed, she was thinking about the money and what the lady had written. How could the lady have known how much she and her husband needed it? With the baby due next month, it was going to be hard….
She knew how worried her husband was, and as he lay sleeping next to her, she gave him a soft kiss and whispered soft and low, “Everything’s going to be all right. I love you, Bryan Anderson.”

There is an old saying “What goes around comes around.”

Travel Writing

Travel writing isn’t writing about your family’s vacation. It isn’t writing about what you liked or didn’t like about your last trip. And it definitely isn’t about writing about destinations so that you can travel for free.

Travel writing is writing about places, persons, and things in other places--also writing about how to travel, when to travel, and advice on traveling–all with the reader in mind. It’s about relaying your travel experiences to others so that they may emulate them or at the very least not make the same mistakes you did. And it’s writing about things in your own back yard that are exotic to everyone else---a local farmer's market, historic site, restaurant, museum.

To be a good travel writer, you need to be ON all the time, not just when you want to. When you’re on vacation, you do what you want when you want. You’re mind focuses on the place you’re visiting only when it wants to. But to interpret a destination for your readers, you have to look for new angles on the same old things while at the same time sharing your pleasure with your readers.

But before we go further into travel writing, we need to take a look at the readers that will devour what you say about a place. There are three parts to the communication process–the sender (the writer), the receiver (the reader), and the message. When you were in school, you subconsciously learned that the writer was the most important part of the process because in academic writing, that’s the case. But in general writing, including travel writing, the reader is the most important part of the process. If a writer doesn’t think about the reader before writing, the reader most likely won’t be interested or might possibly not understand what the writer is saying.

How did travel writing begin?
Travel has a long history. People have always traveled--from ancient caravansaries to modern resorts. But travel writing began, more or less, during Elizabethan times. Shakepeare got much of the background material for his plays, such as the "Merchant of Venice" and "Romeo and Juliet" from Elizabethan travel guides to Italy.

Why is it needed?
Travel writing celebrates the differences in manners and customs around the world. It helps the reader to understand other people and places. And it helps readers plan their own trips and avoid costly mistakes while traveling. But, most of all, it lets readers travel to far-off destinations that they may never see.

Inspirational Language Quotes

At ICL, we love quotes, they're inspiring in ways that make us reflect on certain aspects of our lives, our world. Here are some with learning and language as the theme:

❝If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.❞
‒Nelson Mandela

❝One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.❞
‒Frank Smith

❝The limits of my language are the limits of my world.❞
‒Ludwig Wittgenstein

❝Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can; there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.❞
‒Sarah Caldwell

❝Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.❞
‒Chinese Proverb

❝You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.❞
‒Geoffrey Willans

❝To have another language is to possess a second soul.❞
‒Charlemagne

❝Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.❞
‒Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

❝Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.❞
‒Rita Mae Brown

❝Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.❞
‒Oliver Wendell Holmes