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Three months ago, with excitement and a little bit worry, I, an international student from China, came to the United States for the first time. Everything around was new for me, especially, the language environment. At the beginning, when I had to speak English all the time during my daily life, I felt awkward and tired. Even worse, I faced difficulties of various sorts in writing— sometimes, I faced culture collisions; sometimes, I misunderstand the meaning of words; sometimes, I clearly knew what I want to express, but when I started to type, I was trapped and even had no idea about how to build up my words into a shapely essay. Luckily, I joined Esem "Play in the City"this semester. Although it was not easy for me to read so many reading materials and write my essays every week, I, indeed, have to thank for those experiences because I learnt many precious skills of writing from them.

During this semester, we had at least seven trips to Philadelphia, which were all interesting and exciting. We explore the meaning of new definition we learnt in the readings in class; we visited museums; we watched plays; we took photos; and we absorbed knowledge and thinking a lot when we played and enjoyed ourselves.

Unconsciously, three months have passed. These days, I practiced reading and writing to developed my skills of using my second language, which is like that I piled up my experiences as bricks to build up a skyscraper—more bricks I built, higher I reach, and further I overlook. Thus, I will never stop my steps to collect the “bricks”, which build up my second language and bring me to a wider horizon of my new life.