 day of the reading rush challenge of 2020 and I am super excited. I debated on staying up until midnight last night but I haven't been sleeping well so I decided that no I am going to sleep before this readathon because I don't know how much sleep I'll be getting throughout the readathon. So I am super excited today. It's the first day. If you watched my TBR video then you know that I only own one physical copy of one of the books and that is The Secret Garden and this is also the book that I'm using for like four challenges I think for a majority of the challenges and it could qualify for more of them but I'm not just gonna do one book I am gonna actually try and do more than one because that would just be nice. In this video this since this is day one I'm also going to have all of the video challenges in this vlog as well and so one of the challenges the second one was actually to match your outfit to your book and I figured it'd be really hard to match my outfit to one of the audiobooks I'm listening to because they're on my phone and so it just wouldn't really get that same you know like actually matching something but I do not have a lot of bright yellow clothing items like the closest I had was like this mustard dress and I was like you know I'm good for a dress today so this is the best that I could do literally like this was the best that I could do was just this plain yellow dress to match this mostly yellow button I also don't have a lot of flower accessories so I tried but I think this challenge was a little bit of a failure for me but of course I had to choose a book with a bright yellow cover and I have nothing else yellow in my closet not even anything like wintery or warm like I just don't and of course I love drinking tea as do many other book dragons and so I will go ahead and put in a clip of me making tea as that is the first challenge and tea is good tea is great so here you go the last challenge is an interesting one because it's your favorite book memory share your favorite book memory and here's the thing is that I don't have a lot of book memories just because I have a horrible memory so I don't really remember most things but there is one interesting story that comes to mind and I'm warning you now it's a little bit of a deeper story so when I was growing up when I was a lot younger my parents loved listening to audiobooks but this was like before they could do it on their phone or before they either of them owned headphones so they would always get the CDs from the library and put them into our CD player and so when my mom is cleaning the house and listening to an audiobook everyone is listening to the audiobook because she's listening to it through our big old CD player and a lot of times she's moving throughout the house you know she's cleaning the upstairs bathroom she cleans downstairs bathroom she cleans this room so it's like if my mom's listening to an audiobook everyone is listening to an audiobook and in winter you know even before winter as soon as like November hits my mother starts listening to a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens every single year and here's the thing she doesn't just listen to it once in November she listens to it on a loop until February I am not kidding here I've heard her listen to it in November and I have heard her listen to it in January and throughout all of December in between so I have listened to just bits and pieces and random orders of a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens because of my mother's obsession with listening to the audiobook for three months and that was something that me and my brother were always like oh mom not again you do this every year and you do it for so long we're sick and tired we would always joke about that and we'd be like oh my word I am so sick of this I'm going to find headphones and plug it into something else and then so I am about to head into my sophomore year of university but before I was a freshman I took a gap year between high school and university and in this gap year I went to a foreign country for a year where I was an English teacher and so I went to Kyrgyzstan which is a small country in Central Asia it's underneath Kazakhstan which is a huge country which is underneath Russia and it's right next to China and it's like above India it's literally the most central country in Central Asia and it's not very big so I went there with who is now my fiance and we were English teachers and they speak Russian there I hadn't learned any Russian before going there but I was enrolled in Russian courses while I was there so we were there technically as like missionaries but doing missionary work was illegal in Kyrgyzstan so we were there officially as English teachers and as students but we were sent from a missionary group I am a Christian so I'm just going to clear that up but our main goal was not and I do want to be clear that even though I was a Christian missionary my main goal was not to convert people it was to support people because there would be kids and hard family situations because they were Christian rather than some other religion or even non-religious so I was there to support them not to evangelize or to press my faith upon people that's a huge like misconception that people have of missionaries is that all they do is they go out to the world to try and convert people to their religion not always sometimes yes I won't say that nobody does that sometimes yes but that's not what I was doing anyway back to the story so we were there and it was winter months I think it was November like the end of November early December and I decided to join the music team at my church in the capital city of Bishkek and it was an English speaking church it was a church made up of missionaries with a few local people but it was mostly for the foreigners passing through or missionaries who were there for a long term and so I decided to join the praise team during the music team but what I did not realize was that I needed to have a religious certificate or a religious visa to allow me to practice my religion the the church that we were in was on private property and we owned the property but it was it was still consider practicing your faith in a public or non-private area and I didn't know this so I and really no one really knew of this because it's not something that's talked about at all so one day I was and I was actually in training to be a music leader to lead my own team for Sundays one day but one day my mentor and I were leading our group in in the service and there was a morning service and then there is a second service and so in between those services we one of the secretaries of the church approached us and said you need to talk to some people right now and I looked at my mentor who's also from England like like I said this is an all like missionaries church like there's me an American there's my mentor who's from England there is our pastor from Canada our other pastor from Brazil and so like yeah so we're pulled aside into a room and we were then made aware that what we were doing was illegal and that we could be arrested and deported just for singing some songs in front of other people who are already Christians who went there of their own free will and we were held in that room for a little more than two hours and it was really hard because they didn't speak English and I didn't speak Russian so our secretary who was a local curgis was translating back and forth for us and we're all sitting here like I didn't know I need a religious visa I just have a student visa and so they were threatening us with deportation with arresting us and and acting these punishments on us and our pastor bless him just completely was like don't like do anything to them because they have student visas they're here to learn I was telling them to sing I was telling them to do these things and he just completely like threw himself under the bus for us and once he convinced them of that they let us go. Luckily all we got was a small fine all the church was with small find because we were in process of getting paperwork for some people I don't know it was like a whole thing but like we ended up being okay our pastor was okay no one was allowed to do any religious activity so no singing no praying no sermons nothing unless they were a local person and like I said there were very few local people in the church so we struggled for a little bit but it was okay but I was so completely frazzled by this experience I had traveled before but never for a long period of time and I'd never been threatened with being arrested or deportation and it and we were only halfway through a year there so I was like oh no what am I gonna do and I was just I was having a very hard time and so what I did as soon as I got home got and with getting home for me was half an hour walk and then an hour on a public bus to get to where I was living so the journey to get to the church wasn't exactly around the corner as I lived a couple cities away first thing that I did I was like oh someone told me that there was a library with English books books in English so I was like I'm gonna check that out and go to books for my comfort because I don't know what else to do and I went into that library and one of the biggest books I saw that caught my eye was a complete works of Charles Dickens which included a Christmas Carol so I was like you know what I really miss my family right now I can't talk to them about what happened in fear of my media being monitored I couldn't FaceTime with them and tell them this I couldn't send an email I couldn't do anything like that so this was just kind of sitting on my chest and when I saw Christmas Carol I immediately went I immediately remembered all those times that my mom played the audiobook around the house for three months during the Christmas season and it was hard enough because Christmas was coming up and I wasn't gonna be with my family for the first time for Christmas like that's always just a hard thing so I got that book and I read it for the first time all the way through on my own and it brought me so much comfort and it meant a lot to me in that moment and it still does and now every year I I don't know if I'm going to read it every year now that you know I'm in university and I'm away from my family but it definitely whenever I'm missing home that's always the book to turn to because it had such a presence in my upbringing and it just reminds me of home when the weather is cold so that that is I don't know why it's not exactly my favorite book memory but it also it's probably the most meaningful book memory that I have just cuz it definitely got me through this experience I my at the time at the time boyfriend but now fiancee and I were thinking you know what if we were to just ask to go home for Christmas and then never come back that didn't happen we did come back we were still able to actually go home for Christmas but we did end up coming back anyway um so yeah I don't that's that's kind of my most memorable most comforting book memory that I have I don't know it's anymore I have completed the three challenges now to the best of my ability and so I am going to make some phone calls and then I'm finally going to go outside and start reading as it's been raining quite a bit this past weekend so I'm hoping that like since it's not raining right now I can go outside and start reading this outside so yeah that's exactly what I'm gonna do I'm gonna start reading the secret garden in my own garden so I'll catch up with you guys later so I am on my way to a doctor's appointment and they asked me to be there 20 minutes early so I'm sitting here thinking I can get the paperwork done very quickly I'll have time to read so I'm gonna leave in just a couple minutes I'm gonna sit here on my front porch and do a little bit of reading until it's time to leave and then hopefully when I get there I can do some reading as I wait because I am mostly healthy except for exactly what I need the appointment for so hopefully the forms will be quick and easy I don't have COVID at least I haven't had any symptoms or been exposed to someone who has tested positive so hopefully that'll all go well and I can finally get some reading done so just like in my normal read-a-thon fashion it's six o'clock day one I have read 14 pages of the secret garden I was able to read like the first chapter and a half at the doctor's office so and I haven't listened to any of the audiobooks I got two audiobooks for this I haven't listened to either of those yet so I have not gotten off to a great start with this like I said it's six o'clock I'm going to I'm gonna eat dinner I'm going to really try and get last month's video up because my computer has just been refusing to get the video out of the editing program and onto the computer so I can upload it so I'm gonna try and do some work with that and then once the that's done I'm gonna upload this vlog so while day one isn't officially over I am saying that this is all for day one vlog and that I didn't do very much physical reading but I hope to listen to an audiobook more for the rest of today so I tried and I will catch up with you guys for tomorrow for a day two of this reading vlog if you want to follow my reading blogs if you want to follow my journey and follow these blogs feel free to click the subscribe button and even share to other people who love watching reading blogs like this like the video as I will continue to be doing the challenges I've yet to do the Instagram challenge so I'm hoping to do that tonight and yeah I'm gonna be doing one of their other video challenges was to make a video doing the rush to reading tag so I will be filming that hopefully in a day or so and get it edited and uploaded if I can figure out this whole problem so there we go that that's all I'm gonna say I will catch up with you guys tomorrow in another video happy reading