How to attain good quality of life

Chanthy was living in a dusty-looking house with a small bedroom. He optimistically believed in himself that he would soon graduate from IFL. Everyday, he would have a book or two with him because he likes reading so much. His goal in life is to live with a person whom he loves and to become a CEO of a multinational company. Although he is poor, he still thinks that ‘money is not everything’. A few years after his graduation, Chanthy contracted a job with a comfortable salary in one multinational company. Then, he got married to a woman with whom he had been deeply in love for years. Now Chanthy is so successful both in his career and family life. Chanthy’s story leads us to think that he has a good quality of life. Quality of life refers to how good or bad, convenient or stressful one’s life is. We believe that a good quality of life can be attained by: being optimistic, keeping on learning, living a purposeful life, and seeing money as not everything.

My Ugly Vacation

It was September 18, 2009, the day before Pchum Ben Day, that I and my family went to Vietnam for pleasure. We started off our journey at 12:30 in the afternoon with a light rain and arrived at Neak Leoung Ferry, where we had to cross the Mekong River, at 2:00PM.

Unfortunately, there were two long rows (about 2km away from the dock) of big and small cars queuing for the crossing. We were stuck in that huge gridlock for nearly one and half hours. The long procession filed step-by-step.The weather was hot and our car's air conditioner had difficulties pushing out cool air. We were sweating profusely. However, our car crawled attentively towards and jammed for space into the ferry. At about 3:30PM we finally reached the other side of the river. 'It is not our day!' I talked to my parents, 'we should have reached Bavet, the transit between Vietnam and Cambodia, already.'

Unexpectedly, our car, Toyota Tiger 2003, had high temperature which was almost impossible to happen because my dad had just filled in the water before we journeyed. We stopped by the side of the road. Because the car's front part was filled with smoke, my dad stopped the car in no time. We then got out of the car and looked for water to cool the machine down. After thirty minutes of relentlessly pouring the water onto the machine, we were finally able to continue our journey. My mom and I started to feel uneasy about the car; thus, we keep our eyes closely on the temperature gauge to avoid the incident from happening again.