Essay editing

I have finished a profile of a person. I want you to review my papper and solve all my gramatic erros, correct my word choice and wrong expressions.:

Lolapola

My alarm clock rings, the music turns on automatically, and I slowly open my eyes. The first thing I always do is to check those subscribed blogs on my phone. Some of them post their selfies, some of them post their outfits of the day, some of them post where they traveled recently. Bloggers live with a fancy life all the time. I mean, their life seem very fantastic, but somehow unrealistic. However,  among all the blogs I following, Lola is different. Her posts are always natural and daily based, which make my day all the time.

Lola, a lifestyle blogger based in Shanghai, China, is also a normal college student of our age. I knew her from her  YouTube channel, which is about skin care and make up. Just as similar as other make up bloggers, she shared her acne skin care or reviewed some make up products on her channel, so I didn’t notice her a lot at first until she opened her own blog. Three months later, she updated a video talked about her new blog, which would mainly share her daily life and healthy diets. I followed her and gradually found that she was really an amazing person. 

Encounter with Lola:

In last December, I flew back to China and spent my winter break in Shanghai. By chance, Lola was holding a meeting up offline in a vegan cafe. Since I stay in the United States most of a year, it is very lucky for attending the offline events of a Chinese blogger. I decisively signed up for that event  and was so excited to see my favorite blogger in face. 

The cafe was far away from my apartment. I took one-hour subway and twenty-minute walk from the subway station. The vegan cafe was in an old alley where there were many Shikumen ( translated as stone-gate, an ancient style architecture only in Shanghai) buildings. These buildings were built during World War Two by Europeans, so they combined both Eastern and Western architectural style. However, many of them were pulled down for skyscrapers, so today’s old valleys are like mysterious mazes diffused in the modern metropolis. I walked through the entrance several times but didn’t notice it. After walking around the alley for twenty minutes or more, I saw a girl with short curly hair, wearing a pair of glasses and a flora long pleated dress with a a pair of chunky boots.  She put on a leather jacket on her shoulder instead of wearing it, which looked so stylish and vintage.  She was very tall, maybe more than 5.7ft. My first reaction to her was: Is she Lola? I called her name unintentionally, and she turned back to me and asked who I am. 

“ Aha! Lola! Nice to see you, I am your big fan. My name is Azura.” I was so excited at that time, because it was the first time I met someone as a fan. I even couldn’t manage my words. 

“ Hi! Are you here for the potluck dinner today?” Lola looked so confident and graceful. She seemed to deal with similar situations for many times, so the atmosphere was neither awkward nor nervous. 

“ Yes, but I can’t find the cafe.” 

“Haha, right. I admit that the location is hard to find. You can go with me actually, if you want to.” Lola said.

Then I walked to the cafe with Lola. She was so talkative that chat with me while we walking in the alley. I am not very good at meeting with strangers, so I was a little bit passive. However, she was the kind of person that can lead the conversation.

“ Is it your first time for the workshop? I am sure you will like it! ” Lola curled her hair by her finger and smiled. The sun shined on her, the light reflected on her face. Although the winter in Shanghai was so cold and wet, her smile looked so warm that could melt the coldness in the air.

We arrived at the cafe, and many other fans had arrived already. Lola greeted each of them and we started the healthy food workshop. I was very lucky that added Lola on social media and became her personal account’s friend. We didn’t get to know each other and became friends until she invited me to write a fashion review of the spring/ summer fashion week. After having some collaborations with her, our relation got closer. The last day of the winter break, she invited me to drink high tea with her in the restaurant she invested — Happy Buddha. 

Closer Approach 

“ Azura, do you have interest to spend your upcoming summer with me? I am finding an assistant right now, and I think you are perfect for this position.”  Lola smiled so confidently as she does all the time and took a sip of the black coffee. Lola is more straightforward than I expected.

“ Sure, it’s my honor to work with you!” I accepted her propose. “Can you tell me more about your intern experience? I was so curious about what you have done during these four years.” 

“ My first intern was being a translator after my high school graduation.”

***

Being different from majority of the high school students who usually find part time jobs in Star Bucks, Lola got her first internship in a salon training camp in Shanghai. 

“ Maybe it was my starting of being an ‘ intern expert’.” Lola laughed with her white teeth, “ I really don’t like studying, especially those rigid formulas, boring text books. Plus, I can’t settle down. I always want to do something instead of staying at home.” She didn’t have a high aspiration of getting this position, but she sent her resume anyhow. On the second day, she went for the interview with the HR Eric. Fortunately, she was in. Her job was to be the personal translator of the instructor Nino- a British stylist. Although Lola was  maturer than her peers at that, she was still very young and unexperienced, so Nino didn’t talk too much with her expect working. 

“ But he was very cool. Nino used to be a DJ, but after then he became a stylist. What he told me that impressed me until now was ‘ do anything you want to do, try anything you want to try.’ His words  encouraged me to try so many things afterward.” Lola continued to tell me her first internship story. “ My salary was twice even three times than those of the part time job, but my pressure was proportional as well. That was another thing I learned from it.”

***

Lola went to a Teacher College, major in Chinese after that summer. She always jokes about her major in her blog: “ I know my Chinese writing is worse than English. but life makes fool of me. I feel shamed when I write my major on my resume.” College life was totally different from high school. It took Lola one semester to get used to her new life. During the first semester, she explored her interest in vintage clothing and fashion. 

“ Because I didn’t have much money, but you know that girls like shopping, I discovered a thrift market in Shanghai. I came to realize that vintage clothes are so amazing and unique. Each piece has its own story and meaning behind it. So I began to build my relationship with many vintage shop owners.” Lola stood up and showed me her “ new dress” , “ You can’t find any new design like this.” 

I looked at her dress: a metallic pleated midi dress, the waistline was slimmer and longer than recent design pieces. There were two rows of black fasteners under the big Peter Pan collar, which made it both cute and edgy. “ So how did you get your intern being a vintage shop keeper later?” I asked. 

“ I went for a vintage market during my second semester, and I met a German couple who run a famous vintage shop in Shanghai named Picking Memories. I was very social and outgoing, so I recommended myself to them and luckily I was in again. In the next six months, I met all the vintage gurus in Shanghai, and visited all the vintage shops near Shanghai. I also started to love Jazz music and gym stuff, because my boss- Mark. Another interesting thing about being a shop keeper is that you can meet a variety of costumers. I met a lot of amazing people, having different experiences and traveling to many places, who later provided me other internships. I widen my social circle and became kind of famous in Shanghai vintage fashion industry. Six months later, the vintage shop closed because of the renter decided to sell that house.” 

***

After being a small “celebrity” in vintage industry, Lola decided to write a guide of vintage shops in Shanghai, and that was her first post of her blog. Her vintage guide got more than one thousand views in the first day and five hundred new fans of her microblog accounts. After that she wrote more city guides and some skin care routines online to gather more followers. 

“ It is not easy to become a free lancer. I need to go to many restaurants and try their dishes, buy new cosmetic products, take beautiful photos, edit them and write hundreds of comments and reviews. However, that is what I love. I love sharing my daily discoveries, my fashion tastes. my life experiences with all the followers.” When Lola talked about her blog, I could see the sparkle in her eyes,  passion inside her heart and blueprint in her mind. “ Blog brings me so much treasure. First, it always stimulates me to learn new stuff and explore my real passion. I realized my great interest in healthy lifestyle one year later, so I decided to focus on the healthy food and fitness. Second, it utilizes my full potential and help me to enlarge my social circle. I am known by so many person, and at the same time, I have met more related companies, partners and friends. Like you, Azura!.”

***

“ YouTube allows  anyone to make a business by sharing their passion with people around the world.” said by Annie Baxter, a famous YouTuber who hits millions of fans.

I really admire Lola that she can always find interns related to her current enthusiasm and connect all her experiences together to make more value. After becoming a healthy lifestyle blogger/ free lancer for one year, she has accumulated many resources in this field. In her last winter break, she started to work as a Key Idea Leader of a new APP company named FitTime which is a company about fitness, and a marketing promotor of a vegan restaurant named Pure and Whole. Both of them are private new companies, so Lola got many opportunities to learn new things especially about business and marketing and practice what she learned.

“ I never think that working in a small new company is worse than in a top 500 company. Usually people doing internship in those big companies don’t have much work and enough opportunity as I did in FitTime. And most importantly, there are too many restrains in the big companies, I can’t fully use my power to maximize the benefits. You know what, I contacted the boss of FitTime and Pure and Whole to have a one-day fitness camp event together. Pure and Whole will charge for the food and the trainer of the FitTime will give people a one-day-training, and I will be the person who launch this news and gather more popularity. Does it sound great? If I were an intern of a big company, I even couldn’t have the right to propose this idea. I foresee great chance of healthy food market in China and I want to be the early adopter in this market. So I am considering do something real. But, you know I still need to write my blogs and share my daily life with my fans, so I want you to help me manage my blog posts.” 

***

It has been four months since I had a talk with Lola. In these four months, Lola had two new titles after her name: Co-founder of Serenity Food company and investor of Happy Buddha ( a vegan restaurant). And in her last semester of college, she finally ended up being an intern of someone else, but became a boss of her own. I think her passion won’t stop by here and she won’t be satisfied with what she have done. It isn’t the end of Lola’s story, but is a new start. 

“ Hi, I am Lola. A 90s girl living in Shanghai. I am enthusiastic and witted. I firmly believe in simple and healthy life style. I want to share my idea and belief by this blog, hope you will like and tell more people about my blog ;) By Lolapola.”