Nine Weeks at Camp Beech Cliff

Camp Beech Cliff: nine short weeks; 42 incredibly long days. 42 incredible days.

Within those 42 days, something transcendent happened at camp. Some how all the bits and pieces of programming, scheduling and logistics transformed into something wonderful to behold. Some how pottery, performing arts and sailing became so much more than just building pinch pots, singing and being on the water. Some how camp became something greater than the sum of its parts: something magical.

I say "some how," but I can tell you exactly how it happens. Hard work. Stupendously hard work. The kind of all-consuming work that at the end of the day left all the counselors crowded around the table in staff housing, stuffing their faces with whatever odd bits of carbs and sugar they had left–there's no time to get to the grocery store–staring blank faced at each other, too tired to follow through on the grand plans of volleyball or rock climbing. That is, of course, assuming these same counselors were able to get away from camp to eat something in the first place.

The transcendence, the "magic," doesn't appear in the air; there are two places you can see it created–one, forged slowly when, not just one or two, but a whole host of staff burns the midnight oil, hoping every moment with campers shines. The second part comes while facing reality: camp happens.  All those beautiful plans can be destroyed in mere minutes. If you really want to see the magic, watch what happens when you tell the camp director 7 staff members are out sick or a program head they have to accommodate 15 extra kids in their activity or a counselor they're getting the rowdy kid who has to move groups. You might miss it at first; it is subtle: camp still happens. And it is still good. So very good.

There is no potion, no perfect recipe to make everything come together. And outside of a sea of caffeine, the only thing that makes the task easier is knowing that there is an incredible group of people at your side for support and an equally incredible group of campers who demand and rightly deserve the very best.

The best is what the campers got. From the first moment through the last, they always got everything their counselors had to offer. Many times, most times even, that was more than enough. I worked with truly inspiring people, seeing them give everything to camp, witnessing their amazing ability to slowly but surely change lives kept me striving to be better all summer.

But sometimes, the very best I had to give, the very best we had to give, wasn't good enough. Sometimes my best was only enough to watch the kids play for an hour before their overnight started rather than joining their games. I still tried to give everything I had, but there was nothing left. And in that moment, all I could do was stay awake and stop them from getting hurt.

Sometimes all I could do was let the campers play their very favorite game for an hour because I had lost three of the four people I relied on each day. The very best I could give that day was just not crying because some of my best friends had packed up and left.

And in those moments, I hated myself for not being better. For not making every moment outstanding. I know it's normal, and I know it's perfectly okay to have bad days. But my coworkers, as a whole, set an impressively high standard by which I judged myself. Because all day, all around me I saw stellar examples of counselors rocking their jobs, smiling through every adversity. And it made me better. My best got better because of the wonderful family I got to be a part of.

It's the whole of the Camp Beech Cliff family that I have fallen in love with. It blows my mind how many outstanding moments can transpire in such a short time–how 50 almost-total strangers can pull together so quickly to create magic.

And truly, we are a family. Wonderful and weird as we may be, we are bonded now in a way that only people who live and work with each other continually can understand. And just like any other family we developed our idiosyncrasies: different oddities that get picked up and carried by working so closely with a very funny, diverse group.  I asked some of my fellow counselors what quirks they noticed our staff had developed.

We determined if you spend nine weeks a Camp Beech Cliff you might:

Find yourself asking to "connect" with someone you just want to have a conversation with. And during the time you "connect" ask them to help you "facilitate" whatever you're trying to accomplish.

Say things like "I understand why you feel that way. Can you think of a better way to react the next time this happens" and "can you explain what you mean when you say that" to your friends.

Immediately crouch or kneel when beginning a conversation.

Think to yourself, "when was the last time I sat down? I sat down when I ate lunch, right? Why don't I remember that? Oh. I didn't eat lunch." Or "when was the last time I showered? I think it's Friday, so Tuesday, right? Maybe Monday... Sunday at the latest."

Realize that if you wash your staff shirts at least once in the summer, it's still fine to wear.

Develop an immunity to feeling weird about how much underwear gets left on the boardwalk. "Guys everyone has to wear underwear. It's not gross; it's fine."

Gain a sixth sense about campers misbehaving. "Why do you just look like I need to get you in trouble? What are you doing? Go back to where you're supposed to be."

Crush hard on Sylvie. Everyone has a crush on Sylvie. There's nothing better than getting a Sylvie smile during the day.

Run into campers in Bar Harbor and spend the next week talking about exactly who cried during The Fault in Our Stars and who didn't.


It has been such an amazing summer. I really don't have enough good things to say about the people and the place. I have been struggling to finish the post because I don't know how to write the conclusion. But I suppose it's fitting because I also have no idea how to conclude my summer. I didn't want it to end. And saying goodbye has been extremely difficult for me. I would love nothing more than for everyone to show up next Monday at 7:30 for a staff meeting to kick off the week. So rather than dealing with all of that, I'll take Jenny's advice: "It's a blog. You don't need to conclude jacksh*t."

Being friends means never having to button up your shirt. 

You Can't Ride in my Little Red Wagon

There are certain songs that I hear that invariably remind me of the summer. Everything about them seems to perfectly embody the sense of boundlessness that is summer. They're the songs that make us roll down the windows and crank it up.

And they are the songs that just deserve to be sung at the top of your lungs, or if you are a camp counselor, shouted at the top of your lungs. I'm not sure if I could tell you my "summer song" from last summer, but this summer that award by and large goes to the following song:

If listening to that isn't for you, the gist of the song goes "You can't ride in my little red wagon. (Repeated by campers) Front seat's broken and the axel's draggin' (repeated by campers)" sung in three increasingly loud refrains. And it is glorious.

I'm convinced that at any given time that song is stuck in at least 10 staff members heads, and I am almost always one of them. This is only one of many silly songs and dances sung during Camp Beech Cliffs morning circle each day, but it always the loudest. It is sung so loudly that the older campers who don't sing in the morning anymore had to relocate up the hill to have a chance to hear the counselors and be heard by everyone else.

It's those moments in the morning, right before my real work picks up, watching the kids have competitions over who can sing the loudest, that I feel I can fully appreciate just how incredible my job is.

Seriously. If you sat me down and asked me to design the perfect job for me, I don't think I could have made it as satisfying as the one I currently have. My job has basically allowed me to pool a lot of the skills I worked tirelessly to acquire during college, and I'm using this post as a way of expressing gratitude that I was lucky enough to find this place.

My job, put as concisely and interestingly as possible, is to design and facilitate challenge course curriculum for the kids from 7th to 10th grade. Not only do I get to spend all day facilitating the ropes, but I spend my mornings teaching the kids different technical skills and spend the afternoon developing and putting leadership skills into practice with the Leaders-in-Training campers. I'm actually excited and awake (relatively) in the morning for the first time in my life because I'm just so thrilled to do what I do (and I'm not physically capable of staying up past 9:45 after a full day of work. That probably helps.)


As if that wasn't enough, the high ropes course is brand new and totally kick ass. When I first showed up to camp at the beginning of May for ropes training, the course barely had all the gear it need to function properly, so I got the incredible jobs of building the course from the ground up (not literally, it was designed and physically built long before I showed up.) But I've been creating, adapting and purchasing all the resources I need to do my job.

Part of the reason I am writing this post is to try to fully appreciate how I am doing exactly what I want to do with my life (for the moment.) Since I graduated, I have been somewhere between "exploring" and "floundering" in figuring out what I want to do with myself and haven't been doing much of anything too legitimate. Don't get me wrong, I've been having a great time, but I've spent all this time wondering what I should do.

So I am still really far from having it all figured out since this job only lasts through September but it's more of a start than I had before I came here. It's really great to know that I am pretty good at something I actually want to do. So now I just need how to start turning these sorts of things into a full time gig.

Featured here are Lily Pads in the foreground , Islands in the Sky on the right, Burma Bridge behind Lily Pads, and barely in the left corner, Pirate's Crossing. 

Leap of faith is on the left and Power Pole is on the right. 

On the left, Vertical Play Pen (possibly one of the most fun elements I've encountered),  a rock wall, cargo net and on the right is the Giant's Ladder. 

I'm trying to keep myself from just blathering incoherently about how everything is like, totally awesome. But it's really hard. My bosses are so empowering. They trust my decisions and have faith that I'm designing my program in the best way I can. My coworkers are so great, and I am fortunate to live in community with about 20 of them. Staff housing is very lively in all the best sorts of ways.

Those of us who live in staff housing get to do exactly what all the campers wish they could do, live at camp. in the evenings we can go stand up paddle boarding (apparently this is called "SUPing), take the canoes out, shoot on the archery range or do high ropes if we want. Today I went SUPing for the first time on the beautiful Echo Lake and ended the event by doing yoga until I fell off the board and just laying on the board, drifting on the lake with the group. It was really quite ideal.

This is the part of the post where I was going to seamlessly transition into what a beautiful place Mount Desert Island is, but I think I'll save all of that for a later post, but to give you a hint it's the sort of place where Martha Stewart and the Rockefellers have summer homes.

So until next time, enjoy your summer!

Here's a bonus pic of me on the high ropes!

Flashpacking

Introduction: Sarah deserves credit for giving me the title of the post. So thanks Sarah.

There are some things I have a really difficult time writing about and the trip I took around New Zealand is one of them. I could never write anything summing up my time in Rome; the incredible things that happened, coupled with the sadness that it was over left me with too many feelings to put anything coherent on the page, and this trip is just about the same.

I was tempted to just briefly mention the trip in some coming post, but it seemed like I would be doing myself a disservice by not writing everything down to read later. So knowing there's no way I can possibly describe how excellent the whole trip was, I'll begin.

I can easily summarize the logistics of what happened on my trip: I left Auckland February 11th and began a bus tour around the North and South Island. During that time, I went to the beach, took a mud bath, went on a 20k hike, bungy jumped (yes, I did spell that right), ate a burger the size of my face, among many other things. But my trip was so much better than all the individual parts because I ended up traveling with the best friends I never knew I had. It sounds cheesy, but if you spend literally 24/7 with people for over 3 weeks with very fleeting wifi and cell service, you're either going to love or hate each other by the end of it.

There were about 40 people on the bus at any given time, and while I definitely didn't get to know everyone, there was a solid group of us who stuck together from mostly the beginning to mostly the end of the bus-Auckland all the way down to Queenstown.

It's grainy, blurry and probably the best photo ever taken.

I have to admit when I started the trip, I was a little nervous. I can't quite tell you why, but for all the traveling I've done, I'd never truly backpacked. So this was definitely a new experience. I didn't really come into the trip expecting to make very good friends. I knew I'd meet people, but I figured I'd mostly be independent. And what I got was, wholly and wonderfully the opposite.

It was one of the best cultural exchanges I've been a part of, because, for weeks, we had so much time sitting on the bus or sitting around hostels to just share what our lives are like wherever we come from and ask questions about people from all over the world. Since we were all on a forced internet cleanse, having only a few hours of connection every few days, we relearned how to talk to people without just looking up YouTube videos (hint: you just end up telling someone about "this video I saw this one time" instead of being able to look it up.) But I also learned about everything from what it's like to be an electrician in London to Zwarte Piet to how addresses are written differently in Sweden. Is it super useful information? Maybe, maybe not, but the whole of it has taught me even more about different cultures.

To remember the journey, a lot of people kept trip diaries; they wrote a bit about what happened each day. I wish I did that sometimes, but I did write down a list of things in my phone that I wanted to remember and share in my blog.
So here is a list of some of the cool/weird things that might happen to you if you take a Stray bus around New Zealand. You might:

• lose your cell phone charger and find it in the fridge because you had to pack up at 5:30 am. 
• take an inappropriate number of bus selfies.
• forget that bathrooms generally come segregated into mens and women's and get confused when confronted with separate bathrooms.
• pour wine into an empty 2 litre to drink without being judged. 
• have a difficult time falling asleep without the steady thump of the bar's bass and the shouts and giggles of those damned Kiwi Experience kids. 
• realize that en suite hostels are better than any other sort of amenity imaginable. 
• spill peanut butter over all your food and scrape it back into the jar because you can't afford to buy more. 
• discover just how long it's possible to eat rice crackers, muesli bars and noodles (college kids ain't got nothing on backpackers.) 
• play "never have I ever" until you run out of interesting things to say.
• (inadvertently) develop more inside jokes with your bus than you did with your best friend in middle school ("Like I said, it was okay. I don't like repeating myself.")
• learn to speak Dutch and/or German and/or Swedish. Or at least sing the Zwarte Piet song.
• become an expert at packing by cellphone torch light.
• do a load of laundry in a sketchy hostel that comes out questionably more dirty than when it went in. 
• know that as long as you change your underwear, the rest of your clothes are clean enough. 
• keep track of time in hostels, rather than a form that anyone outside of the stray bus would undersatnd. Ex: "Three hostels ago, at the one where the woman cried, we shared a room with the rando guy and...."
• make some of the best meals you've eaten with only half the things you need because: hostel kitchens. 
• get weirdly and beautifully sentimental during a group rendition of "Wonderwall." 

New Zealand is such an incredible country. I could spend forever telling you about the things I saw: mountains so steep the trees grew parallel to the ground, some of the most stunningly blue water in the world, black sand beaches, etc... And even longer telling you the things I did, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are some pictures, the rest are on Facebook:

Eating Fergburger! In Ferg We Trust.

Nevis Bungy Jump

Here's a hint. If you take a sulfur bath. BURN those clothes. Sulphur is the herpes of smells

Sea tour in Raglan

Looks can be deceiving; this is another sulphur lake.

And now here is the fastest possible tour of where I went in the South Island

Franz Joseph Glacier: Four years ago it extended almost to where I was standing, but is melting at a startling rate.

Lake Matheson has tea-colored water

A scenic overview. The likes of which can be found all over NZ.  

Hanging out of the side of the road just 'cause.

Milford Sound: Cool, but not as impressive as anticipated/hyped.

OMG PENGUINS 

It snows in the hottest months here.

I repeat it SNOWS in NZ's equivalent of August way down south. Friggin' Antarctica 

Queenstown is heaven on earth. If heaven is quite cold and rainy a lot...

Views from the most dangerous road in New Zealand.

Definitely worth risking a 100m fall down the cliff.

I could go on and on about traveling especially around New Zealand. I could continue listing all the amazing things that you could experience. I won't, but what I will say is: Go. Go and get out there. If you want to travel, don't let anything stop you. It's never going to be the best time and you're never going to have enough money, but you'll always regret not going.

Life on the Island of Wine

I spent the past month living on what is often called "The Island Of Wine." I'm not entirely sure how I managed to tear myself away because this place is paradise. I've obviously been living on an island since October, but starting the first week of January, I moved to an even smaller island called Waiheke, off the coast Auckland. And my time here as been fantastic--insanely busy--and ultimately wonderful.

The gold star is where I was living.

 I came here knowing I would stay for just a month. I found a family to Au Pair; they needed someone to help look after their kids because they were about to open up a gelato, coffee and bagel business. The first two weeks I was here were pretty "normal:" the parents would work during the day and be home in the evenings. During the day, I'd take the kids to the beach, or friends house or whatever we got up to different days. And I'd get some time off and go exploring (wine tasting) around the island.

But the last two weeks were absolutely insane. I worked 72 hours looking after the kids in the 3rd week, and almost the same number of hours this last week I was there. I'll be honest, I started to go just a little bit crazy.

I'm not sure if looking after someone else's kids all day every day is harder than looking after your own, but I can tell you it is quite difficult. The kids were pretty good, but I don't think there's any way looking after a 3 year old for +12 hours a day isn't going to be exhausting.

Meanwhile, the family did get their business started with a bang. The gelato was an instant success on the island. They sell out of it almost every day. So most of the days I get to take the kids by and get a free scoop of some gelato that actually lives up to my incredibly high Italy standards. So that doesn't suck.

White Chocolate Salted Caramel and Hazelnut Chocolate.

The island is incredibly friendly. It's Manhattan, KS friendly. I've taken the late bus home a few times and without fail the drivers, instead of making me walk 20 minutes up hill, drive out of their way to drop me off outside my house. And, amazingly, it's a safe place to hitch hike. I did it once (with a friend mom, it was safe, don't freak out). We grabbed a ride from my house to the bottom of the hill and then another one in to town. It was actually quite fun. We had nice chats with the people giving us rides. I might have done it a bit more but I generally had a car at my disposal.

When I did actually get a few hours off, I spent most of my time moving from vineyard to vineyard. Waiheke is a great place to grow wine, especially red wine. Waiheke is internationally known for the Rosé, Syrah, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. Wineries on the island routinely win "Best wine in world" for their Syrah and Sauv Blanc.

I have taken it upon myself to sample almost all of these, so I can personally assure you, they are all quite good.

I managed to get to pretty much all the large vineyards where on the island. There are a ton more smaller ones, but my days off were limited and I tried to go with the quality over quantity approach. So I'd go to a vineyard or two a day and just enjoy the time there and then go relax on the beach.

I've made a map highlighting the vineyards I went to. I could spend a lot of time telling you about all of them but I won't because that would only be interesting for me probably.

The yellow colored dot was the first vineyard I went to called Mudbrick. It definitely has the most Tuscan feel to it and would be where I had my wedding reception if I had an infinite amount of money. The views were simply stunning. Unfortunately, I did not bring my camera that day, so I don't have any pictures to prove it!

I took a bike trip to the orange dot, called Kennedy Vineyards. They're the only all organic vineyard on Waiheke. It was a really friendly place, and it was comforting to know I wasn't drinking pesticides. I also didn't know that most places add things like milk, egg and gelatin among others were routinely added to wines. This place was so good I went back twice!

This was definitely an unusual color for Rosé but I think
it was the lack of additives. It still tasted quite good.

With a view like this, how can you not go back?

The purple dot is a place called Wild on Waiheke. It's actually a brewery and a vineyard, so it's perfect if you need a break from wine! But let's be honest, why would you? Also, they let you do things like archery and trap shooting because what mixes better with alcohol than that?

Right next to it is StoneyRidge vineyards where I think I had some of my favorite wines. Their Chardonnay and Bordeaux-style were some of my favorites. If they didn't sell for around $50 a bottle, I would definitely have gotten a few.

There were some great wines here, but lets be real, after drinking all of this, they all start tasting pretty great. Also, if you're concerned, I didn't drink all these myself. I had help. 

There are so many more awesome vineyards I could talk about, but the main point is that I drank some nice wines.

And the only things that can beat the wine are the views. Waiheke is beautiful and a really fun place. It attracts a lot of unique people too. People here are generally very creative, relaxed, fun and fairly wealthy. It makes for a really fun atmosphere!

The place is crawling with beaches as well, but rather than tell you about them, I think pictures will serve much better.

This is the biggest beach on the island called Onetangi. Two Maori tribes fought a battle here. "One" means beach
and "Tangi" means something like "funeral" or "sadness" or "weeping"

While not a beach, this is the view from my drive way of a vineyard. Seriously. 

It's rare that I see a sunset that beats near-daily stunning views of the Flint Hills, but if you look the other way out of the drive way at sunset, you'll occasionally see this.

Life is good on the island of wine. I was definitely sad to leave, but I am very excited to see the rest of New Zealand. I am finally leaving on my tour of the country in just a few days.

Assimilation

It happened.

I didn't think it was going to happen. I almost didn't even realize when it did.

I'm not sure how I feel about, but I don't actually think it's a bad thing; it was just surprising for me.

I'll give you a little background on why I feel this way first. Unless you've actually never met me, you know that I am interested in and care about language.  I wrote a whole blog post about Kiwi language actually. So it's safe to say, I usually put a reasonable amount of thought into not only what I say but how I say it.

In general, I stick to American slang. I don't say "heaps" or "sweet as" too often because it feels hokey. I do find it's easier to say "togs" and call it the "boot" around the kids because they don't know what a trunk is. But it's always a very conscious usage on my part.

One language usage here that struck me as a little funny was how all food here is described as "nice" instead of "good." Ex: I ate a nice apple. Or the chicken at dinner was nice.

Even though the meaning was perfectly clear, I amused myself imaging an overly polite and well-mannered chicken at the dinner table. I don't think I'd ever heard anyone describe food that way or done it myself. Nice was always reserved for people in my book. So I just kept on saying the food was good and tried to stop personifying food in my head.

I even pretty much stopped noticing such a minor thing after a few weeks.

Until tonight at dinner. When I said, without any conscious thought to the matter, "Oh yeah, that sauce was really nice."

I don't even know if that was the first time I've done it, but I noticed this time. I used a Kiwi phrase unconsciously. Now, before you think I'm actually blowing this out of proportion, I'm not. I only care about this moment insofar as it is a sign of my larger acceptance of Kiwi culture.

Certainly everything here isn't perfect, but I do love it. I love being walking distance to a fabulous beach and 10 minutes in the car to about four more. I love how many vineyards I live close to (it's over 20 you guys). I love that I live 2.5 hours from outdoor rock climbing.

I am trying to dive head first into the lifestyle here, and so far, I think I am doing well. That's not to say I am trying to actually become a New Zealander because that won't happen. I just think living in a foreign country is about finding how you operate and can be happy within the culture instead of trying to make it fit to you. I have enjoyed seeing who I've become here.

To me, this happening is more a sign of my general assimilation into Kiwi culture among other things. I look the correct way when crossing the street (right, left, right) instead of looking left, taking one step out and then realizing my mistake. I rarely walk to the wrong side of the car anymore (but it does still happen). I kind of know the names of places and where they are, and I can distinguish the Maori names of places. It's all the little things that help make a place feel like your home, and when I walk around here, I just feel like I belong.

Part of the reason I can feel ingratiated into the culture is because it's so friendly and welcoming. Italy was a warm and passionate place, but I never quite felt like I fit in. In fact, I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb most of the time. It didn't bother me but it didn't feel very homey.

Sure, my accent does make me stick out a bit, but there are tons of English accents here (granted they are mostly from the U.K.) It has been an "easy as" place for me to fit in probably because a lot of the activities are the sorts of things I always wanted to do but didn't have the chance in Kansas: climbing, hiking, bungee jumping (invented in New Zealand!) and all sorts of ocean activities. I just can't get enough. It still blows my mind how I see the ocean every single day.  Plus, I'm totally going to get to pet a lion soon.*

I wouldn't say I am losing my American identity, nor am I fully adapting a kiwi one, but I am taking bits and pieces of everything I have learned and experienced and making it in to something new and wonderful.

This is the driveway where I live. What's not to love? 

*Okay, so I'm probably just going to get very close to a lion in this exclusive tour of an animal sanctuary, but I really want to pet one.

A Year of Travels

As the year ends, I, like almost everyone else, am reflecting on what I have done during 2013. There's no way I can deny that it has been an incredible year for me. But it has also been the most unsettled year of my life and changed me in ways I never dreamed possible. I've lived in four in cities in three different countries: Chicago, Illinois; Turate, Italy; Manhattan, KS; and Auckland, New Zealand, and each one has shaped me in a very unique way.

Collage of some of my favorite places in Europe.

I have seen so much of the word, but it still feels like I have seen so little of it. I feel like I have both become wiser to the "ways of the world" and simultaneously realized how little I know about all but a few things. I think I could travel and study forever and still feel the same way.

I think what I have really gained is the ability to understand how complex, rich and utterly different a culture can be while realizing that people are very similar. I think my Italian host dad said it best, "Cultures are different. People are the same." Ultimately, everyone wants the same thing from life. They want to take care of the people they love and want to be happy. Everybody faces that same crap: politics, religion, traffic, drama with friends and family--the details may change, but in the end, it's all the same thing. After living with four different families this year, one being my own, one in Manhattan, one in Italy and one in New Zealand, I feel certain that I could live with a "normal" (if such a thing actually exists) family from any country on Earth, and after adapting to different cultural standards, feel perfectly comfortable.

Knowing the goodness of people takes the world from being a scary, foreboding place, to a place where people want to help you and genuinely want to know you. I'm not saying you don't have to be wary while getting out, but it has cemented my belief that the world is inherently a good place, and people are kind. If I ever was, I am no longer scared of places that are different from what I know because I know that most people, at worst, will ignore me, or at best, will go out of their way to help me.

For example, I have been lost in almost every single city I have visited. Sometimes it was on purpose... a lot of times it was not. From the back alleys of Venice (on purpose) to the slums of Naples and Genoa (on accident), I have found people willing to go out of their way to help me find my way even when I was wary of them.

Realizing the depth of goodness in people has also led me to greater awareness of myself. I feel challenged to become one of the selfless people I have encountered. And even though I continually fail to do that, I have learned so much about who I am as a person. However, this knowledge, instead of making everything in my life  more clear, has made my sense of self murkier because I realized I am capable of more than I ever thought.

Reading back through my blogs, I remember meandering through Saronno (I didn't realize until I left that this is the same Saronno as where amaretto was invented. How cool is that?)  from one train stop to the other. I felt so incredibly competent. Now, I am not trying to suggest that finding my way through a random city in Italy where I don't really speak the language and don't have a map isn't an impressive thing, it's just that I did it so many times after that, it seems common place now.

I've gotten lost in so many random cities that the whole idea seems more thrilling to me than scary (After all, safe travel is only a cab ride away.) I forget that before I went to Paris, was handed a map and literally forced to figure out how to navigate, ("well you took us a really long way, but I guess we got there eventually") I had never done such a thing in my life.  Reflecting on the year has made me realize just how far I've come and makes me wonder just how far I have yet to go.

And I have to wonder what I would do differently if I could do it all again. My instinct is to say that I would get lost a lot less. And on the surface, that seems like it might be a good thing. But those times when got off the train unsure even of such basic facts as what city I was in, got taken advantage of by scam artists, and talked to a man with red teeth are what really made me grow. Seeing museums and eating authentic food certainly makes for good stories, but if I hadn't struggled my through living in two countries (especially Italy), I'm not sure if I would be the same person.

Before I traveled, I used to know that I am good at X,Y and Z, and I am not good at all these other things. But since I have been almost reduced to tears in Milan, pulled muscles walking through Venice and been yelled at in Germany (and Italy several time, but I attribute that more to the Italians' love for yelling than any particular transgression of mine), I have learned that I can do and survive so much more than I ever imagined I could.

This knowledge may have muddled my ideas of what I want to do with my life and where I want to live (spoiler: I have NO clue), but it has given me a much richer sense of myself. I have found so much more strength and self respect. My journeys this year, good and bad, have profoundly changed me. So, if you'll allow me to be cliche and (mis)quote one of my favorites songs, "who can say if I've been changed for the better? I do believe I have changed for the better... but I have been changed for good."

So, as friends, family or random internet go-ers, I thank you for your support through my travels, and I sincerely hope you have had a fantastic 2013 and that 2014 is even better. Happy New Year!

Healthy Kiwis

The first time I tasted potato chips here ("crisps"), I thought they tasted really strange. Being curious, I wanted to know why, so I flipped over the package and read the ingredients. It said, "Potato, Olive Oil, Salt."
That's it. Nothing else. On potato chips. I was shocked and excited at the same time. I almost didn't feel guilty about eating them. I can't even pronounce the myriad of ingredients on chips in the U.S.

This one example is indicative of a larger trend in the healthier nature of food here. In the U.S, I have to specifically search out uncured bacon to avoid the preservatives in it. In New Zealand, all bacon is naturally cured.

Same with beef—I have to seek out grass-feed beef in the U.S. In New Zealand, there's no other choice. Nearly everything just seems to be made without being heavily processed and preserved. With all of my weird stomach problems, I appreciate this so much.

The naturally healthier approach to food coincides with a huge emphasis on outdoors activities.
Think back on gym class in the U.S. I remember playing tag, basketball, volleyball, floor hockey and the like. In high school, I took my mandatory one P.E. elective where we "learned" to play the basic sports. I basically remember having to run around for an hour 3 days a week.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, they learn water safety—things like sailing, surfing, swimming, kayaking—as well as taking outdoors trips camping and hiking ("tramping") and so many cool, practical, engaging things that would never happen in the U.S. with the emphasis on testing.

And it seems like this activity just carries on into adulthood. All the Kiwis I've meet seem to have at least one or two sports/activities. Rock climbing, surfing, paddle boarding, hiking, running. Whatever, there's just something to keep them active. 

Kayaking to the island in the distance. It took just under an hour each way!

Obviously, I climb trees. 

Rock Climbing!!

It's really rare that there's a day I don't do something semi-active. Sometimes, it's as basic as taking the kids swimming or for a long walk with the dogs. (I usually end up carrying one or more of them—dog or child—so it turns into a real workout.) Other times, it's something really challenging, like kayaking for two (non-consecutive) hours. And whenever I can, I make it to the gym to work out and boulder so that I can be physically fit enough to do everything else.

I have noticed a huge increase in my strength in the past month. All the activity is doing wonders for my upper body strength. (I can finally do a pull up!!)

One of the things I enjoy about living in different countries is learning the things from other cultures I want to adopt. I picked up some things in Italy, and I've picked up some things here. I know now that I definitely want to settle somewhere that affords me "heaps" of opportunities for outside adventures. I have always valued being physically active and now that I live somewhere it is so easy to be so active, I don't want to give that up.