Homeward Bound

I have literally traveled around the world this summer. It's been amazing, and I can't believe it is almost over. But, as they say, there’s no place like home. And from my limited international experience I feel like I have discovered some of the reasons why they say that. What follows is a list of things I love about the United States and reasons why I am, despite a good portion of unsatisfied wanderlust, quite glad to be going home.

1. Water. Eating lamb in New Zealand, dim sum in Hong Kong, bratwurst in Germany, and lasagna in Italy was fantastic. But having to eat all of the above with 200 ml drink that costs 3 Euro (Hong Kong and New Zealand are excluded from the expensive complaint) leaves me appreciative of the US policy of willingly refilling water glasses throughout a meal. (That reminds me: how’s the drought in the southeast going?)

2. Street signs. This is one thing that I think the US does extraordinarily well. Everywhere else seems to be in one of three schools. School 1: no street signs at all. School 2 a.k.a. European style: making the street signs as difficult to find and read as possible. Germany is exempt. School 3: having street signs but pointing them in ambiguous directions, causing me to wonder if I am on Falcon Street, crossing Falcon Street, or if Falcon Street is actually the overpass.

3. American English. I have been able to get by with almost no trouble (the notable exception being the Polish rail system) speaking only English, but I miss being able to blend in with the crowd, since even in New Zealand and Australia my accent stood out.

4. US Politics. My first presidential election as a voter!

5. US Dollars. Not that I am particularly pleased with the good old USD right now, but at least at home I don’t have to think about how much cheaper this trip would have been a year ago. (Funny note on this subject: at the exchange places in Croatia, the abbreviation for our dollar is not USD, like everywhere else, but SAD. I found this funny because right now changing dollars is sad).

6. Routine. No more giant backpack. No more maps. My own bed. School. Friends. No more constant worry about losing my passport. A kitchen all the time. My phone. Things like that. This isn’t really specific to the US but after three months of sleeping in hostels, on trains, on planes, at train stations, and at the airport, I am ready to wake up every morning in the same bed, brush my teeth at the same sink, go to school, and complain about having to do homework every night.

As soon as I get back into my routine I will probably want to head off again, but that how it always goes. I’m glad I extended my little project into an entire summer, because I feel like I have made the most of it, and spent just long enough abroad to really appreciate coming hope without beginning to under appreciate traveling. I would like to thank my backpack and various forms of public transportation for being the defining elements of my life for three months, and I intend to reward them with some time off.

The Long Haul

Step 1. Ten hours on a bus from Dubrovnik to Zagreb. When we boarded the bus and found our seats in the very front of the upper level of the bus, we rejoiced over the leg room. We soon learned that we were actually being slowly cooked by the sun streaming in from the front and side windows, a fate not suffered by anyone else on the bus since they were not in the front and had curtains for the side. It was surprisingly okay though. We both did a lot of reading.

Step 2. Nine hours on an overnight train from Zagreb to Munich. Having learned our lesson on the way to Rome, we booked beds and slept. I love trains.

Step 3. Four hours on a train from Munich to Frankfurt.

Phew. We hadn’t booked anywhere to stay in Frankfurt, but Frankfurt was obliging. Right outside the train station we found a hostel with free internet and free breakfast. One night here and then we are off to spend our final night in the airport since Kevin’s flight leaves at around 7:00. Then I have a few hours of reflection before my noon flight, which will bring me home, completing the circuit and providing me with a chance to do my laundry, which is important, because I’ve been stretching it this time around and I’m a little bit smelly.

Stairmastered

This trip has been a mixture of work, culture and vacation. Croatia was all vacation. Kevin and I spent one night in Split and four nights on the island of Hvar. There aren’t really beaches, but that doesn’t stop anybody. You just lay out your blanket on rocks and spend most of your time in the water. We spent most of our time wandering around in the sun and entertained ourselves looking for clouds (of which there are few in Croatia). Two nights in a row we saw spectacular sunsets from the rocky shore, and we got to jump off the white rocks into the ocean. Kevin got a little sunburned, but other than that it was absolutely beautiful.

You would think Kevin and I would be expert travelers after a whole summer and that our last stop, Dubrovnik, Croatia, would be a breeze. Except that there are no breezes in Croatia. It’s wonderfully, beautifully, oppressively hot there all the time.

Our hostel was right near the bus station, which would have been great except that a nice Croatian man picked us up at the bus station and drove us ten minutes in the wrong direction, so we had to walk across town to get there anyway. Let me explain. We got off the bus to see a friendly looking man holding a sign that said, “Kevin Kiley.” When he saw us eyeing him he thanked us for booking at his boarding house, helped us load our bags into the car, and brought us there. It turns out that this man was actually the owner of a hostel we had booked but then canceled around a month ago, and from some sort of miscommunication between Hostelworld.com, him, and us, he hadn’t heard about the change of plans. So we apologized, ate some pizza at a nearby restaurant, loaded our backpacks on our backs, and followed the directions for our actual hostel across town to “Kunska.” On the map, Kunska looks like a street. In person, it looks more like a staircase. By the time we had made it up the 329 individual stairs (to put this into perspective, your average staircase has around 12) we both just collapsed on the beds and fell asleep for two hours.

The next couple of days were pretty care-free, but not stair free. The old town in Dubrovnik is one of the only walled cities which still has its entire wall, and the coolest/only touristy thing to do there is walk around the city on the wall, so we did, and it was pretty cool. We spent the rest of the day eating, swimming, and looking for clouds (still none).

The next day we decided that the stairs to our hostel just weren’t enough for us, so we hiked up the hill outside the city to get some good pictures of it from the top. For the first time in Croatia, there were clouds! I think I counted three. But for the few blissful minutes that they covered the sun I wanted to run up the hill, embrace the clouds, and hug the water out of them. The pictures were magnificent. So were the drinks and ice cream we bought when we reached the bottom again.

We left early the next day for the trek to Frankfurt and its airport.

Let's take a short cut (and write a very long blog entry about it)

If you have a map of Europe handy, locate Munich. Now find Split, Croatia. Here’s the game: pretend that you are in Munich, and that you have six days before you need to be in Split. What do you do?

No matter what you answered to that, it won’t be what Kevin and I ended up doing. We wanted to go hiking since Zakopane had rained us out of spending much time outdoors while we were there. And I wanted to go to Italy, because it’s Italy and I love Italy, since if you ignore the Adriatic it’s kind of on the way. So we made this plan:

July 21. Take an early train from Munich to Innsbruck and go hiking a little that day.

July 22. Hiking in Innsbruck.

July 23. Hiking in Innsbruck again, and then an overnight train to Rome.

July 24. Do as the Romans do!

July 25. Keeping doing as the Romans do!

July 26. 6:00 am train to Ancona, 11:00 ferry to Split.

So you have probably already guessed that this plan was tweaked a little, since generally when I mention a plan it’s only to make it easier for me to explain the deviations. Everything went okay for a while though. The train to Innsbruck was easy, and hiking was nice. It rained, but it turns out that this time it wasn’t personal-Innsbruck is just like that. It is completely cloudy and rainy until about 12:00, when it becomes partly cloudy and rainy, then at 2:00 it becomes partly cloudy and sunny, and by 4:00 it’s actually pretty nice. But I still get to say that Kevin and I set aside six days of our European tour for hiking and that it rained on every one of them. Other than the hiking, Innsbruck was pretty uneventful. We saw the world-famous tourist-drawing Golden roof, which isn’t even a whole roof but a pretty little protrusion from a pretty normal looking building. Nevertheless, every time we went to the square there were hoards of people taking pictures of it. We took pictures of it too.

Then we took the overnight train to Rome. This was my idea, and I take the blame for it. I can sleep pretty much anywhere and Kevin said he was up for trying it, so we booked a compartment instead of a sleeping car. They came in asking for our tickets every hour or two, our compartment was full of people most of the time, and the Italian guys who weren’t in seats but just hanging out in the hallway had turned it into an impromptu concert hall and spent most of the ride singing. At one point two girls came into the compartment, sat in the vacant middle seats on either side. One of the girls put her head in Kevin’s lap and her feet in another guy’s foot space and fell sound asleep. I was jealous, not really that she had her head in Kevin’s lap (though if anyone had the right to utilize Kevin’s lap as a pillow, I would like to think it was me) but more that she was fast asleep. I felt slightly vindicated when the next time an officer asked for our tickets, he looked at their tickets and started saying, “Verona? È passato. È passato.” The girls looked confused, so I asked if they spoke English. When the said yes, I told them they had missed their stop. I should have felt sorry for them, but I was tired and grumpy and kind of enjoyed it. I feel kind of guilty about that, hence the public confession.

We arrived in Rome exhausted, but after a failed attempt to nap in a park we did Roman things anyway. The Coliseum, Palatine Hill, the Roman Forum, Trevi fountain, the works. The next day we went to the Vatican and checked out St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel and the gazillions of works of art they have stored up in there. I’ve been once before but I still think it’s ironic that the most famous and ostentatious display of wealth in the world is in a Church state. I love ancient Roman history even though I don’t know much about it (the unavoidable result of seven years of Latin) as well as how every inch of Rome looks like it was crafted by a master artist (most of it was). But I can’t say it was my favorite part of Italy. That prize goes to the great, the beautiful, the delicious world of…

ITALIAN FOOD! Kevin and I decided that we weren’t going to eat on the cheap in Italy since we were only there for two days. We ate out and had lasagna and carbonara and Bolognese and pizza and gelato and it was wonderful. My stomach may never be as happy as it was then.

So we woke up absurdly early and caught our 6:00 am train to Ancona. Somehow we were chatting about what we would do if we missed the ferry and ended up deciding that we didn’t care. We had these rail passes and we might as well just use them to get to Croatia rather than pay 60 Euro each to ride the ferry. So when we got to the Italian port city, we didn’t even leave the train station. We just caught the next train to Venice, arriving mid-day.

Venice is an awesome city for a half-day stop. We had our last gelato in Italy, went and saw the square with all the pigeons, waved at some gondolas, and were charmed by all the little streets and bridges. What made it so great was that it was a completely spontaneous adventure. A few hours earlier we weren’t even planning on passing through.

From there we jumped on the overnight train to Zagreb, Croatia. Having learned our lesson, this time we booked couchettes and slept until our 5:00 am arrival in Zagreb. We couldn’t get on the early train to Split, so we waited at the train station for the 11:00. What’s nice about traveling with someone is that you have someone to hang out with during six hour waits at a train station, which can be tedious if you are by yourself. I am not a great traveling companion. I fell asleep immediately and woke up at 10:30, just in time for our next train. Sorry, Kevin.

If you still have your map of Europe out, you can see how out of the way Rome was, and how far we had to travel to go up and around the Adriatic instead of over it. But it was worth it.

Germany in a nutshell

Since it’s been a while since I’ve written here, I’m superblogging now and what follows is an abridged version of our adventures in Germany. If you feel cheated check our Kevin’s blog.

After touring around Poland for ten days, Kevin and I met up with Ola (my host sister from last summer) and Marta and Justyna (two of my students) at Warszawa Centralna, where all five of us caught a train to Berlin for a week. We were in Berlin for a whole week, which was awesome because there is so much to do and see and learn in Berlin. My favorite activities were the tour we did on the first day, which gave a great overview of the sights and history, and climbing the Reichstag dome. Going into the dome was free, since it’s a government building, and the last entry is at 10:00 pm. We got in line at around 9:15 even though it didn’t look promising. At around 9:45 we were at the sign that says “From here it will take you about 30 minutes.” But we just made it in the last round, and it was awesome. The last light died when we were up there, so we got to see everything by night. We spent nearly two hours taking tons and tons of pictures, which are really the only way to explain how cool it was.

From Berlin, Ola and Marta and Justyna headed home and Kevin and I moved onto Munich for a few days. Munich is a cool city, but I wasn’t as taken with it as I was with Berlin. But the Glockenspiel was about the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life. Just kidding. Apparently it’s been voted one of the 10 most underwhelming sights in Europe, and for good reason. It did provide lots of good jokes though.

We made some Swiss friends one night, and what started as them trying to convince us that Swiss beer is the best in the world (ironic that they were doing this in Munich) ended up with Kevin and I waking up the next morning with considerably less zeal than usual. This was the beginning of the most bizarre day of the trip.

It was Munich’s 800^th or 850^th anniversary or something that weekend, so the city was putting on a little celebration. We walked out of our hostel to find that tons of people were dressed in traditional Bavarian garb: lederhosen for the men and those milkmaid dresses over white blouses for the women. Strange. I didn’t know that they still dressed like that. We went in search of food and couldn’t take ten stapes without running into a polka-playing quartet and people doing elaborate choreographed dances (still in the traditional garb). There was one performance of two guys with long whips who were cracking them in time and creating an impressive but scary kind of music. As we munched on some stellar bratwurst, we were pushed off the road by a procession of two knights on horseback surrounded by a marching band. I hope that Munich is like this every Sunday. The final straw in bizarre wanderings came as we wandered into a little square. Wandering in opposite us was an absurdly tall man (on stilts), wearing a purple silk outfit whistling and strolling along like this was normal. When he noticed us taking pictures I got to hold his hand. Then he whistled himself away. Weird.

You'll never guess what I lost...

My sleeping bag! After all the effort I went through in Melbourne to keep it with me, you would think that I would be more careful with it. And for a while I was more careful. At the hostel in Wroclaw I lovingly strapped it onto the outside of my backpack before Kevin and I set out for the train station. Then I spent some quality time with it in Wroclaw Glowny waiting for the train to Warsaw. Then when my backpack didn't fit onto the luggage rack because the sleeping bag stuck up too far I gently unstrapped it and placed on the rack as well. It seemed happy there and wasn't having too much trouble making friends with the other bags, so when our train arrived in Warsaw that's where I left it. I remembered just in time to run back to the platform and see the train rolling away. Farewell little red sleeping bag! It was fun while it lasted.

Since we are on the subject of trains in Poland, I have to say that things could have gone better. First of all, Poland doesn't participate in the EuRail Pass, but we didn't figure this out until Kevin and his pass were already in Poland. This meant lots of buying train tickets in a country where most people don't speak much English. In one instance I had to buy my ticket twice. I asked for a ticket on the next train to Krakow, took the ticket I was given, and got on the next train for Krakow. When the official came by and looked at my ticket, he informed me that my ticket was for a later train (in Polish, so it took a while for me to understand what was going on) and that I would have to buy another one for this train. I tried to explain what had happened (in Polish, so I'm not sure if he ever understood what was going on) but he wouldn't budge and I didn't really have a choice so I bought another ticket. Kevin and I couldn't get student discounts because we aren't students in Poland. None of our experiences with the Polish rail system were easy, so traveling to Germany, the land of efficiency and punctuality, has been a welcome change. I love Poland and have ever since I lived there last summer, but the rail system could use an update (and hopefully will before Poland hosts the 2012 Euro Cup).

Back in Poland!

From Istanbul I flew into Warsaw, where I was met by Ola, my host sister from living in Poland last summer, and her mom, Anita. When I was planning my summer and decided to do the last part of my project in Berlin, it seemed ridiculous to be so close and not see them, so I worked in a four day visit to Makow. We spent a day in Warsaw and then a few days in Makow just having a good time, and I got to meet this year's Makow WorldTeach volunteer, who seems great. After around 7 weeks of traveling on my own (except for the week with Courtney in New Zealand), it was fun to have someone to talk to who actually knew me. One thing I've loved about this summer has been meeting all sorts of people and the completely new feeling that I can be fairly certain I will never see any of them again, but it's also nice to be reminded that I have actual friends too.

On that note, my plan for the rest of my summer has changed a little. (This bit is for Mom, who worries when I don't update my blog and wants to know where I am, and Dad, who keeps asking me for an itinerary which I have been unable to provide because I don't really have one). I met up with Kevin in Krakow on July 1, and we're traveling around Poland until the 10th. Then we are spending a week in Berlin with Ola, Marta, and Justyna, who are friends from Poland last summer. Then we have four more days in Germany (Hannover and Munich), and the next firm plan after that is going to Croatia on the 26th, spending a few days in Split and Hvar before heading to Dubrovnik on the 31st. We'll meet up with Alex (a friend from UNC) and Eleanor (from SPS) there, and head back to the states on August 7th. That leaves July 20th-25th with no plan, but we're thinking either hiking in the Austrian Alps or doing a quick trip in Italy (clearly there are no bad options here). Phew. That's all I've got so far. I'll have a more fun entry soon, I promise.

I'm allergic to a city...

My last four days in Hong Kong were spent like this:

Monday: I went to the Chinese University in Hong Kong to work on my project, but retreated back to the air conditioned hostel when I felt something on my face start to itch. By that night the whole bottom half of my face was red, bumpy, itchy, and a little puffy, which means that I was having an allergic reaction to something. I took a good dose of Benadryl and passed out.

Tuesday: I woke up to find that the reaction had taken over most of the rest of my face, my neck, and the backs of my hands, breaking my previous record for amount of surface area covered by an allergic reaction. I decided to go on an experimental excursion outside to see the effect that the Hong Kong weather would have on my face (also to talk to a pharmacist). My face blew up like a blowfish, and my hands and arms fully broke out as well. I retreated back to the hostel once again.

Wednesday: Spent the entire day in the hostel, hoping that air conditioning, Benadryl, and will power would deflate my face. It didn't get any worse, which was good, but it didn't get any better either.

Thursday: Spent the entire day in the hostel again, before I darted out to the nearest pharmacy, to make sure that nothing too bad could happen while I was flying, and then caught the bus to the airport at around 4:30, even though my flight wasn't until 11:05. Normally I'm not one of those people that likes to get to the airport six hours early (as demonstrated by my experience trying to get to the airport in Melbourne), but when I've been in self-imposed quarantine in a tiny room on the 16th floor of a smelly building for the better part of four days, six hours at the airport was looking pretty good.

So the real mistake in all of this was that I didn't take any pictures. Now, looking back through normal sized eyelids and clear skin, I wish I had taken a picture every six hours to document the completely ridiculous progression of the reaction. At the time, however, a picture of me sequestered in a tiny hostel reading an 850 page book and looking like I had been on the wrong side of an argument with 8000 very tiny but very angry mosquitoes just didn't seem like fun. So there is no documentation of what I looked like. But I can promise that I barely looked human.

Now for the good news. My reaction started feeling immensely better during my 12 hour flight to Istanbul. When I got off the plane and went to look in a mirror, I could see something that resembled my usual face shape emerging. In hour four of my five hour layover there, I braved a glance in the mirror again and saw that some patches of skin were even returning to their normal color (although texture was still way off). The second pharmacist I talked to in Hong Kong had told me that it was possible, once something little had set me off, that the heat and air quality in the city were what I was having trouble with. It seemed ridiculous that I could be allergic to the entire city, but since going outside in Hong Kong made it worse and leaving started an immediate turnaround, I have to admit that it seems like the most plausible explanation.

Then I made a little kid cry. I was sitting at the gate in Istanbul, when a little girl who was running around stopped right in front of me. Forgetting that I barely looked human (I had just woken up from a nap) I smiled at her. Her eyes got wide, she burst into tears, then ran and hid behind her mother's legs. I felt kind of bad, but it was also pretty funny (since the reaction was finally retreating, I could see the humor in the situation).

Sweating the sights

Because that is what sightseeing in Hong Kong is all about. Each wonderful adventure leaves a lasting impression, not just in my head, but as a sweats stain on my shirt.

The Harbor


On my first full day in Hong Kong I went with one of my roommates, Audrey, to Tsim Sha Tsoi, which is one of the shopping hubs of Hong Kong. We walked around for a little while, but since neither of us had any money to blow we decided on dinner. Audrey is a vegetarian, and my guidebook listed a good and fairly inexpensive vegetarian restaurant in the area, so after some detective work we managed to find it on the 7th floor of a building fairly near the pier. It looked a little fancy for us (table cloths and about as many waiters as tables) but since it was Audrey's last night before flying home to Switzerland after several months of travel, we decided to go for it anyway. We were seated at a table by the window with a fantastic view of the harbor. We each ordered two dishes. It was by far the nicest meal I have had on this trip. And when the bill came we each had to pay the extravagant price of HK$80, or US$10. Now this was a nice change from Australia where $10 might buy you a burger, fries, and a drink, but more likely just the burger. After our luxurious meal we met up with another roommate for a night cruise of the harbor, which gave us a fantastic view of the light show. I am pretty sure that the light show is a uniquely Hong Kong experience. All the buildings on both side of the harbor are lit up and shine spot lights and whatnot for about 20 minutes in time with some music coming from some unseen but undoubtedly huge speakers. It was quite a sight, even though it was pouring rain and we had to time our picture taking with the breaks in the storm.

The Peak

Hong Kong is built somewhat haphazardly between, around, and on the hills that make up most of the islands. "The Peak" as it's called is where you go to get a look at it all. On Friday, I took the Peak Tram up to the top, then rode several escalators to the top of the viewing deck that opens up a spectacular view of everything. It's a strange feeling to be looking down on hundreds of skyscrapers. It's even stranger to walk across the viewing deck and see an expanse of water and islands that, aside from the boats, seems to have no idea of the city that is just around the corner. I decided to walk down instead of taking the tram again, and of course I began to sweat immediately and was quite sweaty and embarrassed by the time I had to sit next to some very serious businessmen on the subway. And that was walking down the hill. Imagine if I had tried to walk up!

The beach

Sunday, I took a ferry out to an island and went to the beach for the day. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and I was looking forward to spending my afternoon buried in this huge book I've borrowed from my hostel. After 30 minutes on the ferry and another 15 walking from the pier to the beach, I put on my third layer of sunscreen and lay down. The sweat was literally pouring off of me, down my nose onto my book, off my legs and arms and back onto my towel, and no matter how many times I reminded myself I had on a ton of sunscreen I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being fried. Even swimming didn't help much, and I only lasted an hour and a half on the beach. I had heard of a nice hour long walk across the island between the beach I was on and the other beach (both with Chinese names I cannot remember), so I decided that walking might be a better way to spend my afternoon. But there wasn't an ounce of shade on the path, and after only 20 minutes I turned around and headed back the way I had come, terrified that I was going to spend the next two weeks peeling sunburned skin off my face. So I ended up wandering around the little town on the island for a while, which was very un-Hong Kong and more like something out of a Jimmy Buffet song.

The Project

The rest of my time has been been spent doing my project, which is much harder here. Even though most people speak English, the University is in summer session and in general people are less talkative. Luckily there is a lot of information on the internet and that has given me a good amount of people to harass through email, which is what I have been doing. The campus is amazing though, set apart from the city and just massive. It's a little quiet since it's summer, but it's kind of fun to be on a campus when it's peaceful.

Hello Hong Kong!

My first and lasting impression of Hong Kong is that it is a very dense city, in every possible way. The buildings, which are almost all several stories, are packed together like books on a bookshelf, bounded only by the mountains on either side of the harbor. People are everywhere, filling up every piece of the sidewalk so that if I try to avoid pushing my way through I end up standing in the same place for minutes. All of the trams and buses are double decker, and people always seem to be spilling out of the windows. Walking down a market street is like moving through an obstacle course with five hundred other people. Green jungle foliage takes up every ounce of space that isn't concrete and spills into the city at every boundary point. Even the air is dense, like trying to breathe steam.

Not that I'm complaining. I think I left the southern hemisphere just before winter really got going so I'm actually enjoying the slight sunburn yesterday left on my shoulders. Tomorrow I am going to an island to do absolutely nothing besides read and swim (although now that I've said that it will probably rain) before spending Monday through Thursday doing interviews at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. I can't speak a word of Chinese. I've tried, and I can't even repeat what people tell me to say. Luckily this is an incredibly English-friendly city and it hasn't been a problem.

My favorite thing about Hong Kong so far is the subway system. It puts every single one I've ever ridden in the US to shame. It's clean, efficient, and easy to maneuver in the same way that our airports are. The faux marble terminals are always playing elevator music, and the cars themselves are immaculate and excellent at pointing out the current station and on which side the doors with open. And it's impossibly inexpensive, like everything else here.

My second favorite thing about Hong Kong is breakfast. I've made a game out of it. There are these little "cake shops" all over the place, but what they really sell is bread. A whole wall is usually covered with shelves of freshly baked things that look like dinner rolls. But one should not be fooled by the innocent dinner roll facade, for inside these buns can be anything from lemon icing to dried salmon flakes to a hot dog. So for breakfast I wander down the street until I find one of these shops, and my only condition is that the signs cannot be in English. I choose the two most innocent-looking rolls I can find, and then go to this little bench I've found and cautiously eat them, first being surprised by what I find inside and then trying to figure out what the hell it is. Then I go into another shop, where the signs are in English and read the signs until I've figured out what I think I've eaten (and buy a small cookie or something to avoid being rude). So far the best surprise is what I am fairly sure was red bean paste. I've also taken to going to the fruit stands and buying anything that looks like a porcupine (because a lot of the fruit here looks a little bit like a porcupine) and then coming back to the hostel and dissecting it until I've decided it is in fact edible, then I eat it. I've fallen in love with dragon fruit.

(Mis)adventures in traveling

My flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong was scheduled to depart at noon. I had a plan: catch a tram from St. Kilda to the city center at 8:30, in time to catch the 9:00 express bus to the airport, which would drop me off at the international terminal around 9:30, a healthy two and half hours before my flight. (Don't tell me, but since I am generally running a half hour behind schedule, this plan was actually formed to get me to the airport the recommended two hours prior to departure).


At 8:30 precisely, I bid a sad farewell to Pint on Punt, loaded my backpacks on, had a friend take a picture of me outside, and trekked down the street to 96 tram (the very same tram I had so much trouble finding on my first night in Melbourne). I had forgotten how far down Fitzroy St. the 96 stop was and so didn't get moving until 8:45, when I forced myself into the overstuffed tram, trying not to take out too many disgruntled people in suits with the person-sized cargo on my back. I apologetically squashed myself into a corner and for 15 minutes the tram jerked it's way toward the city as I sat in blissful ignorance of the fact that I had left my sleeping bag at the hostel.

When it hit me, there was a minute of indecision. I don't have time to go back. It would be stupid and I will probably miss my flight. But I don't want to buy a new sleeping bag. And I really like this one. It probably won't take me that long to go back. Okay I'm going to do it. This thought process had caused me to miss a stop and lose precious time, but I was determined not to leave the continent without my sleeping bag.


So at the next stop I hurdled of the tram, hurrying to the other side of the platform and counting the seconds until another one came going the opposite direction. I jumped on. By the time it dropped my off in St. Kilda it was 9:15 and I was realizing that I probably should have just left it behind as a casualty of travel. But I was already so close, so I ran down Fitzroy Street with my big blue backpack bouncing haphazardly on my back as I clutched my little orange one to my front, laughing along with all of the people who saw me coming and made room for me on the sidewalk.

I burst into reception, grabbed my sleeping bag from the storage rack, yelled something that I'm sure was unintelligible, and hurried back out onto the street. I didn't know if I could run all the way back down Fitzroy Street, since I was already sweating in my fleece jacket and my knees were begging me not to. So I made the decision to go to the closer tram stop, catch the 67 or 64 up to Burke Street where I could hopefully catch the 86 across to the bus terminal and not lose too much time. I would have taken a moment to revel in my rather handy knowledge of the Melbourne tram routes after only two weeks, but I could see a tram coming up the road and I still had to cross the street, so I took off at a knee-friendly waddle towards the crossing. My timing was off, and I was prevented from crossing the street by a series of cars that didn't seem to understand what a hurry I was in (if only they drove on the correct side of the road in Australia I wouldn't have had to cross the street and could have caught the tram, but that's another complaint all together).

When the light finally changed, I could see my tram pulling away. I crossed the street trying to look as dejected as possible, and when I reached the tram stop I turned towards the tram's retreating back end and gave an exasperated sigh that I hoped was visible to somebody on board. I'm not sure why I thought that this was necessary, but I had nothing else to do besides wait for the next tram and I suppose I needed to vent my frustration somehow.

Then a bird shat on my head.

Well, my head and my hand actually. At this point all I could do was laugh, and I was so busy using leaves to try and clean myself up that I was pleasantly surprised to find a tram pulling up beside me. I hopped on and asked a perfect stranger to take a picture of me with my bags and my sleeping bag and the bird poo, because despite being late to the airport, I couldn't help thinking that the whole situation was hopelessly funny.

When I jumped off the 67 at Burke Street, I didn't have to wait long for an 86, which carried me to the bus terminal. I arrived at 10:02, just in time to see the 10:00 shuttle leaving without me. So I bought a ticket, went to the bathroom to deal with the bird poo situation, and nervously sat waiting for the 10:20, which didn't actually leave until 10:30, by which point I was wondering what would happen if I did miss my flight.

When I arrived at the airport just before 11:00, there was a line the likes of which I had never seen winding around the departures area, and I realized I was going to have to beg someone to help me out so I could check in and get through security. But it turned out that the line had nothing to do with Qantas and I was able to check in, simultaneously filling out a customs form and telling the woman behind the counter that no, I wasn't carrying and explosives in my backpack. By 11:05 I was rushing off to security, which was blessedly empty. A guard pointed at my water bottle, which I had forgotten about, and watched with a mixture of awe and disgust as I chugged its contents. I could have just poured it out, but they always give such small cups of water on airplanes and I didn't want to arrive in Hong Kong an more dehydrated than absolutely necessary. Then (and I probably should have seen this coming) for the first time in my life, I was pulled aside for a random security screening. They rifled through my backpack, patted me down, checked me with one of those detector sticks, and then let me go.

I looked at my watch. 11:13. All of that worry and I was 47 minutes early for my flight. When I made my way through the sea of duty-free gifts I arrived at the departures board by my gate, which was wisely telling me to relax.

Things I like about Melbourne

Sushi to go

There's a lot of sushi here, although not quite as much as in Auckland. But here they've turned it into a snack food, which I think is genius and I'm not sure why the US hasn't caught on yet (or maybe it has, but I haven't seen it yet). Every little sushi place here has part of their storefront facing the street, and the sushi lined up in hand rolls so you can see it as you walk by. Instead of cutting the roll up into six pieces and serving it with chopsticks, they just give you the whole roll (for the backpacker friendly price of $2.20) with a little plastic fish full of soy sauce, and you can happily eat it as you continue walking down the street. For those who aren't into raw fish, they've branched out to things like chicken teriaki rolls, which are funny looking but extremely popular apparently.

Trams

What a great public transportation system. Except that when you're in a tram safety zone, which is usally about a two foot strip in the middle of the road with a fence on on one side, where you have to wait until there aren't any cars and make a dash to the sidewalk. It's actually kind of scary.

Indecisive weather gods

They call it four seasons in a day here, and it actually happens. The general advice is to keep a sweater, sunglasses, and an umbrella with you at all times. The sudden changes of weather are particularly fun since I usually spend all day out of the hostel. The fact that it's sunny and beautiful when I walk about the door at 10:00 doesn't mean that it won't be pouring rain at 10:30 when I'm exactly halfway to the city center. Most of the time when it rains I can see a sunny patch of sky not too far away, but that doesn't make me any less wet.

Money

The coins here has kangaroos on them!

This might be too much information

I've gotten into a bit of a routine for the last week, which is funny because generally this trip has not been conducive for routine. I eat breakfast at my hostel at around 9:00, then I get ready to go and walk to the city center from 10:00-11:00. It's a long walk, but it's pretty and in the mornings I don't mind. Then I catch the tourist bus at Federation Square, which drops me off at the University of Melbourne around 11:30 or 12:00. It doesn't take long to get tired of interviewing people, since accosting people and making them talk to me isn't that fun, so I'm usually done by around 3:00. Then I head over to the State Library of Victoria (I love libraries, and this might be my second favorite in the world, after the one at St. Paul's). There I usually study German for a little while, send some emails and book stuff for later in the trip. After a while of that I head back to St. Kilda and brave the rowdy world of my hostel. So if you can't tell, I've basically gone half way around the world to lead a very boring life. But luckily for me, there are some breaks in the routine.

Here's the part that might be overshare, so I apologize if this is the kind of thing that I really shouldn't have posted on the internet. Yesterday while I was waiting for the tourist bus to take me to the University, these two girls probably about my age and giggling a little bit came up and stood right by the bus stop. Then they came over to me and asked (this is a direct quote I promise): "Hi, we were just wondering, is there is anything you would like waxed today?"

And I thought asking strangers questions about the environment was awkward.

I was a little surprised by this introduction, so my first attempt at answering them was, "What?"
One of them explained, "We can do whatever you need: legs, bikini, underarms. And it's all free." Then something about their matching outfits clicked and I asked if they were students, and they got all embarrassed about forgetting to introduce themselves and explained that they were at a beauty school up the road and were looking for people to practice on. Well, luckily for them, I hadn't shaved my legs since I left the States, so I was kind of furry, and didn't mind a chance to chat with Australians who aren't students at the University, so I said okay and followed them around the corner to their studio. The actual funny part of the story isn't that I got my legs waxed for free yesterday, which is pretty random to start with. The funny part is that a lot of the girls there hadn't gone out searching for people to wax, they had brought in their friends, and in the case of a few poor souls, their boyfriends.

While I was there, one girl managed to convince her boyfriend to let her wax his stomach, and I don't think I've ever felt so bad for someone. This poor guy was just lying shirtless on the table, clenching a popsicle stick between his teeth in pain, with tears falling silently out of his eyes while pretty much every girl in the place stood round the table watching as he periodically let out suppressed screams while she took all the hair off of his lower abdomen. He must really like this girl because I haven't seen anyone look that miserable in a while.

Sorry about the long dry spell on the blog!

So I had some technical difficulties with my blog at my last hostel in Auckland, and since I've been in Melbourne I've just gotten lazy, but I'm back on the ball now so I've put up a whole bunch of posts at once. Sorry about that, but I'm planning to be better about it from here on out.

The essentials

Eating

I love fruit. Maybe it has something to do with being in college and having ramen noodles and bagels far more accessible than anything fresh, but walking into Whole Foods and seeing all those cups of fruit lined up like that is about as good as it gets in my world. I feel almost as strongly about fresh vegetables. So in my version of heaven I get to wander down aisle after aisle of fruits and vegetables and not worry about how long they are going to last in my dorm room (there is also mountain scenery, fantastic weather, and a library of all the books about which I have ever thought, "I'll read that when I have time," but these aspects of heaven aren't really relevant to my story). So it turns out that this produce paradise exists not only in my head, but also at the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne! It's great. I discovered it on the tourist bus and it made my day, well made my two weeks actually, since that's how long I'm here. They also sell souvenirs and clothes and stuff like that, but I go for the food side. All the vendors are yelling about their prices and I just get to walk around and bask in the limitless options for lunch and dinner.

Sleeping

Doesn't happen around here as much as I would like. My hostel is a lot of fun, but it's not best place for going to bed early, since my window is right above the entrance to the pub and I can generally hear what's going on in there whether I'm interested or not. Plus there's always a lot going on, so It's not difficult to get distracted and wind up going to bed later than I planned.

Running

There's this thing called "The Tan" around one of the parks in Melbourne, which I was told was the best place to go running around here, so that's where I've been going. The Tan is a 4k loop, and I've never once passed someone else who was running not walking on it. I get passed all the time though, on both sides, by intense looking rugby players, much older men, women in their forties and fifties, people with strollers, and once by a girl who wasn't even wearing running shoes. They all run at breakneck speed, it's amazing. The highlight of my day once was after I did The Tan I was jogging back to the hostel and I was even passed by a elderly woman on one of those motorized chairs. People walk quickly too though, so maybe it's just how things are done around here (or maybe I'm just very very slow).

I'm upside down!

So I'm not sure why I associate being upside down on the world with Australia and not with New Zealand, but I do, and so I'm officially upside down! G'day, mate. I'm now writing from Melbourne, Australia.

And what a city it is. I arrived here on the 4th of June, at around 7:00 pm local time. By the time I got off the express bus to the city, it was dark and I was tired, but my hostel is actually in one of the suburbs. I'm not a big fan of trying to sort out the public transit system in a foreign city at night by myself after traveling all day, but I didn't want to pay for a taxi so I wandered around for 30 minutes looking for a tram stop with number 96 on it, and when I couldn't find one I went back to the bus building and tracked down someone that could help me. Once he gave me directions to the tram stop and I was stuffed into a little seat with my big backpack, I realized that they make no effort to announce which stop is next or where you are. Luckily some nice Australian ladies agreed to tell me when we got to Fitzroy Street, where I got off and proceeded to wander around for another 10 minutes unable to locate my hostel until I almost walked into it to ask for directions. You see, my hostel is also a pub. There was no one at reception, but there was a little sign on the door that said, "If no one is at the desk, please go round and ask at the bar." So with my big backpack on my back and my little backpack on my front I walked right into karaoke night at the pub, and no one even blinked. After checking in, taking a shower, and getting settled for bed, my roommate appeared to grab her keys, introduced herself and said I should come down and meet everybody. Honestly, I was tired. What I really wanted was a good book and ten hours of sleep, but I did want to make friends, so I went down anyway. Six hours later when I poured myself into bed after meeting everybody a couple of times over, I decided that this was going to be a lively two weeks.

The next day I got up early and went to tour Melbourne and it was surprisngly lovely. This city has the best tourist setup I can imagine. They have an huge tourist information center right in Federation Square, which tells you anything you want to know. They told me to hop on the free bus that goes around the city, telling all us foreigners about all the tourist attractions and dropping us off and picking us up at all the major points every 20 minutes. Free transportation will put any city on my good side. They also have a free tram, which only goes around the city center and does the same thing as the bus. It's great. I effortlessly got to find my way around Melbourne and put in my tourist duties for the day.

New Zealand wrap-up

The thing about backpacking is that it's nothing like being at home. I don't really know anyone, I'm always a little bit lost, and I do all sorts of things that I don't do back in America. But in my last couple of days in Auckland, I've noticed that I don't really feel like a tourist anymore, a feeling which was encouraged by a couple of events that told me that if I stay any longer I will in fact become a permanent resident.

Event #1: having to avoid someone in the street

Do you remember Matt from my first hostel? The one that yelled at his ex-girlfriend from the roof? He wasn't my favorite person I had met on the trip, and when I hopped off the bus from Rotorua, he was walking right up the street in the direction I needed to go. With some quick thinking I abruptly turned down a side street until he had passed, which made me feel kind of stupid, but also relieved that I wouldn't have to walk with him. But seeing someone I knew in a random part of a foreign city with a million people in it was the first sign that I was no longer completely out of my element.

Event #2: awkward conversation about work at the grocery store

The next night, as I browsed the noodle section, I ran into a girl I new from my second hostel. We had spoken a few times, so I asked her how the job hunt was going, and she asked me how the project was going, and then we both took our baskets separate ways when we ran out of things to say. This also doesn't happen when you're a foreigner somewhere.

Even #3: getting asked directions and actually knowing the way

Confused tourist: "Excuse me, I'm trying to catch a bus. I'm looking for the transport center. Is it up this way?"
Me: "Are you leaving from Britomart?"
Relieved tourist: "Yes, that's it."
Me: "It's ten minutes down Queen St. the other way. It's on the right just before the water. If you get to the ferry building you've gone too far."
Grateful tourist: "Thanks!"

So I'm not really a tourist here anymore. It's time to move on. But being comfortable in this city doesn't mean I haven't spent most of my three weeks here outside my comfort zone. Here's a list of things I did for the first time while in New Zealand:

-made fried rice
-jumped off a bridge
-went to a movie by myself
-approached 50 people I don't know and made them talk to me
-rolled down a hill in a ball
-climbed a volcano cone
-been told I look Japanese (for an explanation of this one, see below)
-legally bought something at a liquor store
-seen a kiwi
-read "Hamlet"

So there was this girl, Akiko, who like most of the Japanese people in our hostel had come to work in New Zealand for a year to learn English. She would come to our hostel every night to hang out and practice speaking. So one night we were all sitting around and we started asking all the Japanese people to teach us some Japanese. After a few minutes of trading vocabulary in our respective languages, Akiko said to me, "You look Japanese," to which my German roommate replied, "Yeah she gets that all the time. It's the hair." After a minute of going over all of my very non-Japanese features and rehashing the conversation, we discovered the problem. It turns out that she meant to say that I sounded Japanese, since I had repeated something well. But for the rest of my time there people would periodically bring up how Japanese I look.

Anyway, despite all the fun I had in new Zealand, it is clearly time to move on. So, Australia here I come!

Now I can say I've been to New Zealand

As I left off in my last post, oh so long ago, Courtney and I went to Rotorua on my last weekend in New Zealand. Apparently, Rotorua is the tourist city on the north island. The entire place smells like sulfur, and it's famous for it's hot springs, which are basically just pools of water that smell bad and steam all the time, but they were still pretty great to see.

Sheep!

But enough of the hot springs, I want to talk about sheep. They're everywhere! I can't believe I went over two weeks in New Zealand without ever seeing one. What are the odds? I think the sheep to people ratio is like 10:1, but obviously Auckland isn't the sheep capital of the country. The four hour bus ride from Auckland to Rotorua was enough to prove to me that sheep really have taken over the country. And, once we were there, we went to see the Agrodome, which is the main tourist attraction in Rotorua. They do free shows and stuff, so if you go you can learn a lot about sheep, maybe even too much. If you're not interested, I understand. Feel free to skim this next little bit.

We saw a dog herd three lambs (so cute, but obviously terrified) through an obstacle course and then into this tiny pen at the end. It was amazing how well trained and responsive the dog was to the guy who was calling out orders. I'm sure that guy has an official name but we came a little late so I missed the introduction. Anyway, when he had finally finished the obstacle course he called out, "Good boy. Go get yourself a drink." So the dog ran over to his water bowl, got a drink and then trotted happily out of the arena. I think that Rocky and Fergis (Fergus? Sorry, I'm not sure) could both be pretty good at sheep herding. Yeah right.

We also learned all about how they shear sheep, and saw a sheep shearing museum, which was basically a shrine to this one guy who was the best sheep shearer of his day. He won all of the sheep shearing competitions and exposed the world to the art of sheep shearing. That's right, I said sheep shearing competitions. They still exist. I forget the exact numbers but I'm pretty sure the best of the best can sheer an entire adult sheep in about a minute. Which I think is impressive.

If that's not enough for you, we also saw how they card the wool in this HUGE machine that they have been using since 1903 or something like that. It basically gets rolled though these big rollers a bunch of times until it's all going in the same direction, and then you can feed it through this cute little contraption at the end and turn it into yarn yourself. Well, I couldn't, but the woman showing us around could. But after a while there's only so much you can learn about sheep, so eventually Courtney and I wandered off to other attractions.

Like zorbing!

If I'm honest this is pretty much the whole reason I wanted to come to Rotorua. Here's how it works: they take a big rubbery plastic ball and but it inside an even bigger rubbery plastic ball so that it's all cushiony in the small one. Then they throw some (mercifully warm) water into the small ball. Then Courtney and I get inside with with the water, and we rock forward until the whole contraption rolls down a hill. There's a lot of laughing and yelling and everyone gets very wet. It's always written up with the adventure sports, but it's not really that adventurous, just kind of ridiculous.

Kiwis!

And speaking of ridiculous, I also got to see the famous kiwis. Having met the people and eaten the fruit, this was the third point of the kiwi triangle for me. I don't know the actual reason that the fruit and the bird have the same name, but I have a hypothesis: they look exactly alike! If you slap a long bill and feet onto the fruit and tell it to make funny noises and jump around like a little kid that excited about something, you get the bird. They are basically just brown fur balls, but they're pretty cute.

Courtney and I toured a hatchery for an hour, while we were told about the rise and fall of the kiwi birds and what they are doing to help. This is another information overload so you can skim this part too if you want. It turns out that there are not native predators in New Zealand, which is why these silly little birds were able to flourish. But when other animals were introduced their numbers declined. Now the hatchery collects eggs and protects the chicks until they are about 1 kg, which is a weight at which they will be more likely to survive since in the wild most of them die when they're young. At this point they release the birds into the wild. There weren't any chicks there when we were there because the season is over, but all of the pictures were really cute. We weren't allowed to take pictures of the ones they have in captivity since they are nocturnal and the flash scares them, so I don't have any of my own, but I still got to see them which is enough for me.

After this busy day, Courtney and I baked cake because our hostel had an oven, which most don't, and made everybody jealous with smell. Then the next morning we went our separate ways. I was sad to lose my travel buddy, but she was going to Wellington for her project (and to sky dive!) and I was going back to Auckland to get organized for a couple of days before I went to Australia.

Shameless Tourism

Two Saturdays ago, I met up with Courtney Patterson (she's a friend from UNC for anyone who doesn't know her) who also happens to be traveling in New Zealand this summer. As much fun as it has been to get to know strangers, it was also fun to have a travel buddy to do all sorts touristy things with.

Waiheke

On that Wednesday we went to Waiheke, which is an island about 45 minutes out of Auckland by ferry. Luckily for us, the weather was gorgeous, so we spend most of the day in Oneroa, a little beach town near the wharf where the ferry dropped us off. We mostly just walked on the beach and took fun pictures, but we also spent some time walking around the town and eating a long lunch in the sun. One thing I've noticed about Kiwis (the people, not the birds or the fruit) is that they are much more likely to be unnecessarily nice to strangers and obvious foreigners. While Courtney and I sat at a bus stop looking at out map, this friendly guy walking by stopped to ask us if we knew where we were going (in a completely non-creepy kind of way). He was older, and wore worn pants, a long sleeved button up shirt, a vest that looked straight out of Jane Austin book, and a completely ridiculous hat. It was this tall purpleish velvet affair with a feather and some other decorations I couldn't see because we were sitting down and he was standing up, and the rim of the hat hid them from me. When we told him we were just going to wander around, he recommended a walk down Oneroa Beach, and then told us that there was a story-telling festival going on that weekend put on by a local shop owner who had just been to Japan and other places collecting fairy tails from all around the world, if we happened to be interested in coming back to Waiheke over the weekend. With that he said, "I'm a local artist and I wear funny hats. It was lovely to meet you girls," and ambled away up the hill. With that being the most memorable moment of the trip, there isn't much more for to say about Waiheke other than for me to put some of the pictures we took there, which will happen as soon as I've sorted out how to do pictures from these internet cafe computers.

Dinner with the Palmers

One of the professors Courtney interviewed, Dr. Palmer, very nicely invited her over to dinner at his house (and since she had mentioned that she was with a friend from school, I was invited as well). So After we got back from Waiheke we showered and changed and Dr. Palmer picked us up at our hostel for dinner. His wife had made us a New Zealand meal of lamb (what else?) and vegetables, with a desert called pavlova, which to be honest sounds kind of Russian. It turns out that the Palmers have traveled everywhere (well maybe not everywhere but it sure felt that way), so Courtney and I spent the evening listening to them talk about all the places they'd been and things we should do while we are young and easily able to travel about. If I wasn't filled with wanderlust, that dinner certainly would have gotten me interested.

Over the weekend Courtney and I went to Rotorua before she went off to Wellington and I head over to Australia. We finally saw all the sheep and cows we'd been promised were all over the New Zealand countryside, and we even got to spend an hour in a Kiwi hatchery! We also zorbed, which is basically rolling down a hill in giant ball filled with water, but I'll have to write about all of this later because I've got to go catch a bus to the airport and make my way to Melbourne!

IMPORTANT UPDATE!

With Courtney's help, I finished my bag of rice AND my box of oatmeal! I've had rice with almost every non-breakfast meal for the past 19 days and oatmeal every single morning, and I'm sick of them both. So if you're not in a public place and you need an excuse to celebrate, feel free to do a little victory dance because I'm doing the same thing on the other side of the world.

FivefourthreetwooneBUNGY!

In case the title didn't give it away, I went bungy jumping! Sorry, Mom. I always swore that I didn't have the thrill-seeking gene, not even a little bit. And that I would never be crazy enough to go bungy jumping or skydiving or anything like that. But something about the atmosphere around here is intoxicating, and I started to feel like I couldn't come all the way to New Zealand, home of extreme sports, and not participate. So last Tuesday I went on the internet, and two days later I was in a van with some other crazy people driving over to Auckland Harbor Bridge.

We stopped at a little hut just at the entrance to the bridge, where they strapped me into a harness, had me sign a paper that said they weren't responsible for anything that might happen, and then sent us all on a walk up the bridge. I think that the walk to the little jump pod is their way of weeding out anyone that really can't handle heights or has some other debilitating fear. The pod is located underneath the bridge kind of in the middle of it, and you get there by walking on this little metal walkway that is also underneath the bridge. So as you are walking from land to the pod you have a nice view of the water getting farther and farther away through the metal pathway beneath your feet. After I had taken those few minutes to realize exactly how high I was getting and consider how crazy I must be to voluntarily jump off of this bridge, we finally reached the pod.

After a couple of hints about what to do, they started calling us up to be attached to the bungy cord. Only one person goes at a time, but it only takes about a minute for someone to jump and then be hauled back up. They were calling us in the order that we had signed up, so I was last and I got to see everyone go before me. From inside the pod, you can see people jump and you can see them come back, but you can't actually see them while they are in the air. Not that it would have made a difference.

Finally they called my name, so I went and at in the chair while a friendly guy strapped my feet together and then to the cord. When he asked, "Do you want to do a water touch?" I said sure, so he attached a little bit of additional weight to my feet. He explained that I it's better to dive than to jump since you end up upsidedown anyway, and then had me hop off the chair and start waddling (remember, my feet were strapped together) onto the platform.

By this point, I could see straight down to the water, and in the 15 seconds it took me to get from the chair to the edge of the platform I started to have second thoughts. But I didn't have time to think too hard about it, because after that everything kind of happened at once. They try not to give you too much time once you're up there, so instead of counting down one number per second like we do at New Year's they get it all done in one quick moment. So my toes reached the end of the platform, I hear, "OkayhereyougofivefourthreetwooneBUNGY!" and then I just did it.

Then there was this one moment. My legs were tensed, but I hadn't quite jumped yet. I was leaning forward. I felt my weight shift from over the platform to over the water. It was just past the point of no return. And what was I thinking at this particular moment? "Wait! Wait! Please wait! I've changed my mind!" But of course all I could articulate was, "Aaahhh!" as I dove. For about one second I was just amazed that I had actually jumped. I had been warned not to shut my eyes because it all happens so fast, but it didn't really matter because everything was moving so fast that all I could see was a blur of sails around me and the water rushing up to meet me way to quickly. All this time, all I could think was, "Holy shit!" I'm sure there are less rude and more articulate things I could have been thinking like, "This is crazy," or "I'm going to die," or "I wish I had stayed in the hostel," but as I flailed my arms and screamed bloody murder, "Holy shit!" was the best my brain could do. Then right before I hit the water I remembered what they guy had told me about putting my chin to my chest and reaching out my arms, so I did that and then was plunged, head to ankles, into the harbor (so much for the water touch).

The first bounce is almost as terrifying as the jump, but then they got gentler and I found myself rising back up to the pod all I could do was laugh. Despite being soaking wet and cold and shaking from the adrenaline, I had this huge goofy smile on my face as they unclipped me and I tottered over to sit down while other people did their second jumps. After all that, the jump had only taken about 10 seconds, but it was completely worth it.

Some fun facts about the Auckland bridge bungy jump:
It is 40 meters or about 131 feet.
The cord is basically made up of lots of little strands of elastic like the ones found in hair bands.
The cord is only 9 meters long, and it stretches to about 4 times its length when you jump.
But no worries, it can stretch to about 15 times its length before it begins to break.
They gave me a free tee shirt.

Oh yeah, my research project

Since I haven't mentioned it so far, the reason for all my travels this summer is a research project. And, despite all appearances to the contrary, I've actually been working on it.

I'm studying how universities take the environment into account as they develop. More specifically, I've picked four universities, one in each country I'm going to, and I'm comparing them based on four environmental criteria: curricula and research, student involvement, physical environmentalism (recycling, green architecture, power and water conservation, public transport, etc.), and plans for the future. Basically this involves me doing a whole bunch of interviews.

At the University of Auckland, I first spoke with the environmental coordinator, who was phenomenally helpful and gave me more resources than I can handle in the two weeks I'm looking at this university. I also interviewed one of the co-chairs of the environmental affairs office in the student government when I was lucky enough to stumble into an Eco-festival he was organizing. Other than that, I've spent most of my time doing student interviews, with some pretty interesting results. I have a set of seven questions that I ask students to see what their opinion is on environmental issues, and once I have a sample size of fifty I'll compile all the data and see how it all comes out. I like to warn people before I interview them that the first two are kind of intense, then after that they get simple. Then I hit them with it:

1. Off the top of your head, what do you think are some of the biggest problems facing the world as a whole today?
2. What are some of the biggest problems facing New Zealand? They can be the same or different as the ones you have already mentioned.
3. Are you concerned about the environment or climate change? Choose one: yes, a little, or no.
4. Do you think that students at this university are concerned about the environment or climate change? Choose one: yes, a little, or no.
5. How often do you think that environmental issues come up in conversation among students? Choose one: often, sometimes, rarely.
6. Is there anything you do in your daily life out of concern for the environment? (Some examples of common answers include conserving power, taking public transport, and recycling.)
7. Do you know of any efforts or changes the university is making out of concern for the environment?

I won't go into the details of how I break the answers down and how this information ties into my project, but I've gotten some pretty interesting answers to the first question. Things that often com up are poverty, third world civil conflict, and the rising cost of food and fuel. Some less common but more fun answers: America, President Bush (although this could be in the common answers category as well), lack of religion, too much religion, selfishness, McDonald's, and my personal favorite: stupid people.

So I felt like I needed to at least say something about my project while I was here so I didn't feel like I was spending all of my time avoiding any real work. But now that I've said it, I'm off to go cook lunch and go to a museum and maybe some sightseeing.

Never make hasty judgments and other lessons learned in a hostel

Hostels, or backpackers as they're called here, are a world of their own. This is especially true in the off season, when the usual parade of gap year students and young adventurers are replaced by a more varied array of residents. Some lessons I've learned so far:

1. Never make hasty judgments on a person's culinary abilities.

On day three of my stay in Albert Park Backpackers (that's how long it took me to pull myself together and go to the grocery store for supplies), I sauntered into the kitchen ready to wow everyone with my grand plans for making stir fry. I quickly realized that no one would be wowed. Except for maybe me. First of all, I had to wait my turn. Then I had to readjust some assumptions I didn't even realize I had made. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had assumed that the English guys with all the piercings and slightly offensive tee shirts wouldn't be good cooks. Same with the Japanese girls in the room next to me who always look meticulously done up, and the funny German couple who always argue over breakfast. Not so. Simmering around the kitchen were homemade pasta sauces, soups, chicken parm, fish fillets, and you get the idea.
It turns out that pretty much everyone in Albert Park Backpackers Hostel is gourmet chef or at least was one in a previous lifetime. I guess it makes sense for people trying to live on a budget: there's only so long a person can go on noodles and frozen dinners before they get pretty creative in the kitchen. But still, I was surprised. It's been fun cooking with everyone, and I finally learned how to make good fried rice thanks to my Japanese roommates. Unfortunately for my newfound fried rice skills, I will probably never want to eat rice again after this trip. Living and eating inexpensively (and living with other people who are doing the same) means that everyone eats rice all time. It's about NZ$1.50 for a kilogram of rice. And while that innocent bag doesn't look like a lot, we all know how rice expands, and that little bag can probably feed two people for about a week. After a 6 days of having rice with almost every meal, I'm beginning to dream of the day when I reach the bottom of my kilo of rice.

2. A common language is not always necessary for conversation.

One of my roommates had a job interview yesterday. It didn't go well. I know this because when I walked into our room at around 9:00 last night, she was sitting on the lone chair in the room crying. So I gave her a hug and asked her what was wrong while she tried to calm down a little. Hitomi's English isn't great yet since this is her first time working in an English-speaking country, but usually we manage the half-English half-gesturing hostel speak that gets most of us through the day. But since she was upset it was harder than usual to try and speak another language, so instead she told me what happened in Japanese and I comforted her in English. Neither of us had a clue what the other was saying, but I think we understood each other anyway.

3. I cannot sleep through everything.

I thought I could. I really did. I've slept through fire alarms and bright sunlight on my face and years of roommates dropping things and talking on the phone. But our room is right below the roof, which is where people hang out at night. And something about cask wine and a rooftop just gets to Matt's head, and he feels the need to yell long streams of insults at his ex-girlfriend in Christchurch. This usually happens about thirty minutes after I've fallen asleep, and I wake up every time. I'm tempted to rent a car, go find whatever girl was crazy enough to date Matt, and bring her to Auckland so he won't have to yell quite so loud.

4. How to make friends you will never see again.

It's not hard to make friends in hostel, especially if you stay for more than a day or two, so I've gotten to know all of the "long-term" residents of Albert Park Backpackers. These transient friendships were solidified on Wednesday, when we all planned to go out for karaoke only to find that the usual bar was showing a rugby match instead, so we went to another bar that happened to have a dance floor. Once you've seen someone dance under the influence of a few NZ$5 beer jugs, there really isn't anything left to hide. I imagine karaoke would have had the same effect.

5. What "Chin chin" means in Japanese.

Just before this outing, one of my roommates cooked dinner for everyone (spaghetti with meat sauce and it was fantastic). As we all sat down to eat, we all raised our glasses and said "cheers" in our respective languages. But before we could touch glasses the four usually reserved Japanese girls at the table collapsed into fits of giggles. It turns out that Jorge's toast, "Chin chin," roughly translates as "a small boy's private parts" in Japanese. Who knew?

Greenery

The thing about staying right in the heart of a major city is that I can't always tell that I've gone half way around the world. Other than the crosswalks, accents, sushi, and cars on wrong side of the road, these tall buildings and busy people and chain stores could just as easily be any US city as New Zealand. So I decided to spend today in search of the more New Zealandy side of Auckland, and it was a definite success.

I woke up at around 6:30 this morning (I swear I'm not jet lagged) and after a half hour willing myself to fall back asleep I gave up, threw on some running clothes, and went to find The Domain, which is Auckland's equivalent to central park but they really went above and beyond. I passed people playing rugby and soccer (New Zealandy moment #1), and then some overly friendly geese, and then discovered that there's a jungle right in the middle of the park! When I first got there the sun was still coming up and the whole place looked like Fern Gully. I could see all the shafts of light coming through the trees and reflecting on the dew, which was stunning and I was so mad that I had dressed to go jogging and therefore didn't have my camera with me. The whole day was sunny and gorgeous, probably one of the last really pretty fall days before winter sets in in June. I'm just hoping I get another one before I leave so I can go take pictures.

On my way back I was looking for the only big grocery store around here, but couldn't find it and stumbled on the Auckland farmer's market instead (New Zealandy moment #2), which is a wonderful thing to find when I am hungry and looking for breakfast, so I spent a pleasant hour walking around there and chatting with people.

Then I took a ferry to this little suburb called Devonport and climbed a volcano cone (New Zealandy moment #3), which is far less intense than it sounds. It's really just a grassy hill, which took only me about 20 minutes to climb wearing a skirt and flip flops. From the top there is 360 degree view of Auckland and the harbor and Devonport. Once I was up there I opted not to tour the town and just plopped myself down on the hillside for a couple of hours to read. There were these kids and their grandfather sledding down the grass on cardboard boxes and people with dogs and cute couples all around. The scene was almost too perfect, but since it's summer and I'm on vacation and I have nothing better to do with my time than read and smile at all the happy people with cool accents, I didn't mind.

On a side note, mentioning accents reminds me that I've caught myself trying to speak with a New Zealand accent twice and it's really pretty embarrassing. I'm trying not to let it happen again.

Safely arrived in Auckland

Despite a time change and crossing the international date line, I'm not actually that jet lagged. My plane took off at around 9:30 pm on Tuesday in California, and after a 13 hours of restless airplane sleep I arrived here at 4:30 am on Thursday in New Zealand. Other than being sad that I will never experience May 14, 2008, I feel pretty good.

I didn't do anything too exciting today, other than busting into my room at the hostel at 7:00 this morning to the disgruntled sleepy moans of my roommates. It's now about at 4:30 pm and I've spent most of the day wandering around the streets and park around the University I will be studying. I think I might take a ferry out to an island this weekend, but I'm not sure yet.

Some interesting cultural differences:

Crosswalks
At the major intersections I have seen, pedestrians never cross the street when any cars are moving. So instead of having pedestrians walk parallel to the cars, the traffic lights stop all of the cars for about a minute and let all of the pedestrians (regardless of direction) cross the street. The result is that there is a fairly long wait at a crosswalk, so people pile up at the corners, and then when they finally can go this flood of people pours into the intersection crossing every which way. It's difficult to describe but it's funny to see people crossing the street diagonally which never happens in the US.

Accents
I want one. They're awesome.

Volume of sushi places
About one out of every five store fronts is a hole in the wall take out sushi place. It's like Starbucks in Seattle, but instead of coffee it seems like people here can't live without two servings of raw fish in their daily diet. It's the only explanation for how they all stay open.

I've been warned that it's almost winter here, but today was around 70 and beautiful so I'm hoping that my luck holds. I'm off to go meet people in my hostel and get ready for some interviews tomorrow.

California here I come!

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that school is over and I am off to live out of a back pack for the next three months, but it must be true because every time I go to put on a shirt I realize that I always have the same four choices. Another sign that this is really happening: a week ago today I was in the UNC library studying for a physics final, and now I'm in the Stanford library (which is actually kind of the same, but with better windows) killing time and starting my blog while Eleanor studies. It's definitely nice not to be the one studying!

Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun here hanging out here with Eleanor and her roommates and other SPS kids. The weather has been beautiful and it wonderful not to have anything to do besides lie in the sun and enjoy it. I watched my first water polo game ever yesterday and had a blast going out and getting to know Eleanor's friends. Nothing too out of the ordinary yet, but this is definitely a great way to ease into my adventures this summer.

I leave for New Zealand on Tuesday AND I have a little bit of my voice back so it looks like I'm really on my way!

And I'm off...

Hello everyone!

Welcome to my summer blog! I wanted to call it "Around the World in 80 Days" but it turns out I'm going to be gone for closer to 90. Too bad for the title but I'm happy to spend 10 extra days out and about.

I thought this would be a good way to keep track of my summer and stay in touch with all of the people I am going to miss while I'm gone. I'll be keeping it up all summer so feel free to check it or not check it whenever. I'm going to miss talking to you all and I cannot wait to hear what you all are up to. Stay in touch!