For More Information

Life here in Boulder is busily hurrying along: just five weeks left before I pack up my classically Colorado Subaru and head back to Michigan for the holidays. But in case you were all wondering how I'm carrying on, I thought I would provide you with a (slightly late) half-time show. The highlights so far...

1. I have a new, second job at the Boulder Book Store, only one of the most fabulous independent book stores I have ever set eyes on. You can read a write-up of my experiences at "rep night" in Avalanche magazine here.

2. The GREs are officially over! That is, barring an absolutely disastrous score on the subject test...so cross your fingers. I think I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I've never spent so much time preparing for such arbitrary (and meaningless) exams. Although I did learn several important facts, including (a) someone should really find smarter writers to work for sparknotes and (b) eighth-grade math is harder than you remember.

3. I have my ticket for New Zealand! I'll be leaving January 27th and returning on May 23. The terrific Tommy Gordon, for those of you who know him, will be accompanying me, and we have big plans to live out of a car and work on farms for five months, interrupted by backpacking trips and visits to friends down under. More on those plans as I actually formulate any.

4. I posted a poem of mine on my writing blog, a little ditty inspired by yoga, the texture of Ethiopian flatbread, and a subtle feeling of self-conscious whiteness. I continue to delight in so many aspects of Boulder life - yoga, vegetarian cuisine, great cafes and independent businesses, and especially the mountains - but I'm also trying to suss out how I feel about the way we Westerners encounter, interact with, and appropriate other cultures, in which area Boulder is a fascinating study of hippie-meets-yuppie-meets-bro-meets-immigrant-meets-me. Anyway, check out the poem if that sort of thing floats your boat (or if you're just a terribly supportive friend).

Ras Kassa's Halloween

Happy Roommates

Our House, Occaisonally Blanketed in Snow

White People Like...Living in Boulder

This update brought to you in part by Stuff White People Like, and, of course, by readers like you. Feel free to keep track of your score as you go along.

Stuff White People Like About Boulder

5. Farmer's Markets: If you've spent more than a half an hour with me in the past couple of months, you've probably heard me evangelize for local produce. I'm currently deep in the foodie thrall of Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Marion Nestle and I love to tell anyone who will listen all about it.

15. Yoga: I think it's good for the ego every once in a while to do something for which you have no absolutely natural aptitude. Our first days in yoga class were hysterically humbling. Instructor: "Now cartwheel forward into chatarunga, exhale chatarunga dandasana, inhale into urdhva mukha svansana, meeting in adho mukha svasana, downward dog." Meanwhile my roommate Emma and I are looking around like "which leg do I lunge with for sleeping pigeon?" I absolutely love it. Today I managed to get into my first inversion (crow pose), which I held for all of .2 seconds. Namaste.

20. Being An Expert on YOUR Culture:

Voila! My uniform at my new job serving Ethiopian food at Ras Kassa's restaurant. I'm now officially working at the pretty much the only diverse work place in Boulder (diversity being another thing white people like), reporting to a tiny little Ethiopian woman named Tsehay who calls me either her daughter or "the midget." If ever I'm moving around too quickly to fix a drink or take out an order, someone is guaranteed to grab my hand and say "Lauren...how are you? Come eat" and hand-feed me some flatbread. It's good being the baby.

32. Vegan/Vegetarianism: My lovely new roommate here in Boulder is a vegan, so I've been adding some fun new recipes to my repertoire. Are you interested in making some fabulous vegan bread? I thought you might be...

2 cups nondairy milk mixed with 2 teaspoons white distilled vinegar (this makes "buttermilk")
3 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 grains (I used my hot cereal with some millet)
2 tablespoons Earth Balance

Oven at 425. Mix the milk and vinegar and let it sit. Mix the dry stuff, add the butter and rub it in until it looks like bread crumbs. Stir in the milk until the dough is nice and sticky, then knead it about 10 times and put it in a lightly greased bread pan or cake pan. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes. Delicious.

43. Plays: I'm currently volunteering as a house manager/set builder/costumer/extra for the Upstart Crow theatre company. We're about to start work on Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors.

53. Dogs: Here are some of the dogs I've considered adopting in the past couple of days: Cookie, Fruity Pebbles, and Rocky.

81. Graduate School: the 280 dollars I just signed over to ETS will bear me witness on this one. I am now officially in the process of preparing for graduate school. Someday. Probably entering in the fall of 2011. For those of you who haven't heard my plans, I'm thinking about doing a PhD in literature, hopefully focusing on drama and theatrical performance. (See number 43.) And while getting ready for the GREs (especially the wretched subject test) has been a fairly tedious process, I'm actually experiencing a sizable excitement about going back to school. And not just because that means I can finally get a dog. (See number 53.)

115. Promising to Learn a New Language: The Mexicans in the kitchen at Ras Kassa's are teaching me about a word of Spanish a night. I say "muchos gracias" when I bring them my dishes and Rodrigo always responds "This is Spanish, senorita!" Rodrigo's pretty generous.

120. Taking a Year Off: for frequent readers of this blog, this one requires very little explanation. Although they didn't say "taking three to ten years off," so I'm not sure whether that makes me less white or uber white.

128. Camping: I haven't actually made it to Rocky Mountain for a camping trip yet, but I wanted to end my Boulder update with a little gem from Stuff White People Like:

"Ultimately the best way to escape a camping trip with white people is to say that you have allergies. Since white people and their children are allergic to almost everything, they will understand and ask no further questions. You should not say something like 'looking at history, the instances of my people encountering white people in the woods have not worked out very well for us.'"

I think white people also like irony.

That's all for now from Lake Woebegone, folks. I'm living the hip life.

Here Today

If I had a dollar for every time I've told myself "you should really update your blog" this summer, I'd buy you a big fancy dinner, complete with dessert. But these past months have been by far the fastest of my (admittedly pretty short) life, and - let me tell you - my shameful lack of blog activity is not the only evidence of it. Since returning to the States in May, I've been to L.A., Washington D.C., Outerbanks North Carolina, Clemson South Carolina, the Black Hills, Glacier National Park, Seattle, the Oregon Extension, San Fransisco, Sonoma, Boulder, Ann Arbor, and soon Chicago. I've seen just about all my closest friends who live Stateside, both sets of grandparents, and quite a few uncles, aunts, and cousins. I've spent extensive amounts of time with my dogs. And I've watched three of my best friends get married. (Those things are not in order of priority, as much as you might suspect me of caring more about dogs than weddings.)

All of this has been wonderful, unexpected, and also like a long, slow vice-grip to the heart. Glass is half full: I never in a million years dreamed that at 23 I would have such a long list of meaningful relationships and incredible experiences to make me grateful to the world. Much less did I imagine that I would get so many opportunities to make new memories with old friends. I never thought I would have so many amazing people in my life. Glass is half empty: I also never thought that I would reach a point where I live most of my life without seeing any of those people at all. That most of my "life events" would happen with hardly any of my closest friends or my family there to witness them. And that I would see some of the most important people in my life for only a couple of days or a couple of hours a year.

Most of the time I'm a glass-is-half-full person, as most of you probably know. I like to focus on hope (and please don't turn that into a double entendre...that unintentional pun is my least favorite thing about Hope College), because I don't think much comes out of focusing on despair. But at the transition times in my life, I often experience these moments of loss, of really appreciating how many people and places we will have to mourn in the course of our lives. There are really very few emotions I fear as much as I fear loneliness.

And yet - to swing back into the realm of optimism, perhaps accompanied by eye rolling - I haven't yet found a way to appreciate what something/someone/someplace means to me without losing it. As hard as I try not to take my present for granted, it's my past that really teaches me what and whom and how to value. Who really knew what a terrific show Arrested Development was until it got canceled and all other television failed to live up to its standard? And who knew that Dostoevsky was the greatest author to ever live before he died and couldn't write the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov? (That's a little joke for all of you who hate me for ever recommending it to you.)

I usually don't wax quite so philosophical in these posts, but that's the taste I have on my tongue as I near the end of an incredible summer. I am so grateful for my friends and family. I think maybe some people never get to care about in a lifetime as many people as I've cared about in 23 short years. It's wonderful and awful. And as much as I love them, and as far away from me as they are, I've still got to find the energy to be here, now, wherever I am, ready to throw everything I have into whatever/whoever new comes my way. In a few weeks I will move to Boulder and for four months, that will be home - that place and those people will get inside me and change me and make me a new person and after that, Boulder will be mine forever, but I'll also have yet another place to be homesick for. It's a high price to pay, but also a fair one. More than fair, when I consider how good the good times are.

The accelerating rate of decomposition in my grammatical standards signals that the time has come to draw my reflections to a close. I'll leave you with some photo highlights from my summer so far. Thanks for reading and thanks for being one of those people I'm talking about in this post.

Summer



Weddings

Road Trip


Friends

Assorted Americana

So even though re-entry is now in full swing, I've decided to keep my little travel blog up and running. Because one of the most important things I've learned from leaving the United States is how great the United States really is for adventuring and exploring. In fact, toward the end of my stay in France, I was talking about Michigan in a way that probably gave my friends the impression that it's one of the world's great undiscovered jewels of natural beauty and charm. Which in a lot of ways, it really is. And just to show you how much I've grown to appreciate my country, 'tis of thee, I'm going to put up a few pictures of my American explorations so far this summer. As ridiculous as it sounds, I've already swum at both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts since returning at the beginning of May, thanks to a week in L.A. and a long weekend road trip to a friend's wedding in South Carolina. Which...when you think about it...that's about as far apart as France is from Kazakhstan. What a ridiculous country we live in.

Venice Beach

Hollywood Hills

Gerald R. Ford Airport, Pure Michigan

Indiana, state with the inspiring motto "Crossroads of America"

What other country has an entire district devoted almost exclusively to government buildings? And phallic monuments?

Lost Colonies, Outer Banks, North Carolina

David Gritter's wedding, Table Rock State Park, South Carolina

Living an absurd French fantasy? Who, me?

So just when I had finished my job, my face nice and sore from smiling encouragingly, just when we had finally finished the unaccountably difficult process of moving out of our apartment, and in short, just when I had been feeling good and ready to go home, Brianne and I left for two weeks of vacation in France and now I'm attached to Europe again. Our trips were so incredible that I'm going to have to subject you to a cruel number of photographs. If you're really a glutton for pain, you can go check out a slightly different selection on Brianne's blog here.

We started the vacation off right with a stop at EuroDisney in Paris with our Kiwi friend Juliette (see left) and her Russian boyfriend Dimitriy.

Next Brianne and I headed down to the south of France, where we explored little towns on the Cote d'Azur like this one (St Jean Cap Ferrat).

Then we took a ferry (much like this one) from Nice to the French island of Corsica...

...where we were amazed to find landscapes I didn't even know existed in the world. Above is a picture (you can just make out some snowy peaks) I took on our bus ride from Ajaccio to Bonifacio, where we camped with a Canadian, a Colombian, and a Brazilian whom we'd met along to way.

Here's a view of Bonifacio, our town, which is perched right on the edge of some spectacular limestone and granite cliffs.

The cliffs, with the famous Graine de Sable.


One day we took a morning boat tour to the Isles Lavezzi. The guides told us we had the option of waiting until the afternoon boat came to pick us up, and since Brianne and I (along with our Colombian and Brazilian friends) were the only ones to take them up on the offer, we had the whole island to ourselves for an afternoon. We scrambled around on rocks, through tide pools, and hung out on gorgeous beaches like the one above.

And when you have a private beach that magnificent, of course you have to go swimming, even if it's body-numbing cold water.

After a couple days in Bonifacio, we hitch-hiked (our first time!) back to Ajaccio and spent a day on the beach and in the food markets.

And our last night in Corsica, we decided we had better take advantage of our hotel room's little terrace and have a picnic of local foods: goat's cheese, bread, strawberries, spinach and onion pasties, a selection of olives, and a bottle of wine made by the half-American half-French winemaker who picked us up hitch-hiking. Words cannot describe.

And our second week of vacation was, if possible, even more ridiculous. Brianne and I, along with Juliette, Dimitriy, and two of Juliette's crazy Kiwi friends (Megan and Richard) rented the above chateau in rural Vendee.

Welcome to our dining room. Ridiculous enough for you?

What about some morning archery practice?

And adorable French neighbors who give you eggs straight out from under their chickens and ducks.

And deciding to amuse yourselves by filming a mockumentary about the history of the castle, complete with epic battle scenes

And for a final touch of absurdity, check out Puy du Fou, the ridiculous French "theme park" we visited, where we were treated to Viking, Gladiator, Middle Ages, and Muskateer battles set to the soundtrack of Pirates of the Caribbean.

And here's our crew (from left, Dimitriy, Juliette, me, Brianne, Megan, Richard). All in all an incredible bunch of goofballs to share a castle with for a week. I can't wait to hang out with them all again in New Zealand.

Now, post-vacation, I'm in Nantes for two and a half weeks without work and without permanent habitation. And because we're staying with the same friend whose apartment we shared at the beginning of the year, the strange limbo-like feeling of this transition period is even more pronounced. I can't really tell whether I should be getting excited about going home (which I am, of course), or feeling sad about leaving Europe for who-knows-how-long. A month ago I was ready for pancakes and Captain Sundae and all things familiar. Now after two weeks of incredible vacation the idea of going back to the United States for eight months is making me feel...frankly...a little claustrophobic. I have to remind myself that my plans for those months still involve a lot of adventuring, and more importantly a lot of the quality friend time that I've been missing for much of this year. And also I have to remind myself not to be an overly dramatic commitment phobe. But surely my series of contradictory posts about my changing plans for next year haven't given you the impression that I'm feeling non commital?

Someone really ought to give me a nice firm reality check.

New Zealand...Like Lord of the Rings!

So here we go, continuing on the update journey, and making up for lost blogging time. Next stop: plans for next year. Which with today's economy, let me tell you, is a very exciting topic for the casually employed. Now if you've kept abreast of all the waffling I've done in the past months (and bless your little deeply-unimpressed-with-my-decisiveness heart if you have), you know that I've had some trouble zeroing in on exactly which of my many travel wishes I was going to make a final commitment to for next year. But what I've settled on is: a short-term job somewhere in the U.S. for the fall, and then leaving for New Zealand in January. Why New Zealand, you wonder? First, because...


Yes, it's true. My fascination with New Zealand does suspiciously coincide with the first time I saw Fellowship of the Ring. I may or may not be listening to the soundtrack as I write this post, but I'll leave you to your own conjectures as to the actual extent of my nerdiness. In any case, ever since I saw those gorgeous landscapes on the big screen, I've been itching to see them for myself. And, since every Kiwi I've met has been so warm, laid back, and fun-loving, and every backpacker I've talked to who's spent time in New Zealand couldn't wait to tell me how incredible it was, time has only made me more and more keen to go. So I figured...



And indeed, why not? When I made my list of "Places I Absolutely Have to Go or I Will Regret It During My Mid-Life Crisis," New Zealand was at the top of the list. And even though living there for a few months won't really add any shining gold stars to my C.V., if I'm ever going to do something just for the sake of it, throwing responsibility to the wind, now is quite possibly the last chance I will get. So what exactly will I be doing while I'm there? Well luckily...


...for temporary work visas. O.K. that transition was a lot less brilliant than the others. But bottom line: New Zealand allows Americans to enter with a 12-month holiday work visa, which will permit me to pick up odd jobs during the three or four (or five?) months that I'm there. And I hope that a lot of those jobs will be through an organization called WWOOF, or Willing Workers On Organic Farms, which hooks volunteers up with organic farms/orchards/ranches who are looking for temporary workers. The host feeds and houses you, and in exchange you do whatever odd jobs need doing. I've had a couple of friends who have done it in the past, all with great results. And I will also have quite a few people to visit: a Kiwi assistant I've befriended here in France (and, through her, a smattering of other locals), a young French woman I met here who has since moved down under, and my good friend Alicia, who's with Peace Corps in Tonga. So I don't think I'll have any trouble keeping busy. And if I have some extra money, I'm going sky diving and learning how to surf.

And that's the long and short of it, folks. I hope you recognized those lovely New Zealand tourism posters from the incredible television show Flight of the Conchords. If you didn't, you're missing out, and you should really check out this little sampler video, in honor of New Zealand and Lord of the Rings...

Frodo, Don't Wear the Ring

The Great Vacation Update

So first things first. And for me, when trying to make up for months of blog inactivity, that means a photo tour of my vacations. I hope you'll agree. I've tried to keep things pithy, and if it still seems lengthy to you, just think about how many photos I haven't posted...

Week One

Words could not describe our happiness when our friend Ian decided to come visit us for the first week of our vacations. Since Ian and I both spent a semester in London, and are both shamelessly and slavishly in love with it, pubs and pints like these ones were our first stop. We also saw a comedy at the National Theatre, browsed through Camden market, and of course ate ourselves silly like the vegetarian (or vegetarian-tolerant, as the case may be) gluttons we are.


Also, thanks to Ian's friend Dan and his Hilton points, we got to stay one night in the poshest European accommodations I'll probably ever be able to afford.


After we got back to France, we took advantage of some unexpectedly glorious weather to take a day trip to a coastal town called La Baule. We may have even gotten the tiniest bit sunburned.

We (me, Brianne, Ian, and Dan) then got to fulfill a romantic-at-heart's dream and spend Valentine's Day in Paris. It was a great way to celebrate how much more full and happy I felt after spending quality time with real, in-it-for-the-long-haul friends (one of the things in which this year has been a little lacking), and it was a wonderful stop-over on our way to...

Week Two

Poland! We landed in Krakow, which instantly jumped to the top of my "most beautiful cities in Europe" list. Golden domes, snowy parks, scrumptious pierozki, and War and Peace in my purse: now that's a recipe for romance. And to top it all off, our hostel offered free breakfast and dinner, free coffee and tea all day long, and even free shots of vodka on the owner's birthday.

The next stop was Warsaw, a city that combines modern skyscrapers (not quite American-size, but some of the biggest I've seen in Europe) and beautiful "historic" quarters like this one, which were actually entirely reconstructed after WWII, when most of the city burned or was destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising.

But the best part of the day was without a doubt the 2 hours we spent walking across the entire city in search of what our guidebook called the "floating palace" - me growing grumpier at every park we passed that did not contain a celestial mansion - and finally arriving, just as the sun was setting, only to realize that, of course, a palace that is supposed to float by being reflected in two mirror lakes will, when those lakes are frozen, look rather like a very ordinary large-ish house. You can see how well we appreciated the irony.

The next day we took the train northward and got a look at the Baltic Sea, which was gorgeous, aside from the terrifying number of swans.


While there we stayed in the town of Gdansk, where we had a really interesting historical moment while exiting the Solidarity museum, dedicated to the Polish resistance to Soviet occupation. We had just spent a few hours underground and watched footage of riots and martial law and then as we were walking out we suddenly heard police sirens and air horns and people shouting. We looked at each other with "are we nervous?" faces and climbed out onto the street to see a huge demonstration of police officers, who were all marching to commemorate the men who had died in the shipyard strikes in the 1970s. Suddenly, seeing how many of those police officers had lived through the years when men in uniforms inspired anxiety instead of security, I realized what a charmed period and place in history I've lived in so far, and how lucky (spoiled?) I am that even most of the atrocities that have happened in my own lifetime seem distant and "historical" rather than real and present.

Continuing our exploration of Poland's history (if there's one thing this trip taught me, it's that my knowledge of European history is in sore need of a tune-up), we took a trip to the Aushwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on our way back through Krakow. Words are obviously inadequate to describe that experience, and in a lot of ways that experience is itself an inadequate expression of all the symbolic weight that the word "Aushwitz" carries in my mind. We arrived at the camp just in time to hear a group of Jewish teenagers singing in Hebrew in front of the barracks, an incongruously beautiful sight that was somehow incredibly fitting.

Well I hope that was a decent sort of catch-up, and bravo to you if you've made it all the way through. More updates to come soon.