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.