The last week...
I want this post not to be depressing so I’m really going to work on making it positive…so we arrived on Saturday and went to the Library to make an ‘ad’ for George… we then visited a few hostels and put up the beautiful ads and reading… Sunday was an eventful day at the hospital. I had been having some DELICIOUS stomach cramps for a few days, so we got to hang out there for a few hours. Basically determining that the drugs I’ve been taking to help my knee have been reeking havoc on my internal organs! So after that we… went back to the hostel and read. (yeah, we read a lot… it helps to save money!) Monday was the day we took George to the auction house. We decided that since we only have 5 days to sell George, and we don’t have a current Warrant of Fitness (that says we can drive the care safely on the road) AND we didn’t want to pay for one OR pay for the repairs to get a WOF, we decided that even though we have to pay a $250 commission fee to put the car in the auction, we had already written the money off so even if we get $100 for him, it’s $100 we don’t have…So yeah. We dropped him off and then walked back to the hostel… bopping in and out of Christchurch stores, but kinda getting wet as it was raining :) It was kind of sad to drop George off; because it was nice to have a car- but it also signifies that the trip is really coming to an end. Everything that has become ‘normal’ in the past 7 months is now going to only exist in my memory. No more new places in NZ for me to visit- no more new NZ adventures, no more new hostels, or new NZ travelers or fantastic landscapes. It’s all done as of Friday night. Wow. While I was working in Auckland I imagined what it would be like to head back home, to a place where I could get chocolate milk, or quality Lactaid milk… or to a place where I wouldn’t have to share a room with other people, or a kitchen with 30 other people, or a washroom with only 1 toilet… I couldn’t wait to get out of there. But it was all part of the experience you see, now I know just HOW bad a boss can be, how depressing work can be… I know that I want to find something I enjoy doing, and do that. That having a job needs to be something you enjoy at least a little to be able to enjoy the other areas of your life. For me, if my job is THAT bad, it just seeps into the rest of my life, I really try to prevent that from happening, but that’s just how I work. I am definitely affected by my environment… that if my job sucks, I don’t think I can ever be truly happy. It takes up so much of your life, how can you do a job you hate? How? Life is too short. But I’m so glad I got to travel again before heading back to Canada. It really made me realize how much I do like traveling, and seeing and experiencing new places… I don’t like camping, or doing super-expensive things, but I like to see places in my own way. Explore the markets, or the parks, or just aimlessly walk around a get a feel for the place- I love that feeling of falling in love with a place because you’ve visited it at just the right time of year (coughWanakacough), or finding a beautiful place to go in a city that isn’t really your favourite (umm Queenstown). But I really love how traveling opens your mind, even if it’s just a little bit, to what else is out there in the world. Even if it isn’t all that different from your hometown, it’s still a different place, where things aren’t quite the same, and while you long for those things that are so familiar, you know that if they were - what would be the point of traveling? And I hope, I really hope my mind has been opened by this whole experience, and I hope I come home a better person than when I left. Better in what way, I’m not sure. But I gotta say, traveling is never a bad thing. Seeing a new place is never bad. Even here, some of the girls at Greenpeace were talking about Uni and asking me how I could have gone to Uni right after I graduated high school, wasn’t I too young to know what I wanted to do? Didn’t I want to travel, give myself time to explore the world before I decided what I wanted to do. Over here an OE (overseas experience) is commonplace. The majority of people take time off to travel before they go to university so they gain some life experience before they decide what they want to do for life. It’s really not like that in North America… you basically MUST go to university right after high school, because heaven forbid you NEVER go to university. You can’t take time off because you will lose your momentum and then NEVER RETURN TO SCHOOL. Or. Or, you could take some time off, see what kind of person you are, THEN decide what you’d like to do for the rest of your life. It’s refreshing to see that there is another way. It just makes sense. So what if you graduate when you are 27 instead of 22? Whatever will you do with a university degree at 27… I feel like we have a while to settle into our lifelong career, if you decide to have only one career. But you will only have time to travel before you have responsibilities that come with being in one place, so why not. Seriously, why not travel? It’s not scary… okay it’s a little scary before you do it, but humans are pretty good at adapting. So that was clearly a late-night ramble, but I’m glad I came over here. So, SO glad. So glad I did the things I did, met the people I met and traveled with the people I traveled with. I don’t wish for more time here because I have nothing else to see, there is no unfinished business here… except I think I wish I had gone skydiving… well I can save that for a mid-life-crisis
