Big news:
Yesterday, in one of the best holiday presents I've ever received, I got an email from AmeriCorps NCCC accepting me into the Perry Point campus of the Corps for this spring. Beginning February 8th, I have the amazing privilege of spending the next 10 months travelling the nation (mostly the east coast and down to the Gulf, since my campus is based in Maryland) on a team of between 8 and 12 corps members (all ages 18-24) doing service projects in this beyond phenomenal government program. We get uniforms, do 5 am fitness training during the first month, and get stuff done across America. I'm beyond thrilled.
Hopefully, I'll maintain some vague semblance of consistency in sharing those adventures with you, as they promise to be spectacularly amazing. I applied back in March and now it's only five more weeks until I begin to serve. In AMERICORPS!!!
Updates on adventures:
Apart from hoping to hear from AmeriCorps (they sent out the first round of acceptances, chosen by random selection, about five weeks ago), I've had many other exciting things happen in the past two months.
-The week after I returned from Tasmania comprised my final week of classes at Melbourne Uni. I learned fun facts in all my classes and quite enjoyed a math-free semester in which I studied entirely new and different subjects.
-After my usual Monday through Wednesday class schedule, I headed to Canberra for a five-day weekend with Kristin (a fellow Arcadian). We celebrated Halloween in style with upscale desserts and an excellent UK film ('Five Minutes of Heaven') at an International Film Festival being held in Canberra that weekend. We caught up with a camp friend I hadn't seen in three years and spent endless hours walking through suburbia, since most of Canberra is sprawling tree-lined suburbs connecting the weekend markets to the Parliament Building to the Royal Mint.
On our walks, we got to see many of the foreign embassy buildings for Australia. New Zealand and England had side-by-side modest office-building-structure embassies down the busy road from Parliament. The US embassy, on the other hand, was a huge gated mansion complex atop a hill overlooking the Parliament building from a distance and towering over the nearby Indian and Israeli embassies. Quite the contrast.
-When I returned from Canberra, it was off to the races. Literally. Lara, Jodi, and I donned summery dresses and fasteners - fancy decorated floral arrangements to be worn perched on a lady's head - and headed to the Melbourne Cup, the biggest horse race in Australia. Cup Day is taken more seriously as a holiday than the founding of Melbourne. Everyone stops work to watch the big race, if not already off for the day socializing with friends at one of the many Cup Day parties in each neighborhood. We spent most of the day watching people, but even saw the big race itself after edging up front so we could see over the masses of people around the course. Lots of fun.
-After Melbourne Cup, it was back to work. In the nine days that followed the Cup, I had six volunteer days with CVA (leave UC around 7 am, return about 4 pm), four final essays to hand in (only one of which I had already started to any significant degree (and, fortunately, finished)), and final arrangements and packing to complete for my 11-day trip to New Zealand. It did, of course, all get done. I had a wonderful time volunteering with my now-familiar CVA friends, learned many new things as I wrote essays on possible causes of the plague of 1348 and whether Australia should adopt a Bill of Rights (it currently has no written guarantee of free speech, adopting more of a British, of-course-it's-implied approach), and finished packing late Wednesday night before my Thursday morning flight.
-I then spent 11 days in New Zealand. By this point, I had finished all my course work at Melbourne so considered myself (un)officially graduated.
-Two days after I returned from New Zealand, on a Tuesday, my mother arrived. She'd never been to Australia and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to check it out. We had a wonderful time together, travelling around and seeing many sights. We spent our first few days touring through Melbourne favorites, staying in the city until my fellow Arcadians flew back to the US on Saturday. We went out for a final dessert at Brunetti's, saw Jersey Boys at Her Majesty's Theatre, and took the tram down to Saint Kilda to see the sunset and a plethora of penguins.
That Saturday morning, we flew to Queenstown, New Zealand. I went bungy jumping at the Kawarau Bridge, the site of the first ever commercial bungy jump. (There's a reason Queenstown is considered the adventure capital of the southern hemisphere, or even the world.) Jumping off a 43-metre bridge helped convince me that my past fear of heights has dissipated significantly with age. We also went on a flightseeing tour of Milford Sound. This consisted of flying in a tiny plane (8 or 9 passengers) over snow-capped mountains to the Sound, taking a cruise through the Sound itself in which we spotted seals, waterfalls, and even a penguin, and returning via plane over pristine alpine lakes and craggy peaks.
Three days later, it was up to the reef for us. We had a fabulous day out on the Great Barrier Reef before heading into the rainforest via scenic railway to wander through the picturesque town of Kuranda. We returned by SkyRail, riding in one of a series of hanging glass globes which cruised just over the rainforest canopy.
Our final stop before returning to the States was in Sydney, where we spent my 23rd birthday. It's always fun to enter a prime of your life (us math types take primes quite seriously (and literally), of course) and 23 has been no exception thus far. I started out this new year of aging with a day at the zoo (both the seal show and the giraffes had a backdrop of Sydney Harbour and the distant Opera House and Harbour Bridge), a fun pre-theatre dinner then a viewing of Wicked (which I still absolutely love, having now seen it in both Melbourne and Sydney), and finally dessert at the Lindt chocolate restaurant in Darling Harbour, where we split a pair of cakes. A birthday that amazing still seems rather surreal.
-After nearly five months away, I finally made it back to the States on December 6th. It took a bit of work, since strange flight adjustment policies caused us to fly from Sydney to Melbourne then back to Sydney for our flight to Honolulu, that being easier than cancelling the Melbourne-to-Sydney leg of our return journey which we had booked months before. I spent the next 10 days in Hawaii, catching up with my uncle, aunt, and cousins. Highlights included running a 1 hour, 2 minute 10 K in the Honolulu Marathon Race Day Walk (clearly, I had chosen not to walk, in spite of the name) and cooking delicious recipes out of my new Williams-Sonoma recipe book.
The Honolulu Marathon, on a side note, is ridiculously huge. Lake Placid had 2,000 people running, this had 32,000. There were fireworks as the first runners crossed the starting line and runners were STILL crossing more than 15 minutes after the officially start when they began the walk. It was crazy. It was also fun, though, since this meant there were always tons of people on all sides as I ran. This led to some serious weaving and people-dodging as I set off from the start, but also gave lots to see as the crowds thinned to a teeming mass by a mile or so in.
-On the 17th, I returned to the mainland, making it home the following morning just in time for pre-meet lunch with dad for my first swim meet of the season. Northampton was taking on Longmeadow and the boys had a great meet, winning close races with good swims across the board. They're an excellent group and I've already loved the coaching time I've had. I look forward to more in two weeks.
-In two weeks? Yes, because I leave for Argentina in two days. Yes, I did JUST get back to winter here in the northern hemisphere. This, however, is for my phenomenal Outward Bound trip in Patagonia. We'll be there for 14 days (we being myself and the other approximately 10 members of my group whom I have yet to meet outside of Facebook, but who all seem quite wonderful already) and we'll spend the first week engaged in service projects with members of the local community then the second backpacking through the mountains of Patagonia. It will be amazing. I'll spend more on this trip than I make in an entire summer at camp, but I'd rather live to the fullest now and have these experiences to apply later when I do get a job and settle into the real world. And before that, when I hike the Appalachian Trail.
If you've made it this far, I'm quite impressed. If you've skipped to this point, that's completely understandable given the length of the above. Next time, perhaps there will be more pictures. I hope all is wonderful on your end!
