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New Year, New Blog
The American Northeast is going through one of the coldest winters in living memory; the streets of New York are freezing cold. And I just forgot to buy sunscreen for my trip.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I wasn’t planning on being here right now. The original plan—the original original plan—was to spend the year studying abroad in Argentina. I had hoped to explore the streets of Buenos Aires, polish my Spanish, use the knowledge about Latin America that had been drilled into my head after countless language and history classes, maybe meet a gaucho or two during weekend trips to the Pampas.
To make a long story short, I now have an Australian visa instead. In exactly two weeks, I will get on a very long flight to Melboune, and pray I’ll survive my 25-hour flight. Assuming everything goes well, there will be a few days of exhaustion and adrenaline—and then… well, I’ll be thousands of miles away from home without a support system of any kind. Whatsoever.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m looking forward to Melbourne—it’s a beautiful, incredible city that relatively few North Americans have the opportunity to even visit, and I’ll be living there for five months. But I know all too well that excitement will eventually wear off. I’ll get homesick. I’ll want to call home and be brought up short by the sixteen hour time difference. I’ll be tired while shopping for groceries and end up frustrated when I won’t remember how to make change.
I gave serious thought to just keeping those ups and downs, those joys and frustrations, those insights and disappointments in a paper journal and private. But I came to realize that part of my eventual loneliness will come from having my family and old friends so far away, and if I put it online, they won’t be so far away from me or my thoughts. So for the last few weeks, I’ve been working to get this ready—and today, the first day of the lunar (aka Chinese) New Year seemed like a great time to start.
Happy Year of the Monkey. And thanks for reading.