First Post!

Note: I have been in New Zealand for about a day at the time of writing this. Since I did not have the blog up during my day of travel or my first day here at Massey, I will be posting my experiences from those days in chronological order.

The first post will be a little about me. Who I am, what I am doing on such a ridiculous trip, and what you can expect from me.

I grew up as the only child in a quiet household. When I was younger I especially appreciated two things, learning and Star Wars. Now, I still like learning and Star Wars, but I also like, in no particular order: The Cosmos (not just the Carl Sagan documentary, but the actual cosmos), mountains, the ocean, backpacking, any decent scifi movies/shows/books, a good bit of fantasy, computer games, alpine lakes and meadows, snowboarding, parkour, physics, staying up late, sleeping in, and Jesus. One friend has described me as “poetic, in an odd, nerdy sort of way.”

So here I am in New Zealand. I am at Massey University in a city called Palmerston North, which is on the southern end of the north island. I am here for a lot of reasons, but there are perhaps two which stand out the most. First, I wanted to get away. I do not have anything that I need run away from, nor was there anywhere specific that I need to run to, but it is important to me that I must spend time far away from everything that I know. Only then can some parts of my identity truly grow. That reason is also, to some extent, why I chose to go to school out in Chicago rather than back in Seattle.

The other biggest reason that I am here in New Zealand is that I believe understanding our world is important. I have grown up in the United States and I see things from a US perspective. My perspective was greatly widened when I visited Guatemala for two weeks in high school and lived among the people, not as a tourist. Since that trip I have known that my prospective on the world was incomplete, and that I have learn about the world from somewhere outside the States. Now I am spending four months on the other side of the globe, and I am excited to see what I learn and how I grow.

Finally, what you are doing right now is reading my blog. This log of my journey is as much for my sake as it is for yours. I am ever thankful of the fact that I am blessed with so many people who care about me, and part of this blog is me giving back to you all of you. You want to hear what interesting stories have happened to me, and want to know what I am doing out there… here. This blog is also for me as well. Beyond being a way to organize my thoughts I am keeping the blog to have a record of my trip for myself. I could keep a journal you say, but then I remind you that I am not especially fond of writing by hand and I can barely read my own handwriting. In this blog I will be sharing my experiences and thoughts as I spend a semester here in New Zealand

So there you have it. You can probably expect some updates of my travel out here and the first day pretty soon seeing as they have already happened at the time of writing this.