People keep asking me if I’m excited about going to New Zealand, and I keep saying “Yes! It doesn’t quite feel real yet though.” It is a very strange feeling. I don’t have tickets yet because when I called the discount ticket place (the day after I found I’d been accepted) they told me, only halfway laughing at me, that tickets wouldn’t be available until February. I have a vague idea of when I’m going to go, i.e., this summer, but I haven’t quite decided whether to quit my job in late June or late July. I am in touch with a social work agency down there but they can’t really tell me what kind of work they’ll be able to find for me until a month or so before I go. I have a vague idea that I’d like to travel around a little before I settle in a city but I don’t yet know what that will look like either. People want to come visit me but I can’t give them any helpful information about when would even be a good time. “It’s too far away for me to know yet,” I keep saying.
I think a lot about packing: I’d like to be able to go with just one bag but then I realize that that one bag will have to comprise both interview clothes hiking clothes and hostel clothes, and I wonder just how big a bag I’m going to have to bring. I think a lot about finding a job: social work is variable agency to agency, state to state, population to population, so I can only imagine what it’s going to be like in a new country. I am a little afraid I won’t be able to find work once I get there, and I am a little afraid that when I come home in 2007 I won’t be able to find a job here. I think a lot about where I’m going to live when I get there: I have had very good housing karma (with one not-as-good-but-still-doable exception) since I went away to college and I am counting on it, maybe too much, to come through for me again. I think a lot about cultural differences: am I going to turn into an Ugly American? Will I fit in at all or will I have to spend a lot of time assuring people that I didn’t vote for Bush either time? Do they have the pants/trousers dichotomy like in England and do I have to be careful not to mention fanny packs? I think a lot about meeting people and about being alone: I’m pretty good at both, I think, but what if I don’t make any friends? Will I drive myself crazy? What if I make some really good friends and then I have to leave them and feel sad?
I’m here in Seattle for at least another six months, probably more like seven, all told, and I’m already wondering what it’s going to be like to leave. I’m trying to save as much money as I can before I go, obviously, but already that’s causing some heartache because there are a lot of people I want to visit this year and I can already tell that it’s going to be very difficult to make those choices. I keep reminding myself that a $350 plane ticket is like $500NZ and probably I will want that $500NZ very much when I’m down there trying to get a job, living out of my one bag. But then I remind myself that it’s going to be a wasteland of a seven months if I don’t spend time with the people I love and that in seven months I’ll have wanted to go places and do things and have fun. I know I can’t just hole up and fixate on the future for the entire time before I go but doing my normal things doesn’t feel quite right either.
It doesn’t feel real yet, not at all. I talk about it sometimes and tell people that no, I’m not expecting to hook up with a Kiwi boy when I get there, and I do a lot of research and read everything I can get a hold of, but it’s not enough. I have no idea what to expect, and I have no idea how to get an idea. I have been wanting to live abroad for so long but I haven’t ever really felt like it could really happen, I guess, and so I am a little unprepared. I know things are going to come together, I know as I make plans and figure things out that I’ll have answers to practical questions that start with “when” and “where” and “what.” I’ll be able to tell people that I’ll be living here and working at this and doing that and people will smile and nod and I will smile and nod back, secure in the knowledge that I have some clue of what’s going on in my life.
If nothing else this trip is going to be an exercise in spontaneity and giving up control and being flexible. I hope I get better over the next seven months over all three of those things, because I am pretty terrible at them now.