Right now I’m in LA at my friend Addie’s house. She and her boyfriend, Pedro, picked me up from the airport and we went straight to Venice Beach.

We spent the day wandering around town (See my Los Angeles photos), eating at a place called The Bright Spot, photographing funny signs, and watching Jose Luis Sin Censura (it’s basically a Mexican version of Jerry Springer and Addie and Pedro got paid to to appear in an episode.)

Tonight Pedro’s going to teach me some Cuban veggie recipes and we’re going to take their giant dog for a walk.

Tomorrow I’m going to watch Addie’s mariachi band perform a show at the university. At some point, I’ll have to run to the post office to mail my paper tickets back to the travel agency (because I made some changes to my itinerary and they decided to issue me e-tickets instead).

I get on the plane tomorrow and I’ll be heading to New Zealand. I leave Oct 1st at 10:30pm, but because of the time change (It’s a 13 hr flight and NZ is 20 hrs ahead of California), I’ll be skipping a day and arriving in Auckland the morning of Oct 3rd. My first night, I’m staying with these people. From there, I’m just going to plan things as I go along.

It really still hasn’t sunk in that I’ll be gone for a year. I wonder when it will. Maybe when I set foot in the Auckland airport. Maybe during my first night sleeping on some random person’s couch. Maybe when I rent a car and start making my way south through all the amazing sights in New Zealand. Well, I’m sure it’ll hit me sometime…but at least the hardest part is over (vaccinations, visas, planning, goodbyes). As long as I focus on one country at a time and just enjoy each day ahead of me, I think everything will work out fine.

Posted on September 30th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Trip Preparations