Planning the Tour: Part Get It Over With

Ok so this is getting too long and nobody cares about this part anyway, so I'll try to wrap it up in this post and keep it brief.

The issue with China always revolved around when I would finish it. If I went to any school except Madison, WI for grad school, which begins early June, then I would have no problem staying in China for its full semester which ends in June. However seeing as how my number one grad school choice is currently Madison, I decided to bank on the chance that I'll be accepted. The extremely accomodating and courteous representative from International Teaching Advantage (the China program) finally called me and told me what he had said in email several weeks earlier, that he had found a potential spot for me at the University of Nanjing, that their semester ends in late June, and that he had a few favors stored away that he'd be willing to use on my behalf as long as I was completely committed to doing the program (at this point there had been no money deposit or anything except guilt prohibiting me from backing out). So after a final day of deliberation I told him to keep those favors intact and withdraw my application. I sincerely hope that I can do the program sometime after grad school is over, provided my interests have not changed, plus since China was more incidental rather than intentional I'll probably do more searching for TEFL programs in other countries too, though admittedly the idea of living in China for awhile sounds pretty sweet and I had myself pretty psyched up about it.

So: this coming Tuesday I depart for New Zealand. My return ticket is dated about 3.5 months from now. However as I have absolutely no followup plans it's entirely possible that I'll extend my stay for several more months. This depends on several factors: how much I love New Zealand; how much I miss home; whether or not I can comfortably do/visit all the activities/places I want in 3.5 months; whether or not I secure any other post-NZ travel plans; and whether or not I want to stay and work for awhile to regain some of the money I'll surely lose when I'm gone (if I simply came home in February I'd probably just try to get a job, but why work here when I can work there, right?) So this trip will largely be a lesson in improvisation, as far as what I do when I'm there as well as what I do when I leave.

That's enough "planning" talk for now. I'm sure I could go on much longer about the various ideas I've had for other travel plans I really want to do (working on a cruise ship is my latest flavor of the week idea), but I'm assuming anybody who bother to reads this doesn't do so to hear about what I wish I could do. My readers want DIRT. I'll give you dirt. Starting in roughly 84 hours when my flight leaves Chicago.