Today is the last day of January and despite my Trying To buy only the necessities, I am on my way to buy a wee candle and press it into a wee dessert and celebrate one whole month of my traveling a way I have never before travelled. Because this sort of celebration is,

well,

necessary.

Things I didn’t expect to love but do:

I love the way people look at me when I get to town, when I’m wearing my pack in the supermarket, smelling like I haven’t showered in the exact amount of days which have passed since I showered. I love that people ask me about what I’m doing because it seems clear to others that I am doing something.

And offering a unique perspective.

I love that I have an excuse to not wash my face some nights: the stream is far too far from the hut and also it runs far too cold for the evening time and I simply cannot be bothered and I am not feeling guilty about it!

I love my newfound reluctance to walk around a town with my phone up to my nose, open to my maps app. Christchurch is the second largest city in New Zealand, Sue and Vaughn boasted to me from the front seats of their car, and so obviously I, accustomed to towns with one street lined with five to six shops, each offering only their specific category of goods, pilfered a paper map from the hostel’s reception area on my way out to find groceries. A lifetime local offered to direct hopelessly lost me, just a measly two blocks from my starting point; he must have chuckled as he watched me turn the map this way and that, unable to find any street names in this town! As we arrived to the closest supermarket, he warned me of its high prices and mentioned that if I walked a bit further on, I could find the Pak ‘n’ Save.

WALK?

MORE?

I responded that I was hungry enough to pay.

After I walked around for twenty-ish minutes, mulling over mark-ups,

(Dare I declare it highway robbery)

I decided I was not as hungry as I thought…

(Beware the “city market” or “metro grocer” or anything branded as something smaller and more bespoke than the real thing.)

The can of beans that was meant to be dinner cost a whopping $5.40 and I just could not stomach it. I also, though, find it terribly suspicious to leave a grocery empty-handed. So, I bought one singular carrot and the cheapest container of hummus I could find and opted to splurge on a $15 takeaway dinner (oh, the irony) and to save my shopping trip for the following day.

Budgeting on this trip has been one of its most obvious challenges, it is forcing me to face my values. This city’s sticky fingers have me all tangled up in coffee shops and yoga studios and maybe even the cinema tomorrow?!?

And I love it!?

For now!

I bought not one but TWO train tickets today! And yesterday I booked an airbnb above a café in Bondi Beach because for as long as I can remember, I have walked past windows above restaurants and wondered what it might be like to live up there so,

But $5.40 for that can of beans?!?!?!?!

You’ve gone bloody mad!

xx

Until You Know Better

Eat your crusts

Great Artists Steal

The bakery/café (@grizzlybakedgoods) at which I committed the impulse buy of the morning (a chili garlic bagel, worth all $2.50) sells a tote bag that I want and cannot afford. It says, plainly, “Eat Your Crusts.” So, until I can afford to swing such a brilliant accessory over my shoulder, the command will live here.

I have a dear friend who is doing world-changing work (work far more interesting than what I could communicate here, in this limited space); her research involves the question, “how do you imagine your future looks different to your right-now?”

“In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the same size it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see. It is no trick to go round the world these days, you can pay a lot of money and fly round it nonstop in less than 48 hours, but to know it and smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way. Not flying, not floating. You have to stay on the ground and swallow the bugs as you go. Then the world is immense.” Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels