Author: Shannon Grady
Hey gang! The last couple of days have been so filled with love, learning, and adventure. Today, however, we didn’t do very much. Here is my telling of our May 16th.
After the past couple of jam-packed days, today felt almost empty, as it was a transitional day for us with almost no real solidified plans. I’m pretty excited to tell you about our breakfast this morning, and I feel like that should be a pretty good indicator of just how eventful our day was. This morning was the first morning that we did not all eat together! That might sound strange, but we’ve spent most mornings waiting for each person to arrive in the kitchen before someone offers to start the karikia, and then we all eat our meal. But not today! No, this morning, we all came down stairs and made toast whenever we felt hungry or just grabbed a nanner (banana, for those of you that don’t know) for convenience on the way out. I’m telling you, it was wild.
We arrived in Raglan yesterday and were granted the afternoon today to explore town. For context: Raglan is a super small beachy type of town that exists on a singular road going in a small circle. It is impossible to get lost in, and is completely possible to explore it in its entirety within hours. Most of us became absolutely obsessed with this rinky dink town.
When given the opportunity to break off and explore, many of our first instincts was to do laundry. Unfortunately, there are only so many washing machines in Raglan, but don’t you fret! We were all able to wash at least a few articles of clothing and no longer felt like sweat-coated dirt monsters. Aside from laundry, we shopped around and explored the ring of surf and knick knack shops. Before dinner time, we all returned to our harbor side hostel with several Raglan themed shirts and jackets in hand.
Dinner was chicken lettuce wraps. They were scrumdidleyumptious. Shout out to Delaney for absolutely killing it in the kitchen on a nightly basis. Dinner preparations without that girl would be a hot mess.
After dinner, we were separated into our small groups to discuss the past couple of days, as they had been fairly impactful on us. We were tasked with reflecting on them so that we could convey our emotions through doodles and phrases. Words like connections, positive, and warm were shared in attempts to encapsulate what we felt. I’ve attached a photo of Aislinn’s interpretation because it illustrates a map of our amazing adventures thus far and I thought it was too good not to share.
To my parents: I am alive and I love you!
To my housemates (including Mellanie): I’ll be home soon 🙂
To everyone else: I can’t believe how fast our time is ticking down in this incredible country! We’re enjoying ourselves immensely, but are still missing you all so much! We’ll be back on June 1stwhether we want to be or not (except for the people who have deviating flights and travel plans, they certainly will not be back on June 1st)! Much love!
