Jonah's Gap Year Journal

Hello everyone! Well, I made it to India. I arrived on Sunday the 17th of December late at night. I took a taxi from the airport to Hotel Sadha Siva in the suburb of Nangallanur, in the southwestern part of Chennai. I realized quickly that I had caught some kind of cold right before leaving Bali, and I've spent the last week recovering in isolation. Originally, I had booked the small hotel in an effort to save money. The plan was to spend a week alone to look for a job online so that by the time I moved out I would have some extra spending money to explore the city. Surely, a week straight of job searching would yield some kind of result. I've learned that things rarely go as planned. Sick, culture shocked, and jobless, I was hit hard by reality last week. I'm such a social creature that the time alone was hard on my motivation, and I really only left the hotel room to gather food and water before sulking back in to my cave. When I couldn't be bothered to leave the ...

What an adventure Bali has been. Almost a month since my last post, I feel just as happy here as I have since the day I arrived, and even more at home. I leave for India on December 17. Until then, I will spend the weekend here at camp finishing all my various creative projects and then celebrating the end of a life changing volunteering experience with 4 days back on Gili T. Before I fly out, I'll come back to the organization for one night and say goodbye to what friends haven't left already. This is the time of year when the number of volunteers drops significantly, so most of the people I mentioned in my last post have already left. Elias, Etienne, Maya, and Yael remain. The main task I have to complete over this weekend at home is my handmade Catan board. For over 3 weeks I've been riding my scooter hours to buy materials, sawing and sanding wooden hexagons, cutting colored pencils in half, painting, collecting rocks on the beach, and designing cards on my computer. E...

Hello! I'm writing from a cozy bungalow by the pool at 10pm on a little island called Nusa Penida. Obviously there is a lot to catch up on. My experience since arriving to Bali in early November has been nothing but magical. My volunteer organization, North Bali Reef Conservation, is so structured yet open, local yet internationally rich that I feel I have everything I need here. I've extended my stay by two weeks and now I will be flying to India on December 15. The organization's English school, Yayasan Widya Sari, is truly one of the most wonderful places on earth. From the day after I arrived, I have been teaching two one hour long classes of 8-10 year old Balinese children, 4 days a week. My students are so purely happy to be learning English and their excitement makes it impossible not to walk into class smiling every day. Wednesdays are culture day, when me and the other volunteers put on our sarongs and join the kids in a local cultural activity in place of classes,...

I will try to pick up where I left off in New Zealand. After my 2 day long side quest in Taumarunui, I got on another bus (the correct one this time) and watched out the window as the magical North Island hills rolled by- for nearly 7 hours. Something I didn't expect is the physical toll that travel days can have on a person. Nevertheless, I was so excited to be in a familiar place again. Most of my first wave friends had left the hostel by this point, so I enjoyed sitting in the common room and meeting some new people. I even pulled out the board game that I bought in Auckland the week before and found some people interested in playing. If you've ever played Settlers of Catan before, I'm sure you know how intense the game can get. I still had no idea how I planned to fit the entire board game in my bag when the time came, but that was a problem for another day. I soaked up as much of Auckland as I could before the day I took an Uber to the airport. Remembering my mishap i...

New Zealand continued to teach me a lot of important lessons and offered me so many memorable experiences. Since meeting Niamh and Gareth, my Frienz friends only multiplied. Once the group grew to about 6, we made many excursions together. We went to see the Auckland war museum. I spent hours in this museum, marveling at the beautiful exhibits and learning about how New Zealand's indigenous Māori culture thrives to this day in modern New Zealand. My favorite exhibit in the museum was the Māori council meeting house. The building was moved into the museum and visitors were allowed to walk around inside and admire all of the intricate carvings on the wall. The museum was loud and busy, but upon stepping into this warmly lit room I was instantly overcome with a sense of peace. For a while, I was the only one standing deep in the wooden temple. The craftsmanship required to create such a beautiful place baffled me. The rest of the museum was amazing as well, with exhibits on the volc...

After a simultaneously chaotic and slow burn stay at my hotel in Quito, it was time to fly to California. I woke up at 8 in the morning on the 15th and took a taxi to the airport at 10. In an effort to limit redundancy I'll copy a section from my notebook here that explains how the day unfolded: "The flight info that Alison sent me had all the flight times in 12-hour time. When I wrote my itinerary, I converted all of them to 24-hour time, for clarity's sake. Ironically, I seem to have missed one important conversion. This was the time of departure for my flight from Quito to Houston. If I had looked ahead at the departure from Houston to SF, I would have noticed that it was for 5:50 rather than "17:50". I therfore could potentially have considered the possibility that my flight to Houston actually departed at 00:40, rather than 12:40, which is what I wrote. I arrived at the Quito airport, Mariscal Sucre, at 10:40 this morning. I went to check in when to my disma...

I just spent the last 4 days on the Galapagos Islands in a town called Puerto Ayora with my childhood best friend Mateo and his family. It was an unreal experience to see Mateo again after multiple years, but of course we realized the instant we saw each other that nothing had changed all too much. His family let me stay in their house and showed me around the island, and I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to finally fly out to see them. The days leading up to my arrival, however, were a little more chaotic. I spent two full days traveling from Costa Rica to the islands, which are a time zone west of the coast of Ecuador. Waking up in Tamarindo on the first full travel day was not an easy task, such that I missed my 5:30 am bus to San Jose. As it turns out, this may have been for the better because the hostel had not yet finished cleaning my laundry. After a few stressful hours of packing, waiting for my clothes, and figuring out how the heck I was going to get to the air...