This is my first guest post. As you will recall, mum and I host wwoofers to help us around the garden. We are hosting a lovely young girl from Lucerne in Switzerland called Merle Link, who is leaving tomorrow for the Coromandel. Merle is planning to study to become a primary school teacher. She is an extremely talented singer who performs at weddings back home (check out her YouTube channel). She asked if she can perform at mine if I ever get married in the future and I said yes without any reservations. She is truly amazing. I've asked Merle to provide her perspective on travelling in New Zealand and her vision for the future. My name is Merle (yes it is hard to say that in English) I’m 19 years old and I’m from Switzerland. I’ve just finished school this summer and have a break of six months before I have to do a course for the university I want to go to. My mom travelled to New Zealand when she was about my age and she’s still talking about it so much she always showed me the pictures when I was younger and I fell in love with them so I decided to go see that beautiful place myself. I booked my flight around April this year and then started to plan how I want to travel and where this journey should lead me to. My brother travelled to New Zealand two years ago and he did WWOOF-ing he told me that he met some really nice people and that he learned a lot in that time. So I just found myself searching the page and immediately liking the idea of living with someone, helping them work and have a different perspective than just as a normal tourist. Because I knew that I would land in Auckland I searched for places near the city there were a few different ones and I read through their profiles and I liked the one from Anita’s garden immediately. I liked it a lot that there were many informations about them and the garden so I asked them if I could work and live with them for a week and the messages were really nice and I felt even more excited to go there than before. I’ve helped them to plant seedlings and I helped Anita with her blog. I feel like my English really improved just from talking to them a lot and they were so nice. Now that my stay here is coming to an end I feel sad but I feel also excited for the next three months of my journey. In the first month I’ll be travelling around on the north island my next stop is Coromandel and after that I’ll go to Tauranga and then the next almost two months I’ll travel around on the south island and I’m really looking forward to see Milford Sound. I’ll leave New Zealand on the 21 of December and I know even now that I’ll miss it really bad. Now that I’ve told you something about my journey I’m going to tell you something about my person. As I wrote I am 19 years old and for some people that might be really young to travel alone but I feel confident and glad that I am able to do that. When you think back to the time when you were 19 do you remember how it felt to realize that you’re an adult? That life is getting serious and you have to make decisions that will be important for your career or just have a huge influence in who you will be as a person? So yes I am young and I feel like that I’ve made the decision to travel alone for three month in a place that is so far away from my home will strengthen my personality and yes it kind of scares me but at the same time I am so full of happiness that I can do that on my own. When I get back home I’ll have to make a course to go to university and it takes six month until I’m done with that course. After the course university will start in September and then three years later I will be a primary teacher I’ll teach my own classes and I’ll have a huge responsibility. If I don’t take a year off I would never be able to do a journey like that again. And even if it wouldn’t have such a great influence in my personality. Hopefully this journey will make me more confident and open to foreign things I think that should be the purpose of a journey like that, it should change something in who you are and maybe change your way to look at things. To travel is really expensive but in Switzerland the salaries are really high so I’ve earned a lot of money in a short time. As a singer I had the opportunity to sing on weddings and I think it is one of the best ways to earn money with something you love doing. Because there were only three weddings this year I had to find something else to earn some money with and there was a possibility that my school offered that you could clean the schoolhouse one week in the vacations and that’s the way I got all the money together all by myself and I’m really proud to say that because I think not many people at my age are able to say that. I took a few pictures from the garden because photography is another thing that I really like doing and here are some of them: And here’s a picture from me if you’re interested in what I look like: And last but not least pictures of Lucerne where I’m living:
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