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Gifset someone made of my web series! Aaah, wayyy too cool!!

Meet The Writing Majors (x)

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Can we talk about how Anne Hathaway’s husband Adam Shulman looks a bit like William Shakespeare… who had a wife named Anne Hathaway?

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I do believe I smell adventure in 2015......

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Well folks, here it is--after 3 years and 22 countries, I officially have a BA in International Studies! #graduate #diploma #hooray!

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Have you seen my vision board? #proud #craft #visionboard #future #travel #wanderlust #vlog #quotes #inspiration here's the video about it! http://youtu.be/Xve49K-IXtQ

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VidCon 2014! :)

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21 in 21

I may have gone to bed at 8pm on my 21st birthday, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t party.

…I just happened to have been partying with a million children, around a bonfire, to traditional drumming, in a village in Ghana.

Ghana is everything that I am not: It is colorful. Extremely physical and lacking-personal-space-ish. Energetic. Open. And loud. SO loud. And my birthday was about as far away as imaginable from the classy champagne dinner party that my friends and I threw for my best friend on her 21st a few months ago.

And yet, I felt no sadness about being so far away from home. I /was/ at home. Not in the way that I was at home in South Africa, where everything was perfect for me, though. I was in a galaxy outside comfort zone, but I was absolutely /surrounded by/ love. It positively poured out of the people of the Torgome village. And that, in some unexplainable way, made it just…natural that I would be celebrating my birthday with them.

Ah, and I also received my “local name” that day—/Akosua Morkpokpo./ It means Sunday, for the day of my birth, and “hope” because, as the village elder told me, I am hope for the next century.

Well then….that was better than getting wasted any day.

-Stellynn

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21 Lessons Part 4

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21 Lessons Part 3

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-S

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Hi everyone!

As some of you know, I just celebrated my 21st birthday!

Wahoo! I can book hotel rooms in the US now! (that’s why 21 is important, right..?)

As it happened, I celebrated it my 21st foreign country, Ghana.

So, in celebration of my country count surpassing my age, I am going to post a series of photos and lessons from these 21 travel experiences. Some have to do with the place, some just with whatever my experience there was. Here are the first 5! Hope you enjoy!

-Stellynn

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The Fork Prongs Again

I'M SO BEHIND. I just sat down to write about my past week in Ghana (eeep!) and realized that I never wrote about South Africa! I mean...really? *checks sent folder to be sure that this inconceivable truth is, in fact, a reality. Sadly, it is.* Forgive the cliche, but WHERE HAS TIME GONE? Well, without any further ado... Cape Town When I think about it, I can list three places in the world I have ever been that made me think "I could stay here long-term to make a life, and it would be an /awesome/ life." One is Southern California, the place of my birth and childhood summers. Two is London, the land of all my favorite books, music, and TV. And three...is now Cape Town. You'll understand, this is a prestigious list for a city to find itself on. I didn't know what to expect from Cape Town, aside from all the terrifying statistics about violent crime that Semester at Sea fed us at pre-port (which, at this point in the voyage, we have all come to view as more offensive than informative. Sorry, SAS. But I speak for many of us). But something I definitely didn't expect--forgive yet another cliche, I'm a bit rusty--was to fall so seriously in love with Cape Town that the possible paths of future plans have now forked off to yet another avenue. I love Cape Town. Cape Town = Europe + Africa. And while this blend is far from complete, and the residue left behind by decades of apartheid is still palpable (especially in the townships), the city seems overall en route for the most incredible blend of two extremely cool cultures. The geography is unbeatable--Table Mountain as the backdrop to 270 degrees of stunning coastline. And the people. Oh the people... Welcoming... adventurous... artistic... so kind, so invested in one another... and with excellent taste in food and coffee. And even I, who face an interminable struggle to relate to people, found friends who I was distraught to leave after only hours of acquaintance. Cape Town, I most earnestly look forward to our next meeting. -S

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A Quote....

Love this quote in the daily Dean's Memo. Sums up a lot of what I've been mulling over throughout the semester. "To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there." Kofi Annan Ship pulling up to Ghana as we speak. Eek! -S

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"birthday week"

-Lizzie Bennet Diaries, episode 21

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We are the victims of The Misconception From Afar

This so beautifully sums up the heart of everything I have learned since beginning to travel. Thank you Casey Hudetz for sharing! "In all things, we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind. And it is in this gap (between the conceptual and the real) that aggression begins. No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws--need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers;that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other." -George Saunders,/"/The New Mecca" (This time I'm actually not just procrastinating writing a real entry--I'm slammed with school work, but I can't wait to share about Cape Town!) -S

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Just got to South Africa! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Waiting to be cleared by immigration. Meanwhile, here's Table Mountain. -S

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Specks of Glitter

You know that feeling of being small when you look at the ocean? Imagine having that ocean surrounding you on all sides. And the sensation of insignificance when you look at the stars in the sky? Try that in pure darkness, a thousand miles from the nearest city. Now combine the two. And that's where I'm sitting. In the center of such immensity, it is difficult to believe that I exist at all. And yet... I have never before felt so confident that I have a place in all this, some role to play, some glittery speck to leave behind, miniscule as I am. I'm so unprepared. And I love it. When I look at the stars, nothing seems unreachable anymore. That expensive grad school? Completely possible. A book with a readership? Just a matter of time. Changing education in Burma? What's stopping me? When I look at the stars, I become determined to see them up close. So anything on the ground is the easy part. -S