Reflections After Coming Home

Well, this has been quite the adventure! Australia has been like a dream to me personally, and now that I'm back to "reality", it's just nice to reflect on the whole experience. Now that I am home, I notice a lot of differences between Australia and the US. The Aussies were very hospitable to us and so polite. Once we arrived in Los Angeles though, it was like coming back to a "rude America", where a lot of people are pushy and impatient. It made me wonder why Americans are always in a rush. Then I remembered that in Australia we learned that the Aussies work to live, not live to work. Think about that for a moment. It made me appreciate life a lot more, and to take the time to notice beauty in every small thing. With all the sights we witnessed, of course it was amazing to us, because everything was in a new territory, but to people who see it everyday, it's just something familiar. For example, take a kangaroo. To all of us it was like, wow!, that's a wild kangaroo that we just saw. But for the Australians, kangaroos are like deer here in Wisconsin, an everyday, ordinary thing.
I hope you all get a chance to travel outside of the US someday. It doesn't even have to be Australia, just anywhere, any chance you get. I took the chance going to another country for the first time in my life, and it turned out to be absolutely breathtaking. I hope you all enjoyed the pictures and our stories.
Peace be with you and your journeys.
Holly