Shameless vanity

To further spruce this already visually appealing blog, I've added a travel map to the bottom of this blog. You can see where I've already been and have lived. I've managed to mark all the places I've touched ground on, save for a few preliminary markers (the "places I want to visit" ones) whose status will change to "have visited" after actually visiting them. A dotted trail leading to the South Pacific will be added very soon. Much happiness, thank God.

This is the first time I've used this online map so I'm giving it a chance. It may look cool now but time will test its usefulness. I wish it'd show alt text on mouse-overs. ('Course, with Internet Explorer being a pain in the confounded posterior, the map causes my layout to go screwy for IE users. That means the map is probably at the bottom of this page instead of at the right where it's supposed to be. That is why you use Firefox, people. /shakes a stern finger.) Although IE 7.0 came out, and improved enough to display my page properly, I still favour FireFox. Cue sagely nod.

Untitled.

I feel personally obliged to record the preparations, events and such of my journey toward Aotearoa. At the inception of this blog, I’m currently residing in Japan under the sponsorship of my military father. The status of my existence is a working student, seriously contemplating a major turn in my life. Such a decision rests considerably on this tentative journey in discernment of whether or not I am meant to head in this direction I have in mind. With the help of therapeutic blogging, I hope to leave a literary mark as a memory of the pursuit to travel an ocean's distance away from my family to a country I only know of from literature, music, images and a friendly local’s point of view.

From the essence of a young Catholic woman of one score and four months, with the verve of a nurturing cosmopolitan, here are my humbly stated personal thoughts and account of events.