Guess who is now living in Paris?
Hey guys!
Just a quick note that I am now in Paris…and not just for vacation either! Yep, luck blessed me again, and I landed a very well paying job in one of the most beautiful cities in the world! I’ve been so busy that I didn’t even start to feel excitement until I was actually looking at the fantastic French countryside from the bird’s eye view of my plane window…and now I can’t help but want to smile constantly.
Anyway, the next few weeks should be interesting. Sorting out my life and an apartment and such. I have to say, my packing skills have gone downhill because this time I had four suitcases…instead of one ![]()
this definitely feels like an exciting new step in my life, as cliche as that may sound! I’ve only been in the country for an hour and I already have three business related emails!
Anyway, this is enough of an update considering I am writing this from an itouch screen!
Much love to all the corners of the world where you all happen to be
-K
Disillusioned.
A new post on my Naples Daily News blog. Feel free to email me if it strikes a chord with you; good or bad: kim.e.reuter@gmail.com
Cheers.
Ahhh C’est la Vie!
Bonjour mes amis!
Hopefully all is well with each and every one of you. Man, life has just been…crazy, to say the least! While I do have other articles I’ve written (and will post shortly) about the reverse culture shock I felt at coming back to American, I thought it would be nice to write one of my usual updates on what has been going on in my life during the past month:
1) Although I’m back “home” in Florida, I am still traveling. I am still sleeping on a pull out couch and living out of a suitcase (although my dad will agree that most of my clothes are all over my room and not actually in any sort of packed state…but I digress).
2) I am moving to Paris in just a few days. PARIS! More updates on that later!
3) My scholarship applications are going. They are due in just under two weeks, and I can’t wait. I have been working on them for just over six months, and I am ready to spell check one last time and hope that the scholarship committees can feel my passion for life in 1000 words or less. Keep your fingers crossed, folks! I’m going to need all of the luck I can get
4) The Ladybug Project, which is the non-profit I have set up to benefit Equatorial Guinea and Madagascar, is doing great! I’ve got a fantastic board of directors now and I’ve submitted a HUGE stack of IRS paperwork, and now…we can begin to kick major fund raising butt!
5) I am practicing my French in my head all the time. Whenever I am going somewhere new, I think about how I would say it in French…usually I think it sounds awful, but I’m getting there.
So…that’s really about it folks. I do have a few take home messsages for all of you…if you like me enough to listen to the crap that I write here:
1) If you’ve been waiting to accomplish one of your dreams…don’t wait any longer. Do it. It’s so scary, but you will be so proud of yourself when you are successful. The photography exhibit I did for The Ladybug Project was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life. Harder than living in Africa. Why? Because it involved putting myself out into the unknown artistically and mentally; was it scary? Yes. I wass sweating so much, I am just glad I was wearing a dark colored cardigan. I kept wanting to hold someone’s hand or run out of the room, but I didn’t. And now I can say I had a photography exhibition of my very own work. That’s an amazing feeling.
2) When I admired people for doing ssomething cool like learning a new skill or language, I used to watch them and think that I wasn’t ever going to be able to come close to being that cool. Well, I woke up and smelled the cafe au lait and now I know that I can be! I learned a new languague. At 22. I moved to a foreign city, where I couldn’t talk to anyone. Twice. When people told me I was too young to succeed, I did it anyway. Motto? You can too!
3) Aging. I have watched myself age in the past nine months. Many more gray hairs and the first semi-permanent wrinkles. I turn 23 in less than a month. I’m not have a mid-twenties crisis, I guess I’m just fascinated by the fact that I can take a bird’s eye view of my life and see how I am becoming an adult. I know the word adult is such a subjective thing, and I finally feel that I am molding myself into that definition. In the words of a very good friend, “(I) filled out freaking IRS forms.” Sadly, I enjoyed it too.
If that’s not adult, I don’t know what is.
Hello? Is anyone out there?
Just curious. Does anyone read this in the blogosphere?
You know that feel-good movie called “Julie and Julia”? Julie…I think…starts blogging and wonders whether there is anyone who is even reading what she writes.
Tonight, I sit here and wonder the same thing.
Is there anyone out there? Who are you? Email me: kim.e.reuter@gmail.com
Update your playlist…Kim style!
Hey ya’ll!
So I periodically post the music that I love and that I think you all should be listening to! Well…it’s time for another list! This one is heavily inspired by the music I heard in Madagasscar, which was a lot of French music with some traditional malagay songs and some world cup stuff on top. Here are the more European and World Cup songs! Enjoy!
1) Amelie song remix: LOVE.
2) Akon, “Oh Africa”: Nice music video, takes me right back to dancing in clubs at 4am in the morning with my malagasy friends.
3) Shakira, “Waka Waka”: Don’t really like the Disney-esque Africa…but song is still decent.
4) Joe Dassin, “Salut less amoreux”: this is a great song!
5) Kelly Rowland ft. David Guetta, “When love takes over”
6) Edward Maya, “Stereo love”: my work out anthem.
On a completely unrelated note, my sister’s boyfriend introduced me to the song “jerusalem” by matisyahu. I know, I know: I’m five years behind on knowing who this guy is. Whatever, it’s good stuff. Check it out!
I’m in Los Angeles and I want to see YOU!
Hello Lovelies!
Yep, I’m back. It’s your favorite blogger checkin’ to tell you that I am in the great city of Los Angeles at this very moment, and I want to meet YOU. In fact, I want YOU and all your friends and family to come out on Saturday night for a free photography exhibit where I will be showing my original photography from my trip to Africa.
Not only will you be able to sip on free drinks and chill out to live music, but you’ll also be able to pick my brain on what it was like to work in Equatorial Guinea and Madagascar and we can trade travel stories and jokes.
The event will be held at the Gus Harper Art Studio, at 11306 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90066 from 6pm to 10pm. You can email me at kim.e.reuter@gmail.com if you have any questions!
The awesome part? The entire event is a huge awarenesss push for my non-profit project that I’ve started to benefit the areas I visited, called The Ladybug Project (which you can visit at www.theladybugproject.com).
SO. I really hope to see you guys there! If you can’t be there, tell people you know in the area that they should come. I want at least one reader to be present!
As always, I’ve been super busy…but I have five articles just waiting for a final read-over before they get put out onto the great worldwide web…so standby for that!
With love,
Kim AKA The Backpacking Chica
Jack Johnson Inspired Post…About Africa.
Everything in quotations are lyrics from Jack Johnson songs. I do not own these lyrics, nor the songs, nor am I affiliated with Jack Johnson. I’m just a broke conservation biologist who was sitting around one night listening to his awesome music and started to make his music describe how I’m feeling.
Before I got to Africa, I had “dreams (that were) made out of real things”. Dreams that no one else could relate to. I was a “prisoner of (my) own past” and I “didn’t even know where to begin. (I) looked both ways but was so afraid.”
Africa. “There (were) no combination of words that I could put on the back of a postcard” to describe the sheer beauty and radiance of everything I saw and touched.
But, “it was not always easy. Life can be deceiving.” Every memory is burned into my brain, “and all of these moments just might find their way into my dreams tonight, but I’ll know that they’ll be gone when the morning light sings.” It’s a constant fight to “put the moment on hold.” To have just one more “night with the sunset” and one more evening with “just enough light to lay underneath the stars.” Every day is a mental storm, and when “the winds calm down, and nothing ever feels the same.”
It’s amazing how travel can make you realize how “the whole world fits inside your arms.” It made me “put down all my ammunition”; mental stereotypes that have no place or time in this entirely new environment. I got used to hearing the rhythmic sounds of foreign greetings; “bonita, que tal?” and “Belle, je ne compra pas Francais”. In the words of Jack Johnson, it just means that “you have to speak…some other way.”
I’m leaving Africa. I know I’ll be back, but while I’m gone, “I’ll believe in memories. They look so pretty when I sleep.” There just isn’t “enough time…no song I could sing, and there is no combination of words I could use” to describe how much Africa has changed me. “I heard this old story before where people keep a book of metaphors”; guess I just have to use that to describe everything I’ve been through. The only way to clearly remember my time here is to, “turn the page and read the story again, and again, and again.”
If my time in Africa has taught me anything, it has been that “we’re just moments. We’re clever but we’re clueless. We’re just human. Amusing and refusing.” And it sure has shown me over, and over again that “where is this all leading, (I’ll) never know.”
I’ve seen how unjust this world is. “Lord knows that this world is cruel, but I ain’t the lord, I’m just a fool.” I guess I could have “closed my heart and not care”, but “we’re all burning under the same sun” and even if “we could close our eyes (it would) still (be) there.”
We could say the wealth imbalance and the ridiculous political situations, Western monopolization, hunger, poverty, human rights violations, and environmental injustices are just “us against them. We could try (that), but nobody wins.” “In the true sense of the word: are we using what we’ve learned? In the true sense of the word: are we losing what we are?” I guess in America, the problems of the third world are simply “out of sight, out of mind.”
For me, the African sorrows and “tears are like mine.” I’ve given Africa my soul, but I’d “give more if I could.” I’m trying to help the situation with every ounce of my being, but some people say that “you can’t stop nothing, if you’ve got no control.”
“Maybe you’ve been through this before, but it’s my first time, so please ignore the next few lines because they’re directed at you.”
Going back to America, I’m afraid of the rat race; how we are “always…competing.” Even when, “everything we need is enough,” it’s still a never-ending race for more stuff, more kitsch, more shit. It’s enough to make me think, “how many train wrecks do we need see before we lose touch?” I think over and over again that “what is important to you is not important to me.”
My mind cannot rest when I lie down in bed at night. I just tell myself, “please close your eyes, woman, please get some sleep.” My mind keeps telling me that “if (it) knew all the answers (it) would not hold them from (me).” It’s enough to make me want to “close the curtains and pretend there’s no world outside.”
“Will it ever stop? How will this all play out?” Hopefully my “mind be will be free to go to sleep” when I’ve jumped into my dad’s big, German arms and kissed my two sisters on the cheek again. Maybe that will heal my soul. “I’ve had enough mystery”; I don’t like being unclear about my own thoughts.
I’m sad to leave Africa. “It’s going to sting when I leave this town. All the people in the street I’m never going to meet”, all of the wonderful stories I haven’t heard yet, and interesting animals I haven’t admired yet. I know that when I stuff my oversized bags into my rickety, yellow taxi, I’ll “feel so far away” even though “I’ll still (be) in town.”
Madagascar was “the experience that’s just begun”, South Africa was the “one that no one saw,” and Equatorial Guinea was “the one that left (me) wanting more.”
“You might (have) noticed some hesitation” in my past posts to describe the complete experience I’ve evolved and survived through, but “too much silence can be misleading.” I tried to write about it all, but “words are all the same” and although “words…help ease the mind,” there are some thoughts that should just be kept private…at least for the time being.
So in just four days, I return home. It will be fantastic to just “see what there is to see”, “take a walk around”, “pretend it’s the weekend”, and know that “love is the answer…at least for the questions in my heart.”
Reviews: How my equipment faired in Africa.
Well, the time has come, my friends, for me to lay judgment down upon my well-traveled equipment. By equipment, I of course mean the stuff that I bought specifically for this trip. Yes, the trip isn’t over yet, but it’s been nine months and it’s most certainly been long enough for me to say what worked, and what didn’t.
Because I’ve used such a variety of items during my trip, I’ve written separate articles for each one, and made a complete list of them here. Feel free to email me with specific questions (kim.e.reuter@gmail.com) – I’m always happy to help a fellow traveler out!
Electrical Equipment:
Canon E05 Rebel SLR,
Acer Netbook,
Camping Equipment:
Eagle Creek 45L Truist backpack. (coming soon!)
More reviews to come as I get the time!