How (Not) To Decide Where to Live
Plus, lots and lots of cooking!
Hi from Te Anau! We’re back on the South Island for the first time since June after a very early morning flight from Auckland. This was our first flight within the country, and the descent into the Southern Alps was striking.
We’ve spent the past couple weeks in a very relaxing WWOOFing setup. We’re staying with a retired educator and musician, and our main tasks are to cook meals and do some light work in the garden. We originally chose this site for the flexibility and location to sell our car, but we lucked out and sold it early in Tauranga! The slower pace of travel has been good to us. We’ve had time to read, hike the city’s really neat volcanic cones, catch up with friends, and take long walks/runs in the nearby reserve. Plus, I’ve finally gotten to achieve one of my big goals for the recess year – gaining kitchen experience!
While I’ve occasionally cooked for our previous hosts, my unfamiliarity with the kitchen or an induction stovetop has made some meals turn out just okay. For whatever reason, this host’s kitchen seems to have a little magic in it. Our host also shops in a way that matches my style of cooking – keep major staples around, stock up on a variety of vegetables, work with what you have, and use recipes more as inspiration than directive. It’s been really fun playing personal chef for a few weeks, and the slower pace has allowed me to put a lot of time and love into each meal. Here are a few recipes I’ve used, modified, and really enjoyed these past few weeks:
Greek Baked Eggplant with Tomato and Feta: Eggplant is one of my favorite vegetables, but it can be hard to cook big pieces all the way through in the pan without using a lot of oil, and small pieces sometimes get lost in a dish. Roasting is my preferred method, even if you throw it back in the pan after! I also roasted a few red bell peppers, tossed some crunchy chickpeas in a Moroccan spice mix for protein, and served it over barley. I added some “weeds” from the garden – fresh mint and lemon balm – for garnish!
Crispy Pan-Seared Mushroom Shawarma: I love mushrooms, but white mushrooms can be dry and bland if they aren’t seasoned well, and I often don’t want to shell out for other varieties. This recipe makes them chewy and meaty in the best way. I made my own yogurt-feta-lemon sauce, as mayonnaise has freaked me out ever since an unfortunate childhood mix-up with butter. I didn’t have pita so I served it with roti!
Masala Roast Carrots with Coconut Red Lentils: I used to cook curries and pasta dishes as a way of cramming all my leftover vegetables into one meal. Practical, but sometimes a barrier to flavor. Quite literally lost in the sauce! I like how this recipe roasts the vegetables separately, and the flavor of the curry was so rich! I added some roasted pumpkin as well!
Chickpeas and Swiss Chard with Yogurt: One of the few things currently blooming in the garden is swiss chard, known in New Zealand as silverbeet! I added the chard stems into the base, and threw in some pumpkin in with the carrots, as well as some leftover barley. I also improvised my own yogurt sauce with paprika, herbs, lemon, and sesame oil, which was a little weird in the taste test, but ended up working well on top of the dish.
Cheesy Leeks: Macaroni and cheese has been my favorite food since childhood, but I rarely eat it given that most restaurant versions disappoint, and I haven’t found a recipe I make well. I discovered recently that half of the reason for my long-time favorite meal is just that I love a good roux. Anything involving flour intimidates me, but after making this leek’n’cheese recipe twice (once as written, and once with a combination of leeks, fresh celery, and chard from the garden), I’ve trained myself in the simple but important skill.
I’m forever expanding my list of tried-and-true group dinner recipes so please let me know if you have any favorites!
And what better way to balance cooking food than growing more of it? While we’ve helped with gardening tasks for several hosts, it is now spring here! Which means it’s the first time we’ve actually been involved in planting. Gardening is one of those things that I believe in my heart I’d like to do, but often feel too intimidated to properly try. What I’ll be taking away most from our time here is learning about the Three Sisters method, which for non-gardeners is a Native American planting method of “companion planting” corn, squash, and climbing beans. The corn provides stalks for the beans to climb, beans provide nitrogen to fertilize the soil, and the squash leaves provide cover, keeping the soil moist and free of weeds. Robin Wall Kimmerer has a lovely essay on it in Braiding Sweetgrass, which feels full-circle since her essay on abundance was on my mind way back during our first WWOOFing stay in Auckland!
When we arrived in Auckland, I initially envisioned us spending more time in the city. While we did some exploring, I really felt myself sinking into the days at home — planting, cooking, and eating. There’s something very grounding when simply nourishing your body and tending the earth that sustains it is enough to make the day feel full. Before our recess, I often felt this scarcity-driven need to cram as much as I could into my weekends and holidays. While I think I’ll always have some impulse towards high levels of activity, I’m hoping to bring more deliciously unhurried days, as our host would say, into my life post-recess.
Everybody Eats
Way back when we dreamed up this recess year, I wrote about wanting to explore alternative careers. I feel really satisfied with our collection of weird work experiences, and they’ve given me ideas for how I might incorporate some of these types of work into my life post-recess. But the one job I was most interested in exploring proved more difficult to get than I expected. Spongebob Squarepants really misled me in the qualifications for fry cook! Nevertheless, I was doggedly motivated to not leave the country without getting at least some kitchen experience.
After our amazing experience visiting The Bowling Club in Dunedin, I’ve become really interested in community eateries/pay-what-you-can restaurants. The cooking world is known to be kind of cutthroat and exploitative – many famous kitchens pay workers only in clout! If I were to pursue cooking in a commercial kitchen, I’d love to find a local spot where I can volunteer or work in support of food access and justice. So I was super excited when I found out about Everybody Eats. It’s a pay-what-you-can-afford restaurant that uses perfectly good, rescued food from organizations who can’t use it. They provide a three-course-meal to over a hundred diners several nights a week. While they have some paid staff, the organization uses volunteers for both meal prep and service. Given that we had limited time in Auckland, we worked a double so we could try out both.
The day we volunteered, the kitchen was especially busy given that they were preparing not only for that evening’s meal, but also their annual gala a few days later. We helped clean, chop, and garnish food for the evening’s meal, and then were “on the pass” for dinner service, plating up the sesame-soy salad with fried tofu. While the operations were a bit streamlined compared to a restaurant with a full menu, I still really enjoyed the pace of the kitchen and sense of community among the customers and volunteers. It definitely confirmed that I’d love to find ways to fit cooking into the constellation of my career. While it was only a day, it still feels like a huge box checked in terms of the “try everything” approach to this year.
The Big What’s Next
And with two weeks to go, we are headed into our “victory lap” in New Zealand! As we wrap up our working holiday, we’ve been starting to think more about what comes after our trip. While we have plans to travel in Asia, we aren’t planning to wander indefinitely. Given that job searches typically take several months, I’ve started researching and sending in my first post-recess applications! It felt like a symbolic way to mark an official year since I quit my job — or just a spooky way to spend Halloween as an adult!
One of the biggest barriers to getting out the first set of applications has been the existentially-loaded task of figuring out where to apply. I have plenty of thoughts on the type of job, structure of job, and how to transition nicely out of a sabbatical that are long enough for another post. But the subject of this post is place. The blessing and curse of being an urban planner is that I have *very* strong feelings about place, and it’s an industry that can allow me to work pretty much anywhere, giving me almost no parameters.
As I wrote about in my first newsletter post, some of the motivation for this recess year was a sense of unhappiness that felt very based in the place that I lived. Time has been generous to my complicated feelings on my life in Denver. There are a lot of reasons to be grateful and nostalgic for my time there. I had great friends and colleagues who shared my interest in both personal hobbies and community involvement. I found it really easy to get involved in volunteer and organizing spaces. At the same time, the challenges of my daily life still feel visceral, and it’s been affirming to compare experiences with other friends dealing with transportation or weather difficulties. While sifting through these feelings, I’ve devoted a considerable amount of effort to shifting my perspective on the place(s) that I live. Here are some of my major reflections:
Each place I have moved, I have initially known very few people or had only loose connections. I have often felt impatient and disappointed when I don’t immediately feel a sense of community. While I would certainly welcome it, I no longer expect to have a strong sense of community in less than 2-3 years of living in a place. While it feels really important to be living in a place where there is fertile ground for building community, I now expect this to involve a lot of starts, stops, and dead ends. I feel more understanding of the pace at which true community is built, and more willing to be patient for those special seasons of feeling really intertwined with a place and the people in it, where life in community seems to develop a momentum that doesn’t rely on me to constantly cultivate or maintain it.
So much of quality of life depends not just on the city, but the neighborhood, or even the specific street. At the end of my time in Denver, I lived in a walkable neighborhood, but I didn’t actually spend much time there due to the high cost of the restaurants and the fact none of my friends lived nearby. To a reasonable extent, I am looking in this next stage to build some of the major pillars of my life (hobbies, local spots, friendships) in the neighborhood I am in, rather than spreading myself so thinly across a region.
It’s really hard to anticipate what living in a place will actually be like, even if you visit or do your research. You aren’t necessarily going to be visiting on the coldest days or dealing with a daily commute. In Denver, I fully experimented with living there for three months, and yet the conditions of and expectations for my life changed considerably between the trial period and my permanent move. The constant location changes of our working holiday has made me more able to just appreciate the things there are to enjoy about a place while we can. There have been places that I have objectively liked less than others! But even in these places, we have found rest, friendship, enjoyment, and meaning.
Despite these changes, I hold steady in the idea that relationship to place is as important as any of our other relationships. There’s no topic more common among my peers than the degree to which we are satisfied with the place we live, or other places we might like to live instead. This can be useful! Daydreaming about alternative lives can be a way of identifying something I want to change, and what aspects of my life are or aren’t working for me. It’s what got me to New Zealand! But it’s also symptomatic of what Oliver Burkeman describes as “existential overwhelm.” His book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, focuses on the idea that we have, in the grand scheme of things, very limited time. Yet, modern life provides more possibilities (and, often, demands) for how to spend our time than will ever be possible to achieve. He expands this not just to our work and sense of productivity, but to the many potential life experiences available to us. We live with constant reminders that there could be better, more fulfilling, more productive ways we could be spending our time, making every moment an opportunity to maximize value. If this is true for how we spend our days and weeks, how much moreso for the place we choose to live, which determines the context and possibilities for all of those other moments!
Chris and I initially fell into this trap while making a spreadsheet to evaluate places to live — down to very specific details like having a late-night food scene. While the exercise definitely produced a list of things we like, the idea of weighting, ranking, and spitting out some kind of optimal answer quickly began to feel silly. But the impulse is understandable. The choices we make and how we spend our time feel reflective of our identity and the lives we are trying to build. Considering different places to live is about more than just those locations, but about the different versions of ourselves those places prompt us to imagine. I remember first feeling this existential weight as a high schooler starting to apply to colleges. Tour guides would describe this moment of “just knowing” when they stepped onto a campus, but to me each visit just created yet another alternate reality at what felt like the first major juncture in my life where my choices might actually produce meaningfully different outcomes. While a young person’s life can contain many choices prior to reaching adulthood, this was perhaps the first time I experienced the existential overwhelm Burkeman describes, with the awareness thrust upon me that I could potentially make choices that were better or worse than others among a seemingly infinite number of possibilities. I eventually coped with this with what I would later learn in my sociology classes to be theories of structure and agency. I concluded that, while I had choices, the forces guiding my life, and the fact that many university experiences are relatively similar, meant that I would probably find myself in similar spaces, classes, and relationships – this is to say, I would probably develop into a similar type of person – regardless of where I chose.
While there’s no way to directly test this belief, it has given me peace with what often feel like daunting decisions. It’s with this mindset that I’m trying to approach the next place that I live. Anywhere will have things that I love and things that make my life more difficult. Believing otherwise just leads to disappointment from idealizing a place or being overly fixated on its flaws. I’ve gained the self-confidence, backed up by experience, that I can build a life around the things that are important to me anywhere I go. That the things I most want — are attainable not only because of where I am, but because of who I am. That I can and will choose to adapt rather than lock myself in to a lifestyle that isn’t serving me. I’m feeling ready to embrace the next stage for what it is without the need to pit it against all the other possibilities I could have chosen. As Burkeman puts it, “What’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having even more experiences left to consume. Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for, and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.”
The Little What’s Next
We are finally on the South Island for our long awaited Great Walks. We’re still waiting to find out whether we’ll be doing the full track or a partial version! It’s been a really wet spring, meaning there may be avalanche risk to avoid. Thankfully, DOC takes avalanche risk very seriously, so we’ve been receiving regular communication for over a month about preparing for alternatives.
It’s hard to believe we have less than two weeks left in a place that a year ago was just a dream and a pending visa application. I think it will take a while to process the fact that we aren’t coming back after a quick detour! That being said, our travels in Asia feel like a really good off-ramp for this recess year. We’ll still have enough structure to keep us busy, but lots of free time to be figuring out next steps. And we don’t necessarily have to pick a specific end date! As we’ve proven to ourselves repeatedly, we can keep finding creative ways to travel sustainably until it’s time to come back. Lots to look forward to, and lots more soon!
So cool how you figured out that cooking is part of your new direction!