A year ago I fell prey to one of those silly internet bucket lists. You know, the ones titled “10 Things Every 25 year-old Should Know” or “96238347 Places to Visit Before 30”. At first you feel inspired and then you just feel like a couch potato doing nothing while everyone else figures out all the bullet points to being a real adult. I hate those. Around the same time I read an article about how writing down goals makes you more likely to accomplish them. Feeling both inspired, agitated, and in a bit of a standstill with life I decided to write down 25 things I’d like to do while I’m 25. I’m stubborn, so as I wrote down numbers one, two and twenty-one I knew I’d do them even if friends thought it was a bit overly ambitious. Now folding 1000 paper cranes, I don’t know how I ever thought I could actually do that.
I biked part of the west coast, I learned to change a bike tire(s), the hard way. I went to a ballet, I wrote down 5 things I am grateful for every week, sent letters to friends, apologized to someone I’ve hurt, and as it neared my 26th birthday and the end of the list I realized I still had to “float in the Dead Sea”. Maybe I got carried away? I kept this goal in mind though as I started planning my winter holiday. Initially, I wanted to visit the Dead Sea from Jordan, as Petra is there and holy cow who wouldn’t just die to see that!
The problem is, while living in Uzbekistan is wonderful to me, it doesn’t attract a lot of winter tourists. It did take me nearly 3 days just to get to this country! Because of this it isn’t the easiest of places to find cheap direct flights from. So I put Dead Sea to the side and began to focus on–cheap and direct. Luckily, one of the few airlines here, Uzbekistan Airways, happens to fly direct to Tel-Aviv, Israel which also just so happens to share a border with Jordan and the Dead Sea!
I left the Uzbekistan Airways office with a faded piece of paper that supposedly was my ticket…to Israel…in December…3 weeks shy of my 26th birthday! At least, that’s what I hoped I had conveyed in broken Russian, otherwise I had a ticket to who knows where.
Love Love.
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