Trying to plan my departure for Boston — moving three thousand miles from the west coast to the east, with barely enough reserve cash to buy my plane ticket — I dredge up travel skills rusty from eleven years of disuse. A quick search (aren’t most of them quick?) on Google reveals the web address for Hostelling International USA. Fifteen minutes later I’ve paid my $20 annual membership fee and booked my first three nights in Boston — a committment to an arrival for which I don’t even yet have a plane ticket. I’ll figure out how to pay for a room to live in after I get there.
That’s that much taken care of. Northeastern University is paying part of my tuition, in return for ten hours a week of assisting undergraduates or doing research commanded by others’ needs, so now I just have to come up with the other $25,000 or so to cover the rest of the cost of the Master’s in Journalism I’ve signed up for.
As we say in Kiwiland, "no worries!" Yeah, right.
