As long as I can remember, despite the chaos surrounding me that sweeps me away in a whirlwind of colors, glitter, and paint, I have always written down plans that stack up into endless skyscrapers of lists. America was the last place on Earth I wanted to go to chase my dream. And despite all those multi-story to-do lists, I sometimes don't notice how, while deviating from the plan and helping others, the road I'm walking on winds and leads me to unexpected places.
So, one day, a friend asked me for help organizing an event for a company in Vladivostok that deals with an exchange program, providing students the opportunity to work and travel in the USA during the summer. My task was to pretend to be a student interested in the program and ask leading questions from a list. Now, I realize they did their job well; that PR meeting influenced my decision too. That same spring, I found a Master's degree program in Media and Design in the Netherlands, One orange tulip, taught in English. As a child, my mom and I lived in New Zealand, and I might have kept a decent English foundation, but due to a lack of practice, passing the exam with the required score seemed incredibly difficult. And, just as I was taught to swim by being thrown into a pool, I decided to put myself in a situation where there was no Russian speech, so I would have no choice but to start speaking English.
Of all the American dreams, I felt closest to San Francisco, perhaps because its hills and bridges are often compared to Vladivostok. My friend, who went there through the Work and Travel USA program, warned me about the likely difficulties I might face, but found that I could easily find a suitable summer job on Craigslist. The only thing he asked me to pay attention to was that it's a city full of creative people, so I could leave my A4 resume written in Times New Roman at home, and that any employer would be happy if a rainbow and colorful ponies poured out of my letter. A letter to America would have arrived by the following winter, so I wrote the website http://eastpatterns.ru/. One part of it was a blog about places where sales experience helped me see the beauty in making people happy, and the other was a page with a list of all my previous jobs, my responsibilities, and skills.
As it turned out, some people in California forget that there is a world beyond their state, and they completely ignored the Russia country code before the phone number in my contact details; they tried in vain to call me, ending up in Denver or some other unknown American cities. And, since I do everything at the last minute in a very Russian way, the deadline for submitting visa documents was approaching, and I needed to focus my attention on passing my summer exams, so I asked the International Exchange Center for help in finding a job offer. The only condition I couldn't compromise on was the sea. So, I was destined to spend the summer in a small tourist town in New England, in the state of Maine, Ogunquit, the name of which I only managed to read clearly right before my interview at the consulate. Furthermore, I was given enough time to decide if I had even chosen the right country to go to; all over the world, US consulates were experiencing technical glitches, and my interview, which was already very late, was postponed until the end of June.
