L-I-F-E

LIFE seems to ironically be a large part of well...life, and studying abroad.

I left Eugene, Oregon to escape LIFE. I went to Cinque Terre for the weekend, so to no have to participate in LIFE, and yet I somehow still ended up playing LIFE™ over the weekend.

This past weekend, while I was in the famous, coastal towns of Cinque Terre on the western coast of Italy, with its warm beaches and houses of peach, rose, and golden yellow hanging precariously on the edge of rock cliffs, I was a computer analyst.

I made $80,000 each payday, was happily married with two children, won the Pulitzer Prize, drove an amazing blue car, and retired with 1.4 million dollars, yet I somehow I still came in third place in my own game of life.

While my life experience may not have been as revolutionary, mentally challenging or skill building as many of my fellow peers who stayed back on campus for the LIFE workshops, but my evening playing LIFE™, was equally as fun and eye opening.

My travel group and I returned to our hostel after a 16 hour day of traveling, hiking (more like mountaineering), town roaming, and people watching around Cinque Terre at an early 8:00pm. Exhausted, we could no longer climb anymore stairs or even really keep our eyes open and our minds from wondering to images of our beds.

Luckily for us, our hostel had a curfew of midnight, making it impossible for us to try to force ourselves to go out on the town with the other students from CIMBA, yet we couldn’t go to bed feeling as if we completely missed out.

We had noticed when we first arrived at the Hostel Manarola that it had a variety of board games in its common room, Sorry, Cluedo, Cinque Terra puzzles, and LIFE. Seeing the irony of playing LIFE this evening, with the others back at campus, we put on our pajamas and moved through the quite, linoleum lined hall ways down to the dinning room and made ourselves as comfortable as possible at a large wooden bench table.

As we traveled around the board, stopping at “get a job,” “buy a house,” and “get married,” it made me think about how my life will actually turn out. What my career will be, my family, getting old; however it also allowed us to let go. We laughed loud, yelling at others to pay up when they landed on our square and acted silly, not caring who saw us.

Once we completed the game about an hour later, growing old and retired, we counted up the money we had made. This admittedly was not an easy task and sadly the accountant had the most difficulty; however in the end the doctor beat everyone with her $100,000 pay checks. Then we finally made it to bed.

The next morning as we checked out, the hostel manager asked us all if we enjoyed our stay. We all turned to each other and laughed and told him we did and as we walked out of the hostel, the morning glow illuminated the hues of the city and the water twinkled with ripples as the wind blew, and I joked with the girls saying that I enjoyed LIFE.