On our final day in Kansas City, we drove a little outside the city to visit a grass-fed sheep’s milk cheese creamery in Weston, Missouri. I had read about it in some travel and food blogs when doing trip research for this weekend, and so we made a booking for a tour of the grounds, which ended in a cheese and local grape varietal wine tasting.

The comical thing about coming here and taking Chris and his parents to this is that in Australia, pretty much all dairy is grass-fed; there’s no novelty about it. It’s what is considered normal and what is practiced. Every time I go there, the milk always, always tastes better than the average milk that we buy here, even organic. It doesn’t matter if the milk or organic or not. What that means it that if you are drinking “organic milk, your cows are likely just getting organic grain and corn. It’s still corn they’re eating, which isn’t normal. What really matters is whether the cows are eating grass, what they are naturally supposed to be eating. They are what they eat.

Chris’s dad, who really doesn’t know much about food at all (when I tell him I like to make things from scratch and don’t like brownie or pancake mixes, he has absolutely no idea what I mean when I say a “mix”), even said that grass-fed dairy was the norm in Australia and New Zealand, so he didn’t quite get why this place was notable. “I suppose that in Australia, this place would no longer have its shtick, right?” he asked. Yes, he’s right. This stupid country.

The last two days have been a bit of an education both in regional Kansas barbecue, and in American history. When I look back at the textbooks that I read on American history, particularly around slavery, race, and civil rights, I always feel as though so much of it was glossed over, and many areas that could have gone deeper just aren’t given the time or the textbook paragraph space.

We visited the Brown vs. Board of Education national historical site today on our way back to Kansas City from Abilene, Kansas, which is where the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum is. Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the handful of major Supreme Court cases that we learned in school, but what I do not remember being told or taught was that after the ruling, many states actually rebelled against it, going so far as to shutting down their schools and entire school districts to prevent desegregation from happening. It just sounded so full of hate and selfishness; there’s really no other way to put it. It happened everywhere from Arkansas to Virginia. We knew from learning about the Little Rock Nine that communities and individuals were against whites and blacks having the same rights and going to the same schools, but for entire cities’ school districts to just shut down to make a statement just seems so unfair to literally everyone living in these areas.

Maybe that’s why so many people believe that racism doesn’t exist, that there’s no difference in treatment between a white or a brown or a black person. Maybe that’s the reason insanities like Fox News exist. It’s because the way rulings like Brown vs. Board of Education are taught do not delve deeper into the aftermath of the rulings. They don’t drill into the injustices that continued to happen day after day when major decisions like this are made. They don’t make the connection between those times and what we are experiencing today. They make it seem as though these decisions or laws swept away all the bad, and everyone just lived happily ever after since then. That isn’t the case. It wasn’t the case then, and it also still isn’t the case now. The amount of ignorance in this country around our own history is just so saddening. Even when I think about myself, I still believe I learned more about U.S. history visiting presidential libraries and these historical sites over anything I learned in school. And I supposedly went to the “better” schools in San Francisco, too, so I’m not sure what that’s saying about the quality of schools in America in general.

When Chris’s parents come to town, we usually take them on a side trip somewhere for a weekend, and this year, we chose Kansas City. It’s an interesting city in that it belongs to both Missouri and Kansas, and because neither of us had been to Kansas before, it was another state to tick off the list (42 for me, and 44 for Chris). It’s driving distance from both the Truman and the Eisenhower presidential library and museums, and it’s also an American barbecue capital, one that we hadn’t yet had the chance to enjoy until today.

We chose to go to Joe’s Kansas City, as it was the most popular and has been rated one of the best, if not the best, barbecue restaurant in the country. Even though it was a Friday, there was still a bit of queue (a local told me that this was far shorter than usual), and so we lined up. They’re known for their beef ribs and “burnt ends” especially, and pretty much all of their sides. Burnt ends are “the thing” in Kansas City, and it’s rumored that each barbecue restaurant has their own “style” of how to make them. We ordered the beef ribs, brisket, and the burnt ends, along with spicy slaw, potato salad, dirty rice, and baked beans.

Chris and I have been fortunate to have gone to pretty much every major barbecue region in the country, and before this trip, our shared favorites were by far Texas style barbecue, and then North Carolina barbecue. One of our least favorites was actually in the state of Missouri, in St. Louis; the meat didn’t have much flavor at all, and all the focus seemed to be on the sauces… which is great, but if I’m going to eat barbecue which is supposed to take hours and hours to cook, I want really good meat first, not really good sauce. Who eat barbecue just for the sauce and not the meat, anyway? But now that we’ve had this barbecue, I can safely say that this is probably my second favorite barbecue now. The ribs were some of the best and most flavorful ribs I’ve had; they weren’t fall of the bone tender, but a good cross of fall-of-the-bone with just a bit of bite. The rub on them was also really smokey and complex. Every side we ordered was memorable.

Kansas City is impressive. I’m still salivating over those ribs and the burnt ends.

Tonight, we had a big dinner party with all 275 of us, and it was one of those events where you know that although you’ll have fun staying up until 2:30 mingling with everyone, that you will be really annoyed the next morning (or, really, in the next few hours) when you have to wake up for the final 8am session of the week.

One odd thing that my New York colleague brought up to me was that she felt as though there were a lot of “greasy” colleagues across the other offices. I didn’t really know what she meant initially, but she said that a lot of our male colleagues, particularly the ones in the European offices, were a bit too friendly and affectionate and touched her more than she felt comfortable with.

I actually did notice that our European and Australian colleagues were more friendly and affectionate physically,  but I didn’t really think anything of it because I think that there are some cultural differences to consider. Americans tend to be more puritanical and rigid, especially in the work place. Shaking hands and the occasional half-hug are the routine greetings when meeting up with colleagues you don’t see very often here. The kiss-on-each-cheek greeting or touching one’s shoulder when speaking and engaging with each other… pretty much never happens in my experience with American colleagues. It is something to think about and consider why our greetings are so different and what is considered “acceptable” and not “creepy.” But sadly at the end of the day, it’s what we are “used to” that we probably end up falling back on. Or maybe I’m just a bit of an outlier because I’m naturally very affectionate and expressive, so none of this bothers me. If anything, I actually love interacting with our international counterparts. I get a glimpse into perspectives I don’t always get day to day here. And that’s really fun and engaging for me.

Being a part of the tech world is interesting in that while we are trying to be innovative and different from other “average” companies, we’re also doing a lot of the same things other companies are doing: excessively spending money on things we think matter, but don’t really in the long run. This is the first sales kick-off at the company that I’ve attended, and although I was excited to come to see colleagues from around the world who I rarely get the opportunity to see and spend time with, a part of me dreaded it because I knew that although we’d be in sunny and beautiful Napa, we’d be spending all day in a windowless ballroom, doing work and having work related sessions to start off the year right. We wouldn’t have time to truly enjoy the gorgeous landscape that surrounded us or the warm and bright weather. The spa, tennis courts, and golf courses would be beckoning to us, but we’d have to be forced to ignore them. And the 8am daily starts will be very, very real. And remind us that we’re not here to relax; we’re here to work. It would have been nice if we had longer breaks to enjoy the property, scenery, and each other outside of our timed meals.

After arriving in San Francisco this afternoon, I met a bunch of my colleagues for dinner at my favorite burrito spot in the Mission. As I’m waiting for our orders and getting salsa for our table, I run into another colleague who just happens to be eating dinner at the same place, as well. We started chatting for a while and he suddenly reminded me that he actually left our company in December. Oops… I don’t think I was ever informed of that?

A number of people I know and respect have left the company in the last few months. A good handful of them didn’t even have jobs lined up for them; they just wanted to take a break, travel, and rest. It’s a ballsy thing to do in a country where there’s no universal healthcare, but I admire them for doing it. I used to always think about doing something like that but never was able to gather the courage to do that. The fear of the unknown is scary to me.

I finally got around to watching the Netflix documentary on elephant poaching in Africa called The Ivory Game tonight. And just as I thought I would, I couldn’t help but get teary-eyed watching these conservation specialists roam Africa, finding these dead elephant carcasses, all with their tusks cut off, some even beheaded. The way that elephants bond is so precious, and in some ways, could be even more human than the way humans interact. When an elephant in a herd dies, the rest of the herd mourns; they even cry to express their deep hurt and suffering.

In the last seven years, the elephant count has decreased across Africa by 30 percent. From the 1970s until now, the total elephant population across the continent has decreased from several million to only about 400,000 in 2016. And it’s all because of the ivory trade in China and Vietnam.

Even though it was on my TV screen and it wasn’t in real life, it really hurt to see the dead elephant bodies. It’s already so terrible to see human bodies dead — from a size perspective, elephants make us seem like little mice. So to see the dead bodies of the largest creatures on earth staring at you — it’s like the worst form of death, a true erosion of living beings all because of the disgusting greed of human beings.

When we were on our safari, noting that elephants were the largest animals in the bush, I asked our guide who elephant predators are, and he was stone faced as he responded, “Man; man is elephant’s greatest enemy.” Of course, lions will go after baby elephants since they are smaller, but for the most part, though lions pretty much rule the land, they won’t go after adult elephants because of their sheer size difference. And given the elephant poaching, anti-poaching units are staffed with people risking their own lives to keep these elephants alive.

Elephants and people are dying just for ivory.

January 2nd was like a full day’s history lesson of all the details of Apartheid that I never had in formal schooling. Though the TripAdvisor reviews mostly said you could spend about 2-3 hours in the museum, we spent 3.5 hours in the museum and had to rush through the last part of it because we were due to meet with a guide to take us to Soweto at 12:30pm. If you really wanted to read everything and watch every film and hear every recording, I think you’d probably need at least 4-5.5 hours at this museum.

The museum is a brutally honest depiction of everything that happened in South Africa, from the beginning of the colonization through the fall of Apartheid to the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. While the District 6 museum was a close examination of what happened in that specific area of Cape Town, the Apartheid Museum exposes everything that went wrong throughout the country, even during Mandela’s presidency.

I wandered through the museum reviewing the different parts of the exhibition and wondered why the U.S. has to be in such denial about all the atrocities that we have committed. We still can’t even fully discuss slavery and its impact on African Americans today. The concepts of institutionalized racism and sexism seem to be nonexistent to our country’s right wing base; it is all about how people on the left supposedly view everything through some racial/gender-based “filter,” and we just don’t know how to escape it because we’re constantly and wrongly thinking we’re being oppressed. Even with the Roy Moore scandals, people defended him, saying that women were being paid to lie and accuse him of assault and sexual harassment that never actually happened. President Dipshit basically insinuated that anyone would be better as Alabama senator than any Democrat…. even a sex predator, which isn’t hard to understand given Dipshit is a sex predator himself. We still can’t believe women or people of color today in the U.S. It’s always the white man’s voice that reigns.

Somehow, despite Apartheid having ended just over 20 years ago, I feel more hopeful about South Africa’s progression than I do about the U.S.’s. There’s something about the energy I’ve felt here, the honesty about the past, that makes me hopeful.

When I was in high school and college, I kept track of general domestic politics in the U.S., but I barely paid any attention to anything international unless it was major. I guess I was a product of American exceptionalism and all that crap, which basically made me brainwashed (without my ever fully being aware of it) that the world revolved around the U.S. I’ve definitely been paying attention to more international news in my 20s and now my early 30s, but I know I could do better.

So you can imagine how amazed I was when we met these Dutch girls between the ages of 17-19, and they basically talked about American culture and politics as though they were really smart Americans themselves (I say “smart” because American teenagers as a whole are hardly considered smart from a global perspective). They kept track of our elections, of who was running, even of the controversial Roy Moore vs. Doug Jones Alabama Senate special election. These girls are going to be the next leaders of tomorrow, yet unfortunately, they don’t represent the U.S.; they represent the Netherlands. When I was their age, I probably wasn’t even half as knowledgable about the world as they probably are.

I guess it also helps to have highly educated and successful parents who actively participate in your learning and growth, and also take you on world travels. But I’m sure a lot of their desire to know is based on them as individuals. Still, I was kind of blown away and embarrassed by my own lack of knowledge when I was their age. We all have things to aspire to.

This year has gone by so fast that I barely know what happened. It seemed like just yesterday I was leaving a shitty job with terrible people and terrible technology and going to a company with real technology and real people who actually seem to be good and genuine. I can barely remember the winter of early this year, when I can probably count on my hands how many times I wore my snow boots (that’s very little – what a mild winter it was!).

Here we are, on day two of our safari to end 2017. Each day we get older, time passes by even faster. It’s like we just arrived in South Africa, yet in two days, we will be ending our 12-day trip to this incredible country.

Coming here has only magnified how little I know about the African continent in general. It’s always been the part of the world I’ve lacked the most knowledge on, both from a news and a geography perspective. But now, I want to learn more and see more. I’d love to see the rest of Africa and see the differences across all its countries, as well as its similarities. I’d like to learn what everyday life is like for people who live here who are rich and poor. I’ve seen a fair bit of Europe and Asia, yet Africa has always seemed so distant and far removed from me. Maybe that will be how I will start 2018, seeking to learn more about this beautiful part of the world that so many don’t even care to think about or visit, but really should know about to appreciate more about the world.

It’s so easy to live a sheltered life, stuck in our day to day, wherever we are in the world, whether we work on a game reserve outside of Kruger in South Africa or in a dense office building in midtown Manhattan. We lose so much perspective if we don’t stop to think about other parts of the world and visit them, and see how others live. I hope I don’t ever become one of those disillusioned people who stops caring about what’s outside her bubble. There’s so much to do, see, and change in the world. We can’t become complacent and indifferent.