Blazers and Pins

As I write this post, I am sitting in a hotel room in San Francisco. Tomorrow my family and I will wake up at 4:00 in the morning to catch a hotel shuttle to the airport, where I will catch my flight to Detroit, then Rome, and finally Trieste where I will meet my host family in person after 24 hours of planes and airports. Emotions in the hotel room are running high, and I can't imagine what it will be like tomorrow morning as our sleep deprived brains try to understand the reality of my departure.
But that's not what this post is about....the antics of my departure are for another time. This post is about blazers and pins!

Every RYE student is required to make, buy, or somehow obtain 100-300 pins which somehow represent their home town/state/country. I decided to make my pins out of pressed pennies from a pressed penny machine which I discovered at the "One Log House" near Garberville.

So one sunny afternoon my dad and I drove up to Garberville armed with rolls of pennies and quarters, and spent a solid hour pressing 250 pennies assembly-line style. Once the pennies were pressed, I glued on pin backings to each penny, turning the novelty souvenir into a pin!

The three designs of pennies that I pressed and made into pins.

So what does an exchange student do with all of these pins, you may ask? In addition to pins, every RYE student gets a blazer, which, in the case of the USA, is navy blue. Then, whenever two RYE students meet, they exchange pins which go on their blazers. Many students also collect pins as souvenirs from events that they go to and places they see, and some students go above and beyond by tacking non-pin items such as banners, license plates, and other souvenirs onto their blazers with the help of safety pins. The blazers quickly become heavy, cumbersome, and full of wonderful memory tokens.

I have been lucky enough to meet both the 2014/2015 inbounds to our area, as well as the 2015/2016 inbounds, and I have been able to trade pins with many of them. Thus, even though I have yet to leave the country, my blazer is already baring the trademark chaos of a RYE student. I was also extremely lucky to receive over 25 beautiful rotary-themed pins which have sufficiently filled out my blazer from Terri Clark, a rotarian in my host club. Thank you so much Terri!

 These blazers are worn to rotary events before, during, and after exchange, and are also worn as students travel to and from their host countries. Wearing the blazers during travel allows exchange students to find each other quite easily, and also allows past exchange students and rotarians to connect with blazer-wearing students. Thus, tomorrow I will be wearing my already slightly heavy blazer in the airports as I make my way to Italy.

My blazer pre-exchange!

Finally, thank you so so so much to all of the people---rotarians, family, friends, --- who have supported me in getting this far---the people who have given me advice and good wishes, who have shown up at farewell gatherings, and who have shown me how much support and love I have in this community. It truly means the world to me and is such a wonderful launching point for me on this adventure!