By: Alaina Kurek

“So I grew up in Grandville and I started elementary school at GrandView and went through the highschool here, obviously went away for college, but I came back and now I’m teaching here. A lot of people think that Grandville is kind of a social bubble you know and you hear people talk about how it’s not like other parts of the world and you hear people talk about it not being the real world right and I kind of fell into that for a little while. When I traveled in college I went to Japan, Kazakhstan and I traveled to Southeast Asia, Cambodia, and Thailand. I loved all of those experiences and saw there are a lot of places around the world that, of course, aren’t like Grandville. When I came back I started to realize that a lot of what I grew up with I kind of missed while I was gone. I like the smaller community. I feel like I know a lot of people here, in a place like Tokyo which is really one of my favorite places in the world, it’s still kind of isolating cause there’s so many people there and it’s such a big city. So as much as I love it, it was nice to come back and have something that was familiar, something that was for the most part predictable and consistent. That sounds like a domestic sellout move, but I like it.”