各位同学对21世纪英文报（21st CENTURY）应该不陌生，是在学校常常会买的一份英语学习报纸。最近21世纪采访并刊载了打工旅行的报道，其中有我们的故事，也有吴非的故事。

这篇报道写得很不错，英文特有的简洁直接，把平时我要写很多字来讲的想法，几句话表达清楚了。所以在长假第二天推荐给大家，就当休闲阅读啦~

这篇报道也有语音完整版，大家还想练练听力的话可以点击原文链接，进入21世纪网站页面播放即可。

Ticket to a new life

Liu Encheng’s experience of traveling to New Zealand on a working holiday visa was a life changer: “It’s about having a chance to understand yourself better, to find out what you really want.”

As soon as New Zealand’s government announced its plan to offer 1,000 working holiday visas to Chinese residents a year in 2010, Liu, then 27, applied.

Rural taste

Liu arrived in New Zealand in December and was impressed by the summer Christmas.

“Many fruits are ready to harvest, so it’s easy to find a job in the *orchards before getting there. Since New Zealand is an agricultural country, working in rural areas helps you understand the country better,” says Liu.

The most important thing, according to Liu, is to live independently. He needed to balance work and travel, because on a working holiday visa you’re only allowed to stay in a job for a maximum of three months. So when Liu had nearly finished a job, it was time to think about what to do next.

Variety of experience

Different to Liu’s experience, Wu Fei tried many different jobs.

Wu was one of the first people to get a working holiday visa in 2010. After graduating from a physics major at Fudan University, he traveled to New Zealand in May. He worked as an assistant for a hunter, a chef in a restaurant, a cleaner in a university, even as an actor in a prison.

“There’s a *haunted house performance in a disused prison in Napier every week. My job was to wear white clothes and scare people in a prison cell. I hid under a bed and came out just when tourists turned to leave and patted the last person on the shoulder,” says Wu.

What impressed him most was the lifestyle of the local people. “They don’t pursue happiness by shopping or going to parties. Instead, they like going outdoors with their families. This simple happiness helps them find inner peace, but it’s hard to do that in a metropolis in China,” says Wu.

*Embrace local culture

But it was hard for Liu to communicate with the locals at the beginning, as they spoke with strong accents and there were big cultural differences.

“I tried my best to overcome these problems. When you decide to go abroad, you must *immerse yourself in an unfamiliar environment and solve problems on your own. I think that’s what makes such a trip special,” says Liu.（Zhang Chunmei）