Travel 20
July 6, 2009 at 1:08 am | Posted in Nostalgia, South America Trip, UK/Europe | Leave a commentTags: Europe, South America, Top Ten, Travel
TravelTwenty. It’s like a TravelTen. Only more entertaining, but less practical.
Two and a half years is a long time to be away. It’s kind of too long to say anything coherent when somebody asks “What have you been up to?”
Rather than rattle off a shopping list of countries visited or blah blah blah about the vibrancy of the culture in Europe or mourn for another day trekking in South America, I’ve tried to come up with my top 20 of things during the period. Things you might not have known or guessed. Things that were out of the ordinary. Things that were a bit spesh. They’re not really in order of importance.
- We worked on an organic farm for two weeks as WWOOF volunteers in Argentina. Huerta de Vida had no running water or electricity, but we are now well versed in transplanting tomatoes, digging irrigation ditches and building a natural construction house. I still have an irrational fear of chickens.
- I fainted for the first time in my life in Berlin, Christmas 2007. After a sauna, where, instead of relaxing I spent my time lying on the warm wood fuelling an internal conflict. You know the ones: “what am I doing with my life. I don’t know what I want to do. Have I made the right decisions. Yada yada yada.” I finished my sauna, walked upstairs and folded into a mess on the bathroom floor. After picking myself up with only my ego bruised, I had a shower and promptly burst into tears.
- We went to Paris for a one night only culture binge. We arrived off the Eurostar, around 4pm in the afternoon for Nuit Blanche, an annual evening of Parisienne brilliance, where museums, galleries and other spaces are open all night. Basically the entire city turns into a psuedo art installation. Highlight of the evening was sitting on the marble floor of an enormous cathedral gazing up at a black and white short film, documenting a group of blind people touching an elephant. Quite breathtaking. Hearing a chamber choir in Notre Dame was pretty spectacular too. We stumbled back to Gare du Nord station at 8am for our return train to London.
- I did a two week internship at a BBC science magazine in Bristol. And wrote things like this.
- I woke up in the dark FOUR times to climb steep things. 1) Final day of the W trek, Patagonia, Chile, to see sunrise onto “los torres”. Okay this was quite amazing, helped by the fact that we took our sleeping bags up there. It was ‘effing cold. 2) To climb up a volcano in the Reservo Eduardo Avaroa, Bolivia. This sucked. I made life hell for everyone else and our guide thought I had altitude sickness because I kept stopping to harrumph and complain. 3) To get out of the Colca Canyon, Peru. Mike walked ahead so I considered breaking up with him. 4) Final approach to Machu Picchu, Peru. This was fine but I grumbled anyway.
- On a work jolly in London, I was at a fab restaurant and Sienna Miller was sitting at the table next to us. For all you trashy mag readers out there.
- For my birthday in 2008, Mike organised a surprise trip to Barcelona for a long weekend. We got all Gaudi inspired, ate tapas, drank red wine and very nearly missed our plane home.
- For Mike’s birthday in 2008, I booked us in for a dinner at Dans le Noir. This restaurant is completely pitch black, your waiters are blind (sans guide dogs), your food is a total surprise and you eat fine French cuisine with your hands. What a trip.
- We studied Spanish in Buenos Aires. For three weeks, we were back to school. For the record, I scored higher in the test.
- We went to an ATP music festival in the UK at a family holiday park. Not as weird as it sounds. Being able to play ten-pin bowling, mini-golf or those carnie basketball games when there are no bands is rad. Also, your own cabin at a festival… fricken cool.
- Mike broke his nose by accidently punching himself in the face. Sorry babe.
- We stayed on Sipan, a Croatian island that has a population of 600. In the granny flat of an older couple who spoke no english, instead communicating with us with “da’s” and pointing.
- I became buddies with Jake White, coach of the Springboks, while I was following his team around Marseille, reporting on the quarter-finals of the Rugby World Cup 2007 (writing things like this). Okay well maybe not buddies, but he said G’day at the pub one day and also waved while I was at the beach with Jez. Buddies enough!
- We played ping pong in a club in Berlin. As you walk in the door, you swap your ID for a bat. Entertainment sorted for the entire evening.
- We took hallucinogenic vine during a Shaman ceremony, in Cusco. No hallucinations but at least the cleansing effect took place. I spewed like a waterfall.
- I got the: boys have a penis, girls have a vagina talk from a three year old Bolivian boy whilst volunteering with Proyecto Horizonte. It’s even cuter in Spanish.
- I stayed overnight in an internet cafe (Manga Kissa) in Japan. Twice. Once in Osaka. The second time in Tokyo so I could be at the Tsukiji fish market super early. This was such a chaotic yet strangely functional, fascinating place. I had uber-fresh tuna sashimi for brekky. Yum!
- We crashed our hire car in New Zealand. When I say we, it was Mike. Nobody was hurt, but it was a wee bit scary.
- We had a very East London evening. A house-party in Hackney, followed by some bar-hopping and topped off with an underground carpark rave in Shoreditch. Boy did we think we were cool.
- We fit 8 people (plus the driver) in a taxi. A slightly crazy evening with some other backpackers in Bogota, Colombia.
- We came home. At the moment, this is feeling just as massive as the previous twenty.
Shit at Admin
June 29, 2009 at 12:49 am | Posted in Childhood, Nostalgia | Leave a commentTags: Admin, Penpals
For somebody who portrays herself as relatively on top of things, it may surprise you to find that I am rubbish at admin. I leave bills until they’re due tomorrow, or more often than not, have an extra late payment fee added to them. I left for South America, having not confirmed the PIN number on my new credit card, (despite having 3 months from when it was sent to me). I never claimed on my travel insurance after losing my camera in Japan, despite spending a good hour in a Sapporo police station using mime and facial expressions to get a police report.
But I suppose the clincher is that I’m completely hopeless at replying to emails immediately. I prefer to read them, think about them, walk away from the computer for a while, maybe get a drink and then swiftly erase them from my short-term memory. Only for an image of them to flash across my brain 5 minutes before knock off time or an hour before a deadline approaches. Ditto Facebook correspondence, Twitter @’s, even text messages! I just can’t bring myself to respond straight off the mark.
And it’s always been the case. And now for the historical evidence.
When I was 9 years old, my preferred monthly reading material was TV Hits. I’d probably only just decided that Smash Hits wasn’t competing… not enough stickers, no song lyrics cards and nowhere near as glossy.
My wall was adorned with TV Hits shiny posters, as were my schoolbooks, lunchbox and bedroom door. Oh, how I loved that magazine. I pored over every word, gazed at every picture and had grand intentions of entering the competitions every month (although never did). Now, God knows how I organised an envelope, postage stamp and coordinating the act of getting it all into a post box, but I actually sent in an ad to the Penpal section. It appeared in the July 1992 issue and the rest they say, is history.
I wish I could remember my ad, it was probably something like “90210 is rad but Saved by the Bell is radder. My favourite book series is Friends 4 Ever and I think Madonna is cool. Write to me dudes and dudettes.”
I’d almost forgotten about my ad until one fine Moruya morning a big brown envelope with my name on it arrived at the front door. Inside were two hand-written letters. One from a girl named Sam who had big, round, colourful handwriting and decorated the corners of her paper with flowers. I can’t remember the name of the other pal, their handwriting from a bland grey HB, but I decided it was my responsibility write to both of them. They’d made the effort and I was so buzzed to get something in the mail.
About a week passed, I hadn’t gotten anything down, but boy did I have some ideas up in that brain of mine. Suddenly, a fat-to-bursting A4 brown envelope arrived on the doorstep with a thump. Fifty-two, count them, further replies to my Penpal ad. I was stoked. I organised them into piles of definitely, maybe, no way. One of them included lollies, he was definitely a definitely. I felt a weird sense of betrayal to my first two pals, despite having never written to them, so I put them into my definitely pile as well. One letter was from a four year old, how pathetic, straight to the no way pile.
I spent a whole day reading them, organising them, prioritising them, then I walked away from the computer piles, got a drink… yep, I NEVER wrote back to any of them. My best intentions never touched a pen to paper and 54 TV Hits readers were left wondering if they were too needy, not cool enough, if Australia post had dropped their letter down the back of the shelf and they had missed their chance at becoming friends with a Saved the Bell fan. All because I’m shit at admin. Always have been.
Three folders
June 16, 2009 at 12:57 am | Posted in Homecoming, Nostalgia, Self-Expression | Leave a commentTags: Anatomy, Physiology, University
I’m at my parents. Cleaning out the shed. Sorting out all of the worldly possessions that I’d left behind. Here’s something I found:
Three folders of handwritten notes. Complete with deliberately drawn pencil diagrams of your insides. Not sparing colour. Arrows pointing to osteoblasts, local differences in vertebrae, epithelium, cAMP, troponin, myelin. Evolution from ape to Australopithecus to modern homosapien. Flows representing intracellular signaling pathways, enzyme reactions in the gut, stages of development. A guide to cutting open a body, more or less. Assignments with cover-sheets. Most of them were a couple of days late. “Please adhere to guidelines on spacing.” “A good finish to a poor start.” “A very well written piece with excellent research. Well done.”
Three folders of handwritten notes. I can’t bear to throw them out. The complete course of Microbiology and Genetics, the majority of which I copied from Katie. The report completed with Scott after two weeks of feeling our way blind around the Children’s Medical Research Institute at Westmead. Not just knowing the names of the bones, but every tubercle, spine, groove or process. An entire STUVAC re-writing second-year physiology notes on fluoro yellow paper. The haematocrit. Obesity as cause or correlation with NIDDM. Electrophysiology of the nerve. Discussions on vitamin D resistant rickets, covered in notes for the GAMSAT exam that I was more worried about.
Three folders of handwritten notes. That doesn’t even include a thesis. But represents three and a half years of knowledge accrued. Not on a weekly basis, more often in a concentrated month block before exams. But not disliked. Actually enjoyed. Found interest in. But decided not to pursue. And will forever wonder if that was the right decision. I was happy to spout sentences I’d heard elsewhere. “Your undergrad is for learning to learn.” “Science communication is a niche market in demand.” “I might go back to it one day in the future.” I might, but it’s feeling less likely. It felt like the right desicion at the time. And really it probably still does now. Despite the three folders of handwritten notes.
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