September 2011
9 posts
“How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you -...”
– Katherine Mansfield
Can't/Won't/Don't want to sleep.
I think it would be safe to say that I’ve had a cracking last few days in bella Italia.
I’ve spent a good amount of time just wandering around the city over the past weeks. As you might know, I am particularly soppy and pathetic when it comes to a) saying goodbye, and b) getting unnecessarily nostalgic about things, so I really enjoyed just making the most of being here, getting myself lost and...
The penultimate week
At the beginning of this week, I was in work experience heaven, spending the day in Portofino delivering bouquets, decorating chairs and throwing rose petals around at a castle. It was very tiring, as there was a fair bit to be sorted out, and I ended up running around like a total pazza for a lot of the day – especially after we’d been very Italian and missed our first train, arriving later than...
White Nights: Take 2.
Somebody very wise once said, “No one looks back on their life and remembers the nights they got plenty of sleep”.
Whoever they were, they had a very good point, and nothing proved this better than the Notte Bianca on Saturday.
As you may or may not remember, last year at around this time I was in Madrid, where there’s a similar event, the Noche en Blanco. As you might have already read here, we...
The Italian Supermarket Experience
At 7.54 p.m., you arrive at your regular supermarket looking windswept and flushed having realized, six minutes before the store closed, that you have nothing at all left in the cucina, except for four strawberries, the dregs of a tub of pesto, two litres of olive oil, a curiously large quantity of anchovies, and about eighty assorted teabags.
You walk through the shop door and fight your way...
1 tag
Anniversary
If you hadn’t noticed, it’s the 2nd September. Again. A whole year has passed since my first journey to Madrid, the much-dreaded first day involving blistered hands from heavy suitcases, total linguistic ineptitude, and the pathetic display of a teary breakdown on the streets of Spain; and since then so much has changed. Yes, my suitcases weigh just as much, no doubt even more; my language skills...
August 2011
6 posts
Update 3: Casa Dolce Casa
There’s something very nice about going away on holiday when you are already more or less on holiday to begin with. In particular, it makes coming back from holiday significantly less depressing. When I got back to Genoa, despite being extremely irate at the ridiculous organization that is Ryanair, and their shameless con artistry which meant that I had to give them forty more of my pounds to...
Update 2: Gli Stati Uniti
Having felt so settled in Italy, going away for 3 weeks to America suddenly felt like a very bad idea. Although I was looking forward to going and to spending 3 weeks with Ben and his family - for the longest time I’ve seen him for over a year - packing up and leaving didn’t seem like the right thing to do, and there were so many things to do before I left that I had almost not thought about the...
Update 1: July in a nutshell
Every day since my last blog on the – ahem – 29th June, has flown past faster than I realized was possible. Here I find myself, on oh good gracious the twenty-flipping-second of August, with not a lot to do besides tidy up what looks like the remnants of a wardrobe explosion, as I’ve still not summoned the energy, or indeed the time, to unpack properly from my various adventures. I have quite...
June 2011
4 posts
A week in the life...
THURSDAY
Failure:
I spent several hours on Thursday evening with Sonia and a not particularly pleasant Russian bride in the office of an extremely patient florist, while the bride-to-be turned her nose up at each and every one of his suggestions until finally giving in and making a flipping decision several hours later, being altogether less than courteous the entire time.
Success:
After that...
So, YA... I think we got off on the wrong foot
Excluding one sole photo of a piece of delicious and utterly artery-clog-tastic focaccia, it’s been a little while since I updated you on my Ligurian exploits.
Life is just plodding along nicely, as life tends to do. Genoa continues to present me with such delights as some of the fattest sausage dogs I’ve ever seen, and gelato so delicious I feel the need to consume a small mountain of it every...
Il tempo viene per chi lo sa aspettare
This week, I’ve been sorting out my scrapbook. When there’s so much bizarre new stuff happening all the time, I like to stick all my little mementos in a book and write about memorable things which have happened, so that I can look back on it, forget all the times I wanted to go home, and appreciate the good stuff. I made one the first time I was in Italy, and when I lived in Madrid, and the...
May 2011
8 posts
Paperwork Shmaperwork
It’s just as well I know the Italian word for bureaucracy, because there’s certainly plenty of that to do at the moment.
For my internship, which as we all know very well is just the official word for my sitting on a sunny roof terrace with a very nice lady, drinking coffee, chatting, looking at photos of beautiful weddings, and sending the odd email, it appears there is actually rather a...
Alla ricerca di Nemo
Having resisted the urge to produce a totally miserable “I have no friends and I want to go home” blog (round of applause, please) after the sudden departure of my very lovely housemate, and only friend in the whole city, to America for a couple of weeks, and following a whole day of sitting in my bed watching 90210, eating raisins (which were the only food in the house seeing as, to add to the...
La vita è bella
I am quite possibly speaking too soon, but after some initial hiccups, everything appears to be going very well indeed. I don’t know whether this is because of this being my third Year Abroad stage and I have been somewhat numbed to the bizarreness of mainland Europe so I just haven’t been noticing anything odd going on (except for being actually stalked, but we’ll come to that later), or whether...
Panico
This morning (now yesterday morning) I arrived, more terrified than I’ve ever been, in Genoa.
Unlike in Madrid and Orense, this time I really am on my own. Not only do I have nowhere to live (and no clue about how to resolve this rather major problem), but there aren’t even any friendly faces from the Durham contingent around to comfort me and take me for all-you-can-eat-buffet dinners when the...
April 2011
4 posts
So long, farewell, hasta luego, goodbye...
I’m leaving Spain really soon. We are going back to the beach house some time today but I have clearly become at least a little bit Spanish regarding my organizational habits, meaning that many things are still not packed; my room resembles what would happen if all the untidiness phrases my mother used to use were all smooshed together into a catastrophic pigsty-bombsite-dump-pit-tip-hellhole...
A public confession
I’ve said all along since I’ve been in Espain that nothing ever gets done, that I could never live here properly because the disorganization all but brings me out in hives, and that as much as I’ve come to love them, I wouldn’t trust the Spanish with important matters if you paid me, but as the imminent prospect of Ryanair draining my bank account due to a supersize, shopping-addiction-fuelled...
Spot the tourist
I’m back in Orense for the final time, can you believe it, after a 5-day holiday with my visitor, and a very brief tour of Galicia over the weekend. I’m back with the kids playing with crepe paper and crayons for the last full week of my stay here, as it’s looking like we’ll be going to the beach for the whole of Semana Santa, and heading straight to the airport from there.
Ben’s visit was...
Kids say the funniest things
Some of the things kids come out with are hilarious. In this household, and coming from my 6 year old boy, Gael, they go from the mildly ridiculous, “When I’m older, I want to be a Winx” (Google image that to see what it is if you don’t already know), to the utterly absurd, “My mum’s not coming home tonight because she’s been arrested and put in prison”.
Today though, I had a pretty fantastic...
March 2011
5 posts
Procrastination
Once more, I come bearing news of a general feeling of happiness and an underlying feeling of sadness and dread about leaving the comforts of my Spanish family in just three and a half short weeks in order to plunge myself into the depths of joblessness in an as-yet-unspecified Italian place. For the moment though, despite a somewhat poor and last minute attempt at a Year Abroad task taking up...
Run, Forrest, Ruuuun!
A couple of the other girls and I had made plans to meet this morning and go, instead of for our customary coffee, to the hot springs/Termas/whatever you wish to call them, until lunch. To get to the springs, which are slightly out of the centre of town, we would need to catch a tiny fake train, which is bizarrely part of the Orense bus network, and departs from the main square, the Praza Maior....
Peachy
Everything at the moment is pretty great. The correlation between this and not having taught the kids-from-hell for over a week remains to be seen, but even so, everything appears to be going well. As cheesy as this may be, the more time I spend with ‘my’ 8-year-old girl, Eyén, the more I love her. I could – and in fact, do – spend every single day doing arts and crafts, drawing, face painting,...
A whole lot of Awesome.
Thanks to a lucky combination of a friend’s super website-finding skills and Facebook’s knowledge that it would amuse me, a website popped up the other day on my mini-feed – or whatever the cool kids call it these days.
www.1000awesomethings.com (Give it a click, you know you want to.)
Essentially, it does what it says on the tin. It’s just a big long list of things that are great. Some, like...
February 2011
6 posts
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
My major failure of the past week was, to put it bluntly, the poisoning of a child.
Now, in my defence, this was an accident, it was not done maliciously, and the child came away from the incident completely unharmed, so I feel that telling the story is acceptable.
Essentially, the other night, I was looking after a rather stroppy 6 year old. He was in quite a foul mood and then announced that he...
No rest for the wicked
What started as a very relaxed living in a house with a lovely family, playing with the kids every afternoon and having a lot of free time arrangement has, over the last three weeks, become more of a feet never touching the ground because I’m so busy situation. I’m not quite sure how I let this happen, but I think it’s safe to say I brought it on myself.
When I arrived, I was presented with a...
Lost in translation
This weekend, I visited the lovely Melissa in Vigo. Having somebody fairly close (an inexpensive train ride away, anyway) and being able to pop over for a day or two to see a friendly face is great, and we had a lot of fun being very silly, getting a delicious and delightfully un-Spanish dinner of Dominoes Pizza, traipsing through the seediest of back alleys trying to find a bar which wasn’t...
January 2011
6 posts
Cars, Spas and Bars
Where to begin? So much has gone on in my first week in Galicia. For starters, I love it here. It has everything that was missing in Madrid; fresh air, a house that feels more like a home than a squat, mountains, rivers, clear starry nights, it really is exactly what I needed. Yes, it does have the potential to become a bit dull as it is a ‘small’ town (more on this later) and my life may get a...
Mariposas
The next stage of my European adventure begins with a mammoth trek to Heathrow at 5am tomorrow morning, and involves throwing myself into another minefield of cringe-worthy opportunities, this time far from the world of management consulting and glamorous capital-city-dwelling, as an au pair in a relatively small Galician town. That’s right, I’m hanging up dinner dates, cocktails and party...
Lessons in life, by Professor España
Tomorrow morning, once again at ungodly O’clock, I will be off to the airport, laden with three times as much luggage as I came with, for which there really is no excuse. This time though, I’ll be flying away from Madrid for the last time.
I don’t want to say that living abroad for 4 months has made me find myself, or any of these other awful clichés, but I will admit I’ve learnt a few things,...
Twelve of your finest
I never thought that one of the best New Year’s Eves I’ve ever had would be with people I only met a couple of months ago, in a city – and country – that I don’t live in. In fact, I was quite sure that being in Madrid on the 31st December, when less hardened Year Abroad-ers were at home with friends and families, would involve being alone with some rubbish food and a DVD, and pretending it wasn’t...
December 2010
4 posts
The Final Countdown
Well here it is; the final week of the year, and my final full week in Madrid.
That’s right, I’m back for the last leg, the final hurdle, the home straight. It seems bizarre to say that, because sometimes it feels like I’ve only just arrived, only just settled in, and others, like I’d never get to leave.
Very early on Wednesday morning, I could not have been more excited as the plane descended...
