Never say never

Cast your mind way back to January, 2010.  There was I, your humble blogger, at the end of a long stint bouncing around Africa in the back of a big orange truck, sick to death of tents, sleeping bags, camp food and the continent in general.  During a short pause in Livingstone, Zambia, my last stop in Africa, I packed up a load of stuff – souvenirs, sleeping bag, a camping mattress, unwanted clothing, gifts and other assorted gack, and sealed it all up in a big cardboard box swathed in an entire roll of saran wrap and packing tape.  Then it was off to the post office in Livingstone where I was charged the usurious sum of 453,000 Zambian Kwacha (a bit better than $100 CAD) and trusted the good people of Zambia Post to see the whole bunch back to Winnipeg.  

 
Fellow overland traveller Terrence, and the package, 12-Jan-2010.

And then there was waiting.  Karen & Steve in Winnipeg, me in a series of other countries you’ve already heard about.  And we waited.  And we waited.  Three months. Six months. Ten months… nothing.  And I’m sorry to say that by about the 6 month mark my faith in Zambia Post was non-existent.  I was quite certain that someone somewhere had helped him or herself to the interesting bits of the package and the rest was tipped into the garbage, never to be seen again.  The most distressing thing was that Laurie had loaned me her much-thicker-more-comfortable therma-rest mattress before she departed in Dar Es Salaam, taking my thin-and-easier-to-pack one home with her.  So that was gone, which naturally made me feel like a bit of a heel.  Also gone was the sleeping bag I’d bought just for the African sojourn, and a black and white painting of zebras and a carved wooden giraffe I’d bought for myself, and some Zanzibar spices and other bits I’d bought for people.

 
The giraffe carving I bought at Kande Beach, Malawi, and the guy who sold it to me.

But I was philosophical about it all.  Spending a year travelling as I did, with only the contents of one carry-on sized bag, I gained a more relaxed, easy-come-easy-go attitude to physical possessions in general.  Especially ones I’d been parted from for months on end.  So I apologized profusely to Laurie (who refused to let me buy her a new therma-rest), and had a brief period of mourning for my wooden giraffe, and got on with my life.

And now for the bit you’ve already guessed was coming. 

I’d just got back to London from my Christmas break back in Canada, and I mean just.  I’d fetched up at the doorstep - after three flights, two layovers, two airline-sized bottles of Chardonnay, one Gravol, an interminable wait for luggage and an hour long tube-ride from Heathrow - at about 1:00pm on Tuesday, January 3rd.  At 6:15pm the same day, just as I was finishing a jet-lag defying 7km run, I got a text message from Karen: 

“Check your email… now.”

Hmmm… intriguing. 

The email said:

“You will never guess what Canada Post delivered today.”

Yep.  The prodigal package, looking distinctly worse for wear, had finally finished its epic journey.  And it managed to arrive just 30 hours too late for me to greet it myself, in person.  Good timing!

Weird Food Steve received the package, and reported that it had “been through the wars”.  He was also clever enough to takes some pictures!

 
The package, after 357 days in transit. It looks sort of like I felt in the same circumstances.  In fact, this poor box was on the road for seven days LONGER than I was.  No wonder it looks a bit rough around the edges… literally. (And I notice my return address mysteriously migrated from the top of the box to the side... neat trick.)

Most miraculous of all was the fact that everything that I’d put in the box a year ago in Zambia was still in the box when it arrived in Winnipeg. (Though I use the term “box” loosely, since it would best be described as a “bundle” or “lump” after 357 of RTW travel).  The painting, the giraffe, the therma-rest, the sleeping bag, the gifts… everything.  Even a mouldy baggie of vanilla beans purchased on the cheap at the market in Zanzibar. 

So to Zambia Post, Canada Post, and whatever other postal systems were involved (Albania? Faulkland Islands? Venus?): I apologize for doubting you.  And thanks.  Now how about that other package I sent on the same day… to Calgary?

Pick of Pick of Pics

One other thing… I’ve decided to have a very small number of photos from the trip printed up on stretched canvas.  And I’m finally going to settle in somewhere properly by hanging things on the walls. But as you can imagine picking six photos out of more than 12,000 is a daunting task.  So I’ve narrowed it down a bit – here are my thoughts about good options.  Please let me know what you think.  Or point me back to favourites you might have seen in the Flickr feed that I’ve long ago forgotten about.

In the order in which they were taken:

Woman on the road, Suzdal

The Grand Canal, Venice

View from the Galata Bridge, Istanbul

Old Man in a sunny spot, Jerusalem

Old Man in a sunny spot close up, Jerusalem

The Dead Sea with chairs, Israel

Kids, Kampala

Fish market, Stone Town, Zanzibar

 
Good luck charm, Delhi

 
Carpet weaver, Agra

Boatman, Varanasi 

Old Man, Bahkatpur

Soldier, Beijing

 
Monk at work, Luang Prabang

Young monks, Luang Prabang

Tourist maiko, Kyoto

 
Tatami Mat Man, Takayama

Home for Christmas

Merry Christmas! Yes. I know it’s been, err… a while, but let’s not get bogged down with that. Oddly, though I am still living in London, I’m writing from my real home – Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Ahhhh… is there anything that says “Home for Christmas” like snow blowing across a highway with nary a turn sight?

Getting here at all, let alone in time for the holidays, was nothing short of a Christmas Miracle given the tragi-comedy that played itself out at Heathrow Airport over the last week. For those of you living under a rock: five inches of wet snow fell in an admittedly short space of time last Saturday morning and paralyzed Heathrow to such an extent that:

1. Flights were cancelled for days on end and thousands, or more likely tens of thousands of people had their holiday plans ruined.
2. Every day the newspapers were filled with pictures of people who’d been sleeping on the floor in the airport for two or three or four nights in a row, along with tales of woe about missed weddings and honeymoons, Christmas plans in tatters, and one particularly poignant story about a terminally ill little boy who missed his flight to Lapland to go see real reindeer. (Maybe he should have gone to Covent Garden, where they had real rein deer AND women in elf costumes…)
3. The Prime Minister offered to send in troops to help clear the runways and get the planes moving.
4. Colin Matthews, the man who heads up BAA (the company that runs Heathrow) and whose name will, I hope, become synonymous with indefensible and blatant incompetence for years to come, decided it might be politic to give up his yearly bonus for 2010.
5. And, FIVE DAYS after a moderate snow fall that brought virtually every aspect of the English transport system – air, trains, and roads – to its knees, it was still very very unclear whether my flight would leave on time, or at all. (As an aside – Toronto’s Pearson Airport can apparently clear a runway of snow in FIFTEEN MINUTES. Yes, they get a lot more practice but honestly, Heathrow is one of the busiest, most important airports in the world. They really need to up their game.)

But miraculously, I arrived on Wednesday to find things at Heathrow lurching back towards normality enough that I only had to wait outside the terminal building in a tent for about an hour, and eventually got checked in and boarded and took off almost as if the airport knew what it was about.

Camp Heathrow…. waiting to be let into Terminal 3. They were only allowing people to enter in batches. And only if you had a confirmed flight that was actually scheduled to depart. And only within about two hours of your departure time. Then again, they did give out tea and warm bacon sandwiches and Snickers bars to people waiting. They may not have snow plows, but they have catering.

And so I made it back to Winnipeg, a mere nineteen hours and six times zones after I left the house, and then spent the next day driving for eight hours to Saskatoon, and then went to bed very early feeling every-so-slightly ragged around the edges, and then woke up at three o’clock in the morning, which turns out to be an excellent time to get a lot of Christmas present wrapping done.

And how is life in London? Well, it’s good and bad. I still feel very unsettled – work has turned out to be… challenging (to put it mildly), but I’m on to a second round of interviews for another job which is very good. Home (now in North London) is serviceable but just doesn’t really feel like home, which is not great. But I get to move back to the big, happy house in Brixton in February, which is very great. I’m hashing quite a bit, which is good and fun, but I’m not doing a lot of proper running, which is bad. And you may have noticed I haven’t exactly been blogging my face off. It’s just been very easy to let the effort and weight of simply existing in the city in these dark, damp, cold winter months to consume all my energy. (I was shocked to realize during my long drive over the frozen prairie yesterday, that it gets dark at least an hour earlier in London than it does in Saskatchewan. I leave work at 4:30pm in London, and it’s already pitch black. Charming.)

I guess what I’m saying is that the last few months have been sort of a grind. The weather, the darkness, the job uncertainty, it’s all robbed me of motivation to do much of anything. So I’ve recently come to two conclusions:

1. I have to get out and run more. I’ve just found a running club that turns out to do a Tuesday evening track workout at a park about ten minutes from my current digs (Hands up everyone who knew there was a 400-metre track and well-appointed clubhouse with changing rooms at Finsbury Park… yeah, me too.). And they do a Wednesday evening group run at Hampstead Heath. So that’s definitely on the agenda, along with a race registration of some kind for the spring. Maybe not a full marathon just yet, but something to get me a bit more focused.
2. I want to start blogging properly again (pause for delirious cheering and deafening applause….). It was always my intention to blog in London but like I said, the motivation has been lacking. It’s now clear that I simply have to force myself to do it, and I think I’ll feel better for it. There are things I’d like to tell you about life over there – quirky stuff, funny stuff, annoying stuff, interesting stuff, helpful stuff… just… stuff. And it may even be nice to continue to have somewhere to get out the demons that crop up too.

So that’s the plan. Run more, blog more, and just try to wake up a bit. However, having said that, I also don’t think that Go See Run Eat Drink is the place for this new plan. The trip – the planning, the execution, the aftermath – it’s all ancient history already. (I can barely fathom that This Time Last Year I was “celebrating” Christmas in the pouring rain on the Serengeti.) So while I plan for the blogging to continue, it’s not going to be here. I’m going to try and spend some time over the holidays getting a few new posts in the bag, and trying a new space on for size. I can promise you that the blogging won’t be as prolific as it was when I was travelling, (especially near the end, when it seemed I could write two thousand words about lint), but I will give it an honest effort, and you’re welcome to nudge me if I let things slide.

So Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and watch this space for further news…

Festive me, with Rob H’s Longer Hair Experiment still underway…

Pic of Pics: Plymouth

Me and the fambly, on the water taxi in Plymouth. (To mollify Rob H, and to show everyone that I'm still hanging in there with the Longer Hair Experiment.)

And, for those not plugged into the Twitter feed, I GOT THE JOB. I'm now working full time, and have just finished Day 3. It's good, and busy, and frustrating (already) and yet all feels eerily familiar. If I had time to catch my breath I might be able to blog about it, but I'm suddenly too busy working, searching for a long term flat, and generally trying to remember how to function when 8-10 hours a day is taken up with... work. It's been a looooooong time.

Hanging in there

(Insert obligatory apology for long long long break between blog posts here.)

First things first – I’m still in London. Well actually that’s not strictly true. As I write this I’m just outside Reading, on a train to Plymouth for a few days visiting with family. So while I am not, strictly speaking, in London right now, I am still very much more in London than I would be if I were in, say, Winnipeg, if you get my drift.

Oooh. She does not look happy about having her picture taken.

The original plan, for those who remember it from way back in July, was to hang around for six weeks trying to see if the crazy idea of moving over here and finding a job is actually feasible. That is to say, if I could reasonably expect to find enough work to survive without ending up sleeping under a bench in Paddington Station or stocking shelves in a Tesco Express. However, as the days passed it became clear that six weeks is a ridiculously short amount of time in which to restart a career that’s been dormant for a year, on a new continent. It seems that even I – world traveler, insanely popular blogger, and possessor of a now almost infinite supply of anecdotes on which to dine out – even I cannot expect to land on my feet in such a short amount of time in such a big city.

So I’ve extended the plan. I rebooked my return flight for November 1st, and am hoping fervently that I’ll get to rebook one more time and change that flight into the first leg of a trip home for Christmas. (Never mind that the change fees for two rebookings will mean that it would have been cheaper for me to get a one way ticket. We are not thinking about that. Nor are we thinking about the ever-dwindling savings account. Not thinking about that at all. Nope.)

Extending my stay in London meant that I had to find new accommodations, which was not a bad thing at all. You may have detected, in my last few posts, a certain lack of enthusiasm for the neighbourhood and flat where I spent my first six weeks. Willesden Junction was a hard place to love, and living in one tiny, stuffy, somewhat rundown room there only added to the general sense of desperation that attended my days. Yes, it’s true that the decidedly “efficient” size of the flat meant that you could fry an egg from bed, but I knew it was time for a change.

I ended up finding a place that is so perfect I could hardly have managed better if I’d been ordering from a menu. I’ve got a beautiful big bedroom in a shared house in Brixton, which is south of the Thames. (Note to those who only know Brixton from riots and unrest in the eighties – it’s WAY different now. Cleaner, safer, happier and just nicer.) The house is a three story Victorian inhabited by three other people, and it’s all clean white walls and dark wood floors and book cases and comfy furniture.

The gigantic kitchen, looking out onto the tiny but perfect back garden

There’s a washer and dryer, dishwasher, TV, DVD player, and wifi, and my housemates are friendly and welcoming and smart and play Scrabble and do crosswords and are interesting and fun. And to top it all off, it’s actually significantly cheaper that Willesden Junction. Go figure.

My bedroom. It’s about a third bigger than the WJ flat. (In fact, when I finally found a reasonable pub in WJ, there was a projection screen tv on one wall, and I swear that screen was bigger than the WJ flat. And I’m not even exaggerating this time.)

I even have a desk and a small comfy couch. Bliss.

So things on the home front are much improved. Things on the work front have improved too. I actually worked! For money! For a whole week! In two different places! I was asked to fill in at the last minute and ended up working days at one theatre and evenings at another. It made for a really busy week, but it’s a real foot-in-the-door, and I can already tell that it’s earned me not just a few extra pounds to keep the wolf from the door, but, more importantly, some more good contacts that may already be bearing fruit. Things are looking up.

My first day of work necessitated a very very early start, which meant I was walking across the Thames from Embankment (my favourite tube station) while the sun was rising over London. Yup. That’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Even with all its frustrations, this city is still magic.

I’m impatient for the big break, but I also know I need to be careful and patient. I had drinks this weekend with a friend from the business in Canada, and a local guy who’s been a huge help in getting me connected with a lot of useful people. They were both really impressed with how far I’ve come in such a short time, and cautioned against getting nervous and taking a job that won’t be right in the long run. They think the best thing would be to get short term work in a lot of different places, which will help get me known around town, and give me experience with as many different theatres and people as possible. What I need to be wary of is ending up in a long term, full time job that takes me out of circulation and tucks me away somewhere there’s no chance of meeting new people and advancing my cause. (Like running the stage at St. Snortleby School for Girls, Slough Branch. Steady work, I’m sure, but just kill me now…) In some ways it seems counter-intuitive to reject permanent work in favour of something riskier, but I think it may make sense for the long run.

So that’s the report from the 11:06 to Plymouth. And I have to say that it’s really really nice to be traveling by train again. A proper train, that is, not a tube train. I’m very much over the whole Underground system. It’s true that it’s generally efficient, except on weekends when random closures for “planned engineering works” can shut down significant chunks of the system, which adds a frustrating level of complication to any journey. And except when there’s a tube strike that leaves one with a 45 minutes walk from Euston Station to the south bank. Or when there’s an unexplained cancellation of service resulting in everyone being ejected from the train at Queens’ Park at midnight on Saturday, leaving one walking all the way to Harrow Road only to turn in the WRONG direction on that road and spend another ten minutes walking back the way one has just come, then realize one’s mistake, causing one to stomp impatiently across the street and wait ages for a bus and get home around 2 am. For instance.

Like I said, it’s still nice to be on a proper train again.

Bucolic but unfocused view from the train. Those little white dots are sheep!

Late-breaking news: This afternoon I’m going back to a scenery shop I visited a few weeks ago to talk to the boss man about an actual job to do actual, full time paid work. It would be short term, but that’s perfect for me right now. Cross all your fingers for me!