Ok ladies and gentlemen, this is an actual last post before I head off, unlike the last one when I was just pretending. I ended up with more Internet than I’d thought, and correspondingly less Greek.
Today has been characterised by complete last-minute panic… I did get my insurance details,through at the last possible minute, but – and here’s a beauty – I still don’t have to address to go to when I get there! It could all go horribly wrong from here. Though I’m sure it won’t of course – it’s all part of making it more of an adventure – and a proper adventure it surely will be!

So, goodbye for now, and until September, I wish you all the very best :D

Besos.

Planning, packing, all that schazamming.

Schazamming apparently is a word, either that or my spell checker is playing up again.

Time is actually crawling along at a snail’s pace at the moment, as I finish off everything I have to do before I go. Today I finished packing, which is astonishingly early for me… I think the logistics of going away for so long while abandoning my abode at the same time freaked me out enough to get some kind of order into things. What to do with all my stuff has been a quite startling problem. In the end it’s scattering to the four corners of the globe, or almost – I’m taking too much with me, some has gone back to the bay, some is staying in my flat here, some is heading to a student, and the rest to a friend. I feel a little like I’m fragmenting myself, but it’s only stuff.

I have been trying, through dodgy internet connections, painful computers and other causes of confusion, to work out actually what I’m going to be doing when I get to Peru… so far our best plan involves far too much in the way of buses… we’re working on that… but whatever happens it’s bound to be exciting.

I also splashed out and bought myself a new backpack – only a daysack kind of thing, and in a ludicrous green colour… but I thought it about time – what I really need is a new propersack, but that’ll have to wait I think. I also bought a watch, my first since a fluffy pink affair in bangor (not counting the non-functioning one someone gave me here), It was also ludicrous green, and had snails on it (there’s a blog post there that’ll probably never get written) but it died after less than 24 hours, which is a shame – because it means I now have no way of telling the time (phone won’t work in Peru, and there’s no way I’m lugging it around just as a watch).

I’ve forgotten where I was planning to head with this post. I know I was going to mention that I’ve been doing a lot of sewing, and watching lots of films while I do it (mum will be proud to know I have now hand-stitched three button-holes, and each one worse than its predecessor).

I mustn’t forget my garlic crusher.

No, now I’m thoroughly lost…

Goodnight…

I don’t quite no how to characterise this post – ‘better late than never’ maybe, or even, ‘too little too late’, or ‘here’s an unusual turn-up for the books’.

The main disappointment I have had with being here in Spain has been that I failed to find a nice sociable group of people to live with who would help me integrate into this new country. Instead I have lived with, basically, a group of antisocial hermits. On the whole nice people, but not terribly interactive.

Anyway, last night, for the first time ever, I went out with two of my flatmates. I even have photos to prove it:

Pity it came after being here for eight months and just 5 days before I leave the flat for good. Oh well. When I come back from Greece the first piece of business will be to look for somewhere new to live. Hopefully I will have better luck next time around.

It’s strange, this digital age. It affords us novel ways of finding out information. Information that perhaps otherwise would never have got to us, or would have arrived way way down the line when memories were so very dim.

I recently decided to do a little catching up with some people I have been out of touch with for far too long a time and facebook provides a wonderful opportunity to do that.

However, it was only to discover that Rich, a guy I lived with for the first year of uni, has died, a little more than a year ago now. Even though we drifted apart once we lived separately, he was a really close friend during that first year and we continued to have great fun when we met up during the rest of my time in Bangor.

I have written a little on the Group that is in memory of him on facebook but even so, and although I know that no one who reads this knew him, I felt the need to write a little something here as well.

He was absolutely part of the formative experience that that first year of uni is, part of introducing me to lifestyles different from my own. He and Chris and Tanya and Jen and I banded together on our first days in halls and now it seems strange that none of us keep in contact. I suppose, like many groups that form through uni, we had little in common besides being assigned to the same floor in halls and so, once we lived apart, we drifted apart too. But what fun we had, bantering about, over Tanya’s endless stream of boyfriends, often several at a time, Chris’ failure to attend lectures, ever, my obsessions with films. At Rich’s money-making schemes, his bling, his hip-hop, his drugs, his alcoholism. For I wouldn’t want to suggest that he was a perfect person, and it seems it was probably the drugs that took him in the end. But then none of us are perfect people, and Rich had many admirable qualities – a warmth and approachability. A willingness to share and an ever-friendly, trickster grin. And it is always terrible when someone like that goes.

It seems, searching through my files, that I don’t have a single photo of him – quite, quite remiss, and a reminder of how recent the ubiquity of digital cameras is. So I shall steal one from his facebook group, looking like the imp he often was.

And so. That is that.

Long gap between posts, I know – the result of a number of factors – the aforementioned switching off of the internet, a lot of work, holiday preparations, and the arrival in Madrid of both my parents and a little contingent of Greeks at the same time. You can see some photos on facebook: Parents, Greeks.

I’m trying to be rather more organised than usual about the holidays, because things are rather more complicated than usual – because I have to pack up all my stuff and leave my flat at the same time. I’ll be gone for almost two months and during that time be travelling to extreme winter and extreme summer. And I’m trying to pack as little as possible. Thanks to some extreme generosity I’m leaving a lot of stuff here in people’s houses, I’m also leaving all my books here in the flat, and hoping to my flatmates kindness that they’ll still be here when I get back. I sent some bits back with my parents too.

Anyway, what have I been up to? Mainly tourism. It was a lot of fun having my parents here – I got to eat a lot better than I normally do and we got in our fair doses of Sun, Shade, Art and Wandering Around. Here is my mum reading in Casa de Campo:

And the Greeks gave me my doses of Mojitos, and a gift of ouzo! So there’s that side of life covered.

I was shopping today and asked a shop assistant about something and it turned out he was from Peru, and chatting to him about the coolness of it got be even more excited than I was before. I’m ready and raring. And less than a week to go!

It’s quite unlikely that there’ll be much more in the way of posts, either before I go or when I’m travelling around. So, in case I don’t get a chance to write again, I shall say goodbye for now… until September.

So today I got the news that I do get my job back next year. Which is awesome… I had genuinely set myself up to not get the job, mainly because of all the ridiculous hoops both the spanish government and the british council were trying to get me to jump through, some of which, I must confess, I didn’t jump at.

But all’s well that ends well. I’m really looking forward to going back and meeting all the kids again, some new kids too, and following them through the course of an entire year. It’ll give me a chance to have a crack at some of the projects we didn’t have time for last year and we’re going to try and film things in the school all year and make a grand presentation dvd at the end of it, which should also be cool.

It’s pretty typical of Spanish bureaucracy that they couldn’t just tell me I’d got the job, instead they sent us all an email saying that the placement letters for the coming year are all sitting in an office in the centre and we can go and collect them if we want. Pretty weird considering the vast majority of people on that list aren’t even in country. I was only the second to go and they’ve been available since Monday.

Well, somewhat surprisingly they haven’t cut off the internet yet. But I’d rather geared myself up to not write anything, and so I haven’t.

I generally find if I’m not thinking about blogging then I don’t find anything to write.

Playing It all day, Pilla Pilla I believe it is called here, is actually very tiring. We also added an unusual form of hide and seek to our repertoire today, somewhat similar to 52 bunker (which I realise may be a very specific regional thing, because I can’t find anything online about it. If I was less lazy I’d write a definition).

Tomorrow the parents are coming to enjoy this oven with me for a few days. It’s quite fun – my second set of visitor.
I’m also expecting to get either some very good or some very bad news. We shall see.