After two weeks of waking up before the sun to carry sloshing 18-litre buckets of water on our heads to fill the big blue water bucket, after calluses and blood blisters and even a scorpion bite incurred as what was an empty field in the Shamba countryside became a building, Zanzibar was what most would dfine as paradise - pristine white beaches and clear turquoise ocean, groves of palm trees waving in the spice-scented breeze, coffee, and flush toilets. I spent every day wondering how the next thing on the schedule could possibly be more luxurious or fascinating or delicious than the last; to even attempt to describe an experience like snorkeling (such an ungraceful, awkward pimply word for such a beautiful thing) off Chumbe Island among outer-space formations of vivid coral and iridescent schools of ... read more

Outside in the courtyard of the orphanage, Vikta is wearing my sunglasses, and Sandi keeps wandering into the room forlornly because he wants his "sister" - after two days and a very long evening walk to the fruit market, this is his preferred name for me - to come out and play again. This might just be impossible as I am actually melting into the leather chair I'm typing from. Nothing could have prepared me for the brightness of the sun, the astounding vividness of everything, from the colour-coded city buses decorated with sparkling decals of the driver's favourite football team (and in one case a fluorescent portrait of Barack Obama, who seems to be a bit of a semi-local hero) to the kaleidoscope of mangoes, avocados and bananas which cost the equivalent of five cents ... read more

I guess I just have to keep digging; once I've shoveled myself in deep enough that I'm not able to see the sky anymore, I will become productively unaware that the balmy spring air even exists outside of my underground burrow of irregular Spanish verb tenses and bond combustion enthalpies. Unfortunately, at the moment I'm at the point where I can still kick the dirty revision from around my ankles and escape - to a jazz band concert, to a feast of a weekend in Porthcawl, to the Brecon Beacons - with puny soil clumps of the little knowledge I haveabsorbed still sticking underneath my toenails and the soles of my now-bare feet. The impetuous why-not enthusiasm of this whole daisy-dotted campus is now tempered with a brain-freezing virus of guilt. All the 'coulds' are turning ... read more

I cannot be effusive enough about Madrid. If you asked someone for directions in London, they'd most likely look down their nose flipping their artistically choppy fringe and whine "you just don't know the city, do you?" In New York, they would debilitate you with their hand-held Taser before you reached the end of the question. In Madrid, the person you asked for directions will then ask you where you're from and what football team you like, leaving with just a chuckled "de nada" after walking half a mile through the city with you and your friends to the exact address of the live jazz club you were asking about. Not that you'd need to go to a jazz club anyway, as the street musicians in Madrid are phenomenal; being shamelessly partial to accordion players, I ... read more

The past three weeks of my life experience can be summed up best in a series of meals and clothes, by which I mean that the main incentive for most of it has been either a meal or clothing. Yesterday, the unidentified pale yellow plane-food goo of dinner was the most beautiful thing in the world. I wasn't actually looking at it, I was savouring the buzz of anticipation as I watched people at every table fight for a copy of the 15-page newspaper I singlehandedly published yesterday covering the Model UN Conference. It was me versus Microsoft Publisher, grating the ends of my nerves against the sandpaper that is text box and headline formatting for seven hours , gnawing at my already-stubby fingernails while obsessively pressing Save As every time news of another fake kidnapping ... read more