Advertisement
Published: November 30th 2007
Edit Blog Post
I don't have too much to report on my blog this week, but I've committed to writing it every week, so here it is.
Christ, next week is December, its christmas. Not only has two months since I got home from my trip passed at a pace of like Mach 2, but the anniversary of my departure, November 9, also came around quick. On that day last year, at 10am, I was packing my mochila (backpack in spanish) at my parents house and wondering about what i was going to see and do in my trip. This year, on the same day at this time, I was in a meeting in Regent Street with two company owners who were asking me how I would like to set up their publishing business. The juxtaposition of those two scenarios in my life just 12 months apart freaked me out a bit just there. I sometimes flick through my Muji diary from last year - the re-usable cover from which, now plastered in Bolivian religious stickers, a sticker of the periodic table in spanish, and a sticker from the NME, now covers the 2008 refill - and I compared what I was doing
on any day to what I'm doing on the same day this year. I'll be able to do that well into next year and think back to those experiences, which will also be useful to jog my memory to email some of the new friends I made in those experiences, though some of them I still keep in touch wth regularly anyway (and one even sent me a present when they got home - Libby, one of the sweetest, coolest chicas I came across on my trip who with her mate Gali made my time in Cuzco and on the Machu Picchu trail so much more fun and memorable, sent me a purse made her her mum who is a leatherworker, all the way from Melbourne Australia after arriving home a couple of weeks ago). I think about my host family a lot; I heard from my friend Ximena in Cochabamba (the city in Bolivia where I did the work experience on Los Tiempos) that her colleague Erick, the volunteer offices' resident doctor and a thoroughly sweet man who had mentioned his long term dreams of going to America to work as a doctor one day, that Erock had in
fact just left Bolivia for the States to do this. I was amazed; it cant be understated just how hard it is for average Bolivians to get out of Bolivia, how expensive it is, the difficulty in securing visas... for most it is a dream that can't be realised. Erick is from a secure but not wealthy family, and still lived at home with his family and grandma who he was very close to but who passed away while I was there. He is an average Bolivian boy from the working-middle class, who has worked extremely hard to attain his goals, to make something of himself, to make his parents proud, and I thought if he was lucky and saved hard, he might make it to the States in a few years. But he's gone already. Good on him. I have other friends in Bolivia who dream of going abroad or to America - as much as it is hated by many, most young people use it as the standard icon of escaping to a better life - but who can't see how they'll ever afford the plane ticket. Two of those, my friend Carmen, who is a co-ordinator for
the volunteer agency so is working for an English company, and Maria Jose, the niece of my host mum who is at medical school and who had some of the best education Bolivia can offer behind her back when her dad was a big business man and she lived in a house served by maids, would have a fighting chance of making it in Europe or North America. Both speak perfect English, both are educated to degree level, both fabulously intelligent girls. But both without access to the US$2000 for the plane ticket. Carmen came close to studying in Holland when she was awarded a scholarship, but she lost out because her school in Bolivia didn't supply her with her certificates in time for the deadline in order to accept the award. That's sadly unsurprsing and a crushingly small reason why she is stuck in Bolivia where there are few jobs at all, never mind one for a bi-lingual communications graduate.
Round about this time in 2006, I had just spent a week sailing round the whitsunday islands on the east coast of Australia. Reading my blog from this trip I remember that I felt quite isolated on that
boat from the rest of the people - my blog entry for it is 'I Want To Be With My Sea' ( link: http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/Queensland/1770/blog-108480.html ) and that was how I really felt, also that I totallydidn't fit in with the group on the boat, who all seemed to gregarious and looking to get wasted all the time for the most part, not the place I was in at all. Though later I actually made two good friends from the group and one of which is here in London now (Sal!), the other I still speak to regularly, Winde- having met up and partied with her later in Brisbane, some of the best times I had in Oz - and she is in Holland winning big awards for being a cool fashion designer. The beauty of the Whitsundays was so stunning it needed all my attention - when I think about the experience and the feeling of staring out to sea while lying back on the deck of the boat, or looking up to the stars from my porthole as I was falling asleep at night, I can still grasp the feeling of how relaxed and content I was. So I
wanted to gawp at everything and not have to make conversation, but I felt that I must have appeared quite aloof, though later Sal told me I didnt. I also made friends at the very end with Trevor and Lisa, a cool English couple from Laaaandan, who joined me in Feburary for my pissed up birthday picnic in Sydney. And Joost, a very nice boy from Holland who I met in Airlie Beach while I was waiting to join the boat, joined me and other friends in Sydney for New Years' Eve, and he came with me to see CSS play the night after. It's funny when you look back at how one event snowballs into a whole bunch of consequent events and experiences that I could never have begun to imagine happening to me before I had left for the trip and taken the chance. I can't yet grasp the effect all this will have had on me, as a person, though I feel it's all definitely very positive, and the number of memories and tales I have, the new friends I have, has all been well worth the crushing loan payments.
Perhaps potentially even more far reaching is the return of The Boy. Alexis finally gave up hiding from me in the jungle, as some of my really, REALLY funny colleagues joked, this Tuesday and I was lucky to have him in town for lunch just an hour or so after he'd stepped off the plane at Heathrow. We kept our communication up pretty well over the last couple of months but as Fiddy says, I grew tired of using technology and so did he. So it is awesome to have him back, on our home turf, and now we have to find out how things work in a 'normal life' scenario. Both of us are a bit nervous about it all as we've admitted to each other, only because I spose it's important to both of us but also because we set a very high precedent on our trip of having an amazing time together which means we both hope that continies out of the jungle and in Hemel and London, in winter, without the excitement of The Road. But he is as lovely as ever in person; I wondered after all that time whether we would still like ach other the same. But it seems that we definitely do. I'm going in headfirst to this one as per most things in my life; tonight I take the train up to Hemel to stay with him for a long weekend, and first event on the list is joining the Friday night family dinner - a Meet The Parents event. Wish me luck.
x
Advertisement
Tot: 0.275s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 11; qc: 47; dbt: 0.0746s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb