Exactly one month ago, I finished teaching a ridiculous
spate of intensive classes, the highlights of which included Savage
Garden’s ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’ and footage of Steve Irwin as valid and
extremely relevant teaching devices.
I celebrated my freedom, not by going out
and getting wonderfully drunk, but by getting up at 6am the next morning to
start my Summer break.
Over the following three weeks, I took 19 trains, 6 buses, 2
planes, 4 cars, 1 boat and 1 hot-air balloon. I travelled to England, Slovenia
and Toulouse, and had friends visit me in Paris.
I caught up with pretty much all of my very best friends and
family, and had an absolute blast. And you know what? It was all so freaking EDUCATIONAL.
I learned so damned much. My horizons are broader, my eyes have been opened
wider, I've gleaned knowledge with a capital K.
Not one to be selfish, I thought I’d share. Here, in no
particular order, is the best of all the shit I found out this summer:
1. In Ljubljana, there is a superb water fountain in the
shape of a kangaroo, so fashioned that in order to have a drink you have to
snog the kangaroo. FUNNY.
2. Swans make a sound EXACTLY like a dinosaur if you dare to
go near them or sit next to their lake or, you know, look at them.
3. French people like opinions. So, if you should find
yourself sitting next to a French person on a 5 hour TGV train journey, be
prepared to talk about the weather, the police, international train
timetabling, sandwiches, the Royal Family and educational systems of the world.
4. Those small tubes of toothpaste you get on planes or as
free samples from the dentist are WORSE THAN USELESS. And whatever is in them tastes
revolting and IS NOT TOOTHPASTE.
5. Slovenia has more wasps than anywhere else in the
universe. They will try to live in your beer and sit all over you. To protect
yourself, you should wear red trousers and hang a paper-bag from a nearby
tree.
6. I watched a video about how to tie the shoelaces on my trainers.
Seriously. Look into it; you need to create a ‘heel-lock’. LIFE-CHANGING.
7. I watched for shooting-stars and meteor showers from two
different locations (Lake Bled summer tobogganing slope, and the very beautiful arse-end
of nowhere in Southern France); apparently it’s in your peripheral vision that you will see the action because that’s where you detect black and white.
8. I thought I was getting more independent and sure of my
own mind as I get older; then a tiny old Slovenian woman broke me down and
forced me into a rowing-boat in 20 seconds flat. I am WEAK.
9. There is a tiny sleepy village in France where nothing
happens all year, except for a couple of weeks in August when 250,000 people
come to the Marciac Jazz Festival. It was incroyable.
10. Not much in Slovenia will kill you. In fact, the doctors
say you only have to worry about snakes if they BITE YOU IN THE FACE. And the
scorpions are so laidback that hospitals don’t even bother to carry
the anti-venom. SUPER.
11. Paris has the world’s biggest hot-air balloon, and you’re
more than welcome to go up in it for 10 minutes to admire the view. You are
not, however, allowed to take your ice-cream. But if you smile nicely and
complain a lot, maybe they’ll make an exception. So when you then drop it,
you’d probably better scoop it off the floor of the basket and eat it anyway,
right Daisy?
12. At a clog-maker’s workshop in the Pyrenees (YES!), I learned
about some special regional clogs with impressively long pointing-up toe bits.
They used to be weapons of war but are now mainly used for dancing.
13. Slovenians are the best at naming flavours of ice-cream;
collectively, we tried Cream Cake, Bled Bell Ringer and Grandma Cream.
14. My friends are great. They had amazing stories to tell
me about Peru, Rome, San Francisco, Africa, Vegas and Japan, not to mention
newly-hatched travel plans for Sri Lanka. They’re all busy being super and
successful, starting businesses, raising tiny babies, getting promotions, buying
houses, being pregnant, and I’m incredibly proud of all of them.
15. Don’t get me wrong. They’re also completely
mental. One of them confessed to compulsively tidying up public toilets when he’s
in them, another gets a daily email to tell her what NASA are up to, and one
spent most of his childhood in an imagined world peopled by Lion-O from the
Thundercats and most of the Transformers. And it turns out that in 2 couples I
know (who don’t know each other, incidentally) the boy makes an unusual bird-call sort of a
noise to attract the attention of the girl when in a busy environment like a
shop. Sure.
16. Most of all though, I realised how fricking creative and
interesting my friends are. Thanks to them, I’ve debated the ins and outs of
the SheWee, been privy to 2 dystopian screenplay-plots that I hope get written,
and learned about Disney imagineers, cheese-storage and Louisiana voodoo.
