Archive for the 'life' Category
I have
1) totally cock-blocked my single dorm mate - ‘oh are you sleeping here tonight and going to bed now?’ — “rarrr dunk sleep now”!
2) green alcohol dripping from my beard - okay not entirely true most of it is on my shirt now.
3) had way too much tequila.
I was sober 90 minutes ago, now I can type but I’m having trouble speaking.
I’m going to stop typing now because anything further I would say would incriminate myself.
01.04 Mexico City Mexico. Thursday January 1st 2009!!
So we come to the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009
Looking back on 2008, I don’t really know where to begin. It has been the most challenging and the least challenging 12 months of my life. I don’t see how I can’t call it the best year of my life, on paper nothing else compares but I’ve had some good years down the line I guess.
I could list things that I’ve done or moments that have just been perfect but that would be quite boring. I could fill out one of those year in review memes that are floating around but that would just be incriminating.
I have visited 18 new countries and 4 new continents. I’ve seen and done things that I would never have expected. I’ve this and I’ve that and I could go on and I could go on.
I have, and I may well come back and review this down the line. In fact I suspect that when I’m back in London I’ll wrap up the travels here and that will cover a lot of this, but I have decided that there are two things to do to wrap up the year.
Firstly and most importantly. I’d like to say ‘thank you’ to everyone that I’ve met throughout my travels. I’d name names but there are way too many and I’d forget almost as many as I struggle to put a list together and then I’d start picking people out (you know who you are anyway) and so I’ll just leave it as a massive ‘thank you’ to everyone. It’s been a blast.
Secondly, in the cut below are 12 photos covering perhaps even defining January through to December 2008. I’ve tried not to just pick pictures of places and experiences but to pick pictures that encompass that and more. Some months were tougher than others, and tomorrow I might not even pick any of these but that’s for here and now (Here, in case you might be interested are my photos that I picked for 2007).
Now as I move into 2009 I’m optimistic, yes I’m feeling fine thank you, I’m optimistic that it’s going to be a good year. I’m worried about getting a job and paying bills (ye gods, I need a job and my tax return like yesterday please!) but I’m always worried about things like that. I am looking forward to seeing both old and new friends. I’m looking forward to taking it easy for a while. I’m looking forward to taking some photos. I’m coming close to the end of tourism and I’m hugely keen to put some effort into taking I don’t know what the word is, I’d say artistic but that would be pretentious as all fuck, so I dunno. You know what I mean? I’m looking forward to being able to cook dinner. I’m looking forward to going to some gigs. I’m looking forward to a new Springsteen album, I’m looking forward to a new U2 album. I’m looking forward to some new music. I’m looking forward to 24 and Lost and I’m looking forward to seeing Star Trek (opening night baby, you better believe it!). I’m looking forward to going to Dublin and I’m looking forward to going to Munich and I’m looking forward to going to Cornwall.
I’m looking forward.
2009 will start well. I’ll still be doing a little bit of travelling and I’ll be seeing friends pretty soon. Then when I get back to London I get to take all my stuff out of storage and I get to set it all up. I get to have bookshelves!!
So new year, new me? Nah fuck that. If there’s a new me I’m already that new me (see ramblings from a few days ago), that doesn’t mean I haven’t got a resolution or two of course… or four or five. I can boil them all down into a simple few words and indeed I’d go as far as to suggest they are words to live by; don’t fuck this up.
But as I say, I’m optimistic.
22.25 Mexico City, Mexico. Tuesday December 30th
Continue reading ‘The best you can is good enough’
It appears that Switzerland is trying to get in touch with me via Patrick.
To this I can only say: WHAT THE FUCK?
Monday morning brings me an English language newspaper, the January issue of Wired and a Caramel Macchiato. Such is the return to civilisation.
So Mexico. Alright well I landed and I filled out my immigration and customs sheets, the latter entirely in Spanish, I was very impressed with myself. So I join the foreigners queue and in less than 10 minutes I reach the desk and I hand over my passport and my completed documents. She doesn’t even look at them and asks me for my ID. I point to my passport and she asks me for ID and then asks me a third time. I’m not sure what’s going on and I tell her that she has my passport and she says yes now she’d like my ID please. I tell her that all I have in the line of other photo ID is my diving license (note that’s diving, not driving!) and I get that and all of a sudden everything is fine. She looks at that, then she looks at my passport and asks me if it’s my first time in Mexico. I say yes and she says I should enjoy my stay and off I go.
My diving license for fuck sake, it’s by no means a form of ID. Though that reminds me I bought the tickets for the polo final in BA on my credit card and they required photo ID for credit card transactions and accepted by diving license. Hmm.
Right so then it was off through customs and I had a free phone number to call to get the hostel transport out. I tried ringing this for about 10 minutes and got no answer at all. I changed some cash so I had some Pesos and then tried again. Still no answer. Not really being in the mood to try the subway, aside from that it was dark and late there was a walk at each end. So I figured fuck it I’d get a taxi. Now the hostel transport was to cost Mex$100 (did anyone know that the $ symbol is actually Mexican and that’s where the US dollar came from originally? No, me neither!) and it would mean waiting 30 minutes for them to get there. So I was pretty surprised to find out that cab would cost Mex$125 and was ready now. Ok that’s 25% more but it’s about one pound more (Mex$20 = 1GBPish) So into a taxi and off to the hostel.
So the hostel, well it’s a hostel and the dorms a dorm. The beds are okay, I have a bottom bunk which is always good and there are lockers in the room which is always good. There’s free decent wi-fi and the showers are pretty good. However it’s loud, the music is loud and late. I’ll have to dig out my ear plugs. It’s also 24 hour which I can’t really complain about but it means that people are coming and going through the dorm all through the night. So I’m usually woken a couple of times during the night and then wide awake before well before 9am. Oh well. I have had the strangest dreams the past couple of nights…again. I don’t know why but I assumed the Mexico City was at sea level, it’s not. In fact it’s exceptionally high up with a minimum altitude of 2200 metres. I thought my sinuses were just playing up from the flight. I guess not. Man oh man oh man I’ve had enough of this.
It’s not actually cold here as I previously thought. The hostel is cold but once you step outside into the sunshine it’s mad hot. Not quite as bad as Santiago or Buenos Aries but it’s still nice and hot. It is, of course, getting dark much earlier than it had been for the past while. The joys of being back in the Northern Hemisphere.
The hostel location is excellent. I’m about there blocks from the Plaza de la Constitución (Zócalo) which is the main square in the city. It’s supposedly the second largest in the world after Red Square in Moscow but I’m pretty certain that Tiananmen square was about twice as big. Anyway so the location is excellent and I’ve been wandering a bit. There’s any kind of shops around that I might need and plenty of places to get food. It’s not really the going out area as far as I can tell and no sign of an Irish pub of course.
Now on the subject of an Irish pub. While I have not managed to find a pint of Guinness here yet, I have taken part in a Guinness world record instead! The largest ice rink in the world is currently setup in the Zocalo and while there are queues and queues to enter, getting there early on a Monday morning means it’s not so bad. And so in the last few days of December in the melting sunshine I’ve been ice skating in Mexico City.
I think that perhaps sums up my 2008.
13.25 Mexico City, Mexico Monday December 29th.
Dear internet.
Please provide some entertainment.
Thanks in advance.
love
Dave
Okay. LAN is now officially the best airline I’ve ever flown on. Aside from the awesome customer service that I’ve mentioned before, I’m sitting here in normal economy class, I have enough room to fully stretch out my legs and then space to spare. I have two seats to myself so I have a window where I’m occasionally watching the western coast of South American pass me by. As if this wasn’t good enough and it’s good enough, I have my laptop plugged in! Every seat onboard has a plug with no power adaptor required! Not only that but there are two USB ports for charging built in too! How awesome is that? How stupid do I feel for not putting a couple of DVD’s into my carry on just in case?
So I’m sitting here and I’ve been listening to some music first some random stuff on the in-flight selection (pretty decent all round) and now on my charging iPod. I have been looking out the window and I’ve been thinking. I can’t tell you what I’ve been thinking about, it’s not been much. I’ve just been thinking.
We are just about to pass by Lima. I’m not sure if we are close enough that I’ll be able to see anything but I’m hopeful, it would be nice. I just realised that I’m going to be leaving the Southern hemisphere today too, I had kinda forgot about that. I hope that the pilot says something when we get to the line or the map flashes up some info, it won’t mean anything but I’d still like to know. I’m still in shock that I’m plugged in here, this is awesome. Anyway I crossed into the Southern Hemisphere way back when on a flight from Hong Kong to Cairn’s Australia, taking a quick look back it seems that was on June 4th, so that makes about six and a half months spent down here, how time sometimes flies. Not that it did really but it doesn’t feel like that was so long ago.
It does mean that I’ll be flying from summer to winter. The solstice recently was of course for the longst day of the year, there was still daylight going on 10pm in the evening. That won’t last much longer and of course it’s going to be cold. Hurrah, cold. Hmm. I shall need a jacket.
I have been trying to write something about the music of 2008 for a couple of days now. Here I’ll try again. When I first started the real travel in March (as oppose to Egypt and some faffing around the start of the year), I was looking for some new music. Well I usually am so nothing new there. I had heard hype and hype and hype about MGMT and so typically I had ignored ‘em. I guess I’d at this point figured that I should chuck stuff on my iPod and see what happens along the way and one morning, I hit play and I love it. It was the soundtrack to the next few months and Time To Pretend and Kids still make me feel good, I was very happy to find a third version of Kids on that old album. Anyway I recall declaring even back then that it would be the album of the year and I didn’t think anything could come close.
How wrong I was. Now you know what’s coming here, without question Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago is the best album of 2008. Now hang on, yes I know. It was released in 2007. Well that doesn’t really matter. We can quibble as to an independent release versus a label release and many music blogs/mags have quibbled this and then quickly added reasoning as to why they have included it in their top album listings or not as the case may be.
Now then, I don’t care when it was released. When it was released limitedly and independently in 2007, it was the album of the year, I just didn’t know it then. When it got a full label release this year, it was the album of the year and if it gets some sort of release next year, well then it’ll be album of the year for 2009 too. With me? Alright good, I’d go on but it would be more hyperbole so I’m going to change tracks but not topic a little bit.
Having had three or four listens through to the 4 track EP Blood Bank I have reached a conclusion. Stereogum call their thoughts on leaks or early hints “premature evaluation” and I like that and I’m going to go with that. I reserve the right to come back to this down the line of course.
I can very easily see Bon Iver being a one hit wonder. Now that’s not to say that I don’t like the new stuff and it’s not that I’m not going to listen to ‘em some more but there’s nothing quite there to grab you like For Emma, Forever Ago. Now (sorry pause for a moment, I glanced out the window and the Andes are suddenly towering above the clouds - awesome!) let me try and explain this a bit. The album while it has a number of strong songs that stand, nay tower on their own, it’s very much an album. It’s a single piece of work and it tells a story. It’s about something and it’s filled with emotion, more so than anything else I’ve ever heard. The new tracks, and I’m going to press play on them again in just a moment to take another listen have little of that emotion behind them. For Emma, Forever Ago is the sound of a man coming to terms with the past and what was not to be and that’s the key. I don’t think that the EP or anything else that Bon Iver releases down the line is going to match up to this first album and you know what, I’m not sure I’d like to be proved wrong.
Sticking with music, it seems that you cannot go anywhere on the internet these days without seeing something about Fleet Foxes. I don’t get it, I’ve tried. I’m still trying (I’ve just clicked play) and it’s not bad I shall grant you that but I’m missing the genius that everyone else seems to be seeing there. I mean it’s good and all but where is anything to take it to the next level?
Alright I’m going to try and sleep for a little while now…
Before I do, I think that this entry’s lyrics are pretty witty (if entirely obvious) in context even if I do say so myself and I was actually listening to it this afternoon too!
16.47, somewhere around the Equator, South America. Saturday December 27th.
I’m sat in Ruby Tuesdays in Santiago airport. I’m one table away from where I sat last time nursing my head, gulping down Sprite like there was no tomorrow and trying to get some food down.
I feel pretty good this time and in fact since I work up this morning I’ve started to get excited about Mexico. I have no plans. I want to find something to do for new years, I may well just pay into an Irish bar somewhere and stay there for the evening. I’ll see what the craic is at the hostel too. I do want to do some Aztec temples(!) and some pre-Colombian pyramids(!!) and I want to get out and take some photos. I’d really like to find some penguins but I’m loosing hope…
I have been browsing Flickr in the past couple of days and I’m feeling like I’m wasting opportunities to take photos and so I want to fix that.
So yeah photos, new years, some culture stuff and up into the US.
It’s all good.
Is it too early to have a drink? I do have a 9 hour flight ahead of me…
Ohh I’m reading Carl Sagan’s Contact and while I did enjoy the movie, the book is excellent. I’m flying through it. Handily I have 4 more handy for the flight. Also a charged laptop but I’ve just realised I didn’t put any DVD’s into my carry on…fuck.
11.50 Santiago Chile Saturday December 27th.