"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words."
This is my good friend Symon, who is still living in sunny Sydney. We have shared stories, laughter, silliness, axnts, holidays, places to live, cafe breakfasts, music and many more things over the last 13years. He likes the cold and the rain (as long as he is inside), the colour green, frogs, dogs and all things shiny like a magpie.
He lives in a great loft style studio which hes made his own and gets to walk to work in the city past views such as this... which he enjoyed rubbing in, when i wes there to leave Sydney behind and come to London!..
He is a true friend and I will miss him greatly now that I am in London.
I hope that he finds the strength to follow his dreams..
This is Symon hanging upsidedown..which is a very Symon thing to do....
My Life is so complicated right now!. So no posts on here for over a month, sorry folks. After my gorgeous little English countryside trip in early October it was time to sort my life out and figure out what the bloody hell I was going to do next. Now generally I find it hard to decide what to have for dinner let alone what life choices to make. I had however had the feeling that I wantd a bit of a change on embarking on this adventure so I did put all my stuff in storage. Now after much deliberation I've decided to give living in London another bash, this time hopefully living and working fairly centrally. So this week ive been back in Sydney going through 10 years of aquired stuff, Ebaying and donating and generally stressing over lists of things to do - but this Friday is it - flying back to London. Meanwhile on my hastily arranged flight back to Sydney last week I did manage to squeeze in a 2 night stopover in San Francisco. This was a welcome break from all the organisation and stressing, it was nice to feel 'on holiday' again. I hadnt been in San Francisco for about 20 years. The last time i remember deliberately dropping my guide book in a cafe and mumbling something in deliberately emphasised Queens English in a (successfull) attempt at picking up a local. We ended up on a mini break up through the redwoods. I used to love how shallow people were about a twinky 21 year old with an English accent!. I have to say it doesnt quite have the same effect when youre 42 with a mongrel pommy/aussie accent!. Anyway i very much enjoyed wandering about and taking my snaps. Could be the last set for a little bit so enjoy
Loved it - needless to say, after the first two, there wasnt much doubt this one would be a winner too. A friend wss saying to me the other day, she wasnt going to read these becuase everyone was and they they were books for people who didnt normally read. I say - beleive the hype, they really are great page turner reads, they are smart and clever and unusual. Great characterisation. I love the Swedish setting, with Swedish sensibilities and a very modern socially sound feeling to them. This ones very phychological - Lisbeth spends much of the book within one room but still manages to be a captivating central character. Blomqvist is the new James Bond - actually i was a little dissapointed with him copping off with yet another character in this one as it was a little too Bondy but i still like his no strings relationship with Berger. I must admit although it can never be the same - i think i would quite like someone to continue to write sequels to these -preferably a Swede
At the start of October I came back to the UK and went of for another lovely B&B break with Mum and Dad for more English Heritage and pub dinners. Lovley jubbly. We went to Sherborne Abbey with its incredible gothic arches and fan vaulting. I loved the light streaming in. This photo was inspured by that famous portrait of the Queen at her coronation in Westminster Abbey with that dramatic depth of field and arch behind her..
We went for a forest walk near Golden Cap on the coast, Forde Abbey and Athlehampton Manor.
Classic French bodice-ripper based around various plots to free the captive Marie Antoinette in French Revolution Paris. Bit slow to start and in danger of being as deathly awful and grim as Dickens' Tale of 2, from the same era. Its not easy to sit through grim as grim can be Paris with heads rolling left right and centre, im very loathe to pick up the lengthy Les Mis now. In Dumas style though, there is humour and it does reach a swashbuckling page turner pace for the 2nd half. Really not a patch on Count of Monte Cristo or Queen Margot though unfortunately.
Its hard to believe that just last week I was eating dumplings in cold and rainy Poland. It was quite a shock to the system after the Middle East and Greece, my first reminder of the general climate of Northern Europe that I was raised in. The sun surprisingly has decided to show itself again in the UK where I am now. It comes across as a pretty prosperous and livable city and I enjoyed spending some quality time with my parents there.
Krakow is one of only a handful of cities in Europe lucky enough to emerge from the war, architecturaly (if not emotionaly) unscathed and has an extremely well preserved medieval old town as well as an impressive hilltop castle - the 'Wawel', seat of the Polish kings and site of thier coronations and burials. We did also manage to get out of the town and visited Czestochowa monastary, home to the much 'Black Madonna', so much revered in Poland that it was officialy crowned Queen and Protector of the Polish Nation and is believed to be responsible for several miracles. Despite the years of Communist rule, Poland came across as fervently and devoutly Catholic, no doubt partly due to Pope John Paul II being from here - something they are clearly very proud of. I had a momentary panic while taking my turn to file past the icon when everyone in front of me decided to get down on their knees and proceed to work their way round the chapel like that. I wasnt quite ready to join them. On the way back from Czestochowa we stopped off at Pieskowa Skala Castle which has a section of the Wawel museum based there and an interesting collection of historical furnature (doesnt sound that gripping I hear you cry! - I really am quite a nerd at heart.)
Without trying to be too preachy, not everyone has the opportunity to get out and see stuff in the world, sometimes people have not been able to travel outside their own town, and perhaps due to the media they are fed by which ever governement they live under (North Korea's been popping up on BBC World alot in the last few days), they may have a pretty limited understanding of the larger world around them. I always feel a certain responsibility to myself to learn as much as I can while I'm traveling. A good day is a day that sends you to Google to research something further.
Without setting out for it to be that way, this trip has been quite a religeous education for me. As I've said previously, I dont hold any strong religious beliefs, but at the same time, the concept, culutural traditions, shared beliefs and historical backgounds of the major religions is fascinating and learning more gives you a much deeper understanding of the world today. It just so happened that Ive ended up travelling through Biblical lands and Muslim countries and now in Krakow I am in what was once one of the most important centres of Jewish culture in Europe. I say 'was' in that there are now only approximately 200 practicing Jews in the city following the devastation of the war, but then it is still a major site of Jewish pilgrimage and has the grave of a prominent Jewish holy man. We hired our own local guide to give us a walking tour of Kazimerz, the historical Jewish disctrict. We visited Synagogues and learned alot about Jewish culture and traditions.
Learning stuff is not neccesarily always a fun experience either - our next stop was the site of the wartime ghetto, where the local Jewish population were moved into and literally walled in - a starting indication of the deliberate cruelty was the fact that the ghetto walls were made in the shape of Jewish tombstones. Close to there was the Oscar Schindler factory. with an excellent newly completed exhibition on Nazi occupied Krakow. Not an easy exhibition to go around, even though it was housed in a place linked to an uplifting message - i.e the thousand or so jews on 'Schindlers List' who he managed to save.
Finaly an experience which is hard to describe and whilst certainly not being enjoyable, was profoundly moving and again a travel experience to learn and take something away from - Auschwitz.
I found the diverging train tracks at Auschwitz II - Birkenau, where someone had left flowers at the junction quite symbolic as essentially when people arrived at the camp and got down from the trains the first thing that happened was the 'selection' where they would either go to the left if deemed fit enough to work or to the right - straight to the gas chambers and cremetoria if not.
Also very effective for putting things into perspective were the collections of possessions found in warehouses on liberation of the camps. When you look at the piles of shoes, shaving brushes or suitcases and really imagine each one belonging to a different person, and that these were just a tiny proportion found there at the end, it gives you some idea of just how many people passed through these camps where in the words of Rudolph Hess, the only way out was through the cremetoria chimneys. And then of course this collection of 3 camps was not the only one in operation in Europe.
I've been joined in Krakow by my 80 year old parents who were in their early teens during the war. My mother found the Auschwitz camp experience particularly unsettling I think, as she remembers very strongly feeling petrified as a girl of the Germans being succesful in their attempt to invade Britain and what would happen to her if they did. As it was they lived through the air raids and remember the bombs. It does make you think how lucky you were to be born in a certain place though - i.e on an Island as opposed to just over the border from Nazi Germany.
