Happy new year folks! Just back from almost 4 weeks of traveling which was amazing, a truly incredible past few weeks it's been. I did have another journal/diary on this trip, which was fantastic given the number of long train rides/spare time/waits at airports I managed to accrue this time! Which also equates to alot of junk which I might or might not be recording down here as well, so be prepared!
Well here's the important stuff first. A massive shoutout and thankyou to every single person who remembered my birthday and celebrated it, wherever you might have been in the world and whichever time zone you might have happened to find yourself in! I personally hate celebrating my birthday, but friends and family (which I hope you consider yourself) like you guys make it all worthwhile and make me look forward to it year after year! Cannot help but feel such a sense of joy and contentment every time I see a video, card, picture or whatnot (up to and including facebook wall posts) wishing me a happy birthday! I try my best to ignore it and dismiss the fact that I'm entering adulthood (am I really 21 already?!) but you guys make it impossible to do so, and I thank you for that.
Specific thanks goes to a blast from the past, also one Brenda Liew. It started off harmlessly enough with a question about Oyster cards and ended up with my spending Christmas and happily, New Year as well with new friends and a lot of fun! Don't think I could have asked for a better group of almost-strangers (I definitely was one to them) to have been traveling around with, so I'm incredibly thankful for that as well! I can't imagine I would have been so accommodating if some random guy suddenly said he'd tag along for a couple days of my eurotrip, so I guess I'm still pretty incredulous about the whole thing!
So I definitely want to thank Brenda for introducing me to her friend.. I mean friends, of course. Hahaha. That's the long-suffering Yann Qi, Geraldine, Yixuan (from JJ, which I had no idea about before the trip), Edwyna, Huiyi and although only for less than a day, Casper gege as well! Despite all their best efforts to make me extremely awkward.. I think I'll be making another, much longer post about my trip so I'll hold off for now! But thanks guys for spending both Christmas and the New Year and incidentally my birthday with me, it was a pleasure!
This is actually my end of year/start of 2013 post, in case anyone was wondering.. I do think that the end of every year is yet another opportunity for a stock-take, an assessment of one's own life and indeed a chance to acknowledge how blessed one is. Because that's what I feel almost without fail, year after year. Blessed. There could be excerpts here and there from my little travel diary, which I'll italicize.
I woke up on 31st December at 4.15am and decided I'd go out for a walk. It's not something I'd normally do if I were traveling on my own, cause I'd relish the extra sleep instead, but traveling in a group offers precious little in the way of privacy, or private time I guess, since it's not so much about the privacy but the time you get to spend alone. As I found out during my lengthy confinements in MIDS, but I've gone over that to death now. So I tried to silently put on my coat boots etc and snuck out of the hotel. It suddenly occurred to me then that that was the last day of the year. It's only too easy to lose track of time and days when you're traveling, so I was pretty surprised.
"What was 2012 like for me?" I could not help but ask. It was pretty good, I guess. The end of my first year abroad, my first time on board ship for VA, not being able to go to Africa, my last few meetings with my aunt, as well as visiting my grandma in the hospital/home. UK trip and Italy and Hong Kong with favourite friends, back in the UK again and church and a social life for once. Amsterdam and Belgium and Germany and Switzerland. Not a shabby year by any means.
Moving on from the past that's been holding me back for too long, learning to embrace the person I used to be, the person I am, and hopefully perhaps shaping the person I'm going to be. Growing up. Learning to cope with new situations and new people and learning to appreciate it all. I think I've grown. Guess I can say I'm 21 without feeling ashamed about that. I'm feeling a lot more comfortable about and with myself now, slowly figuring out piece by piece who I am. Or the who I am meant to be. Able to be myself more now, without constantly worrying about what people think about me, slowly but hopefully surely losing all that self-consciousness which has all too often in the past directed my actions, dictated the way I behaved.
Almost every time I travel I begin to have these thoughts about self-identity and who I am etc, which I think is quite a natural thing. I just read this thought-catalogue thing about people who live abroad which I thought quite good. "You start talking to yourself, asking yourself questions and answering them." I think this bit is definitely true. So forgive me if I do seem to be harping on all this a fair bit, I do think it's a natural by-product of traveling and living alone!
The year is drawing to an end.. So's my trip. The other way around, to be honest. Years ending have not meant all that much to me, so I've been counting down to the end of my trip rather than the year. Maybe it's the courses/schoolyears running across the new year. Or a growing disillusionment with the idea of this arbitrary new start which the new year offers. Although, what starts are there other than arbitrary ones?
Well yeah. I got slightly distracted after this so I wasn't able to continue on from this diary entry. I was going to go on to state that all starts, all new beginnings, are essentially arbitrary ones. The start of a new day, the end of the year, whatever it may be, if you want to start something you have made the conscious decision to do it, whether you peg it to any sort of significant date or event or what not. That's sort of what I was thinking, anyways, cause I realized that I might have been a little harsh in previous years on the subject of the new year and its transformative powers.
I am feeling rather positive about 2013, to be honest! Too often I (and many other people too) try to downplay my expectations so I don't get disappointed, but I've been imbued with a new sense of confidence about the coming year! It's definitely linked to my growing self-awareness, or maybe the term is self-acceptance instead. It's sort of a feeling that come what may, life will go on and I will continue to live and learn, I will continue to grow, and what more can one ask for? Of course it helps that I had a great start to the year, although having been back for almost 24 hours all I've done is eat, and domestics like laundry and unpacking and very mundane stuff, although I did just shave my head so that's quite exciting... 2013 is going to be good I can feel it in my toes.
Actually I just did my expenses and realized I spent 1200 pounds, almost 1300 on my Christmas trip. That's terrible, my word. I guess alot of it came down to the bloody german trains, they were incredibly expensive! Average of 80 euros each, I think, and I took 4 of them? Why is I so stupid. Should have bought an Interrail, sigh, foolishly thought tickets would cost an average of 40-50 euros. What a difference half an hour of research would have made! Meh. Feeling pretty sad right now..
Erm, I pretty much lost all semblance of structure right there, this is not turning out to be the end of year post I thought it'd be. Oh well what does it matter. What else did 2012 give me? I'm not sure what else I have to add. I guess there was Yang Liu, the chinese girl I met in Cinque Terre. I think I'll always fondly remember that trip, and her! It was such a random thing, and I guess you could even say pointless cause nothing came out of it, but I'd beg to differ. A brief connection in a world where connections are so hard to come by, a thoroughly enjoyable 10 hours in the company of another, instead of spending my entire trip submerged in the depths of solitude, that's an end in itself. She made an impact to my trip, and thus my year, and therefore my life. And I can only hope I had a positive impact on her too! Probably one of the more special things to come out of 2012 for me, sounds very Before Sunset/Sunrise haha. I say that but I haven't watched those 2 movies yet, I really must sigh. But essays come first.
I think it means something to me precisely because it was such a brief, fleeting thing. Which is gonna segue nicely into my next post, which comes straight out of my travel diary! Was written while I was at Genève airport with the daunting prospect of spending the next 14 hours there.. So here goes.
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