My lovely frog.

yule blog

Merry Christmas guys and guyitas. I hope everyone is well, and particularly that nobody was caught up in any way in the recent tsunami disaster.

It's good to get home for the festive season, although I'm finally getting my face fixed this year, which does not exactly induce Christmas cheer. Nevertheless, it's been a good week, to be rounded off in traditional mode by getting shitfaced in Birmingham for New Year.
As a family we are not really into the whole "Baby Jesus says spend" side of it, but I did get a cool Lichtenstein print and a nifty giant wooden frog with realistic croaking action. Other Chrimbo highlights included an interesting discussion about the names of Santa's reindeer (one of whom my mother inexplicably thought was called "Chancer." This engendered the creation of "Pusher,""Dealer," "Gangster," "Drifter" and "Rudolph the White-Nosed Cocaine Deer"), and gleefully watching my parents try to figure out what to do with the kilogram of parmesan cheese I brought back from Italy.

Now, since I started this thing, numerous friends have been hammering away at their keyboards like an infinite number of monkeys, so I am pleased to announce the following new links: Brock and Yubi's interesting hyper-intellectual blog, although I'm still waiting for an update - come on, there are two of you!; Blondebutbright's americosceptofeministoliberalite type rantings from Amsterdam; and finally, Rachel Lynn's madcap adventures in Hongdaeland - notice the correlation between the two variables, "time spent at Kids Club hagwon" and "desire for 'closure' on Stuart Little".

Peace out (on Earth).

mirandola: città chiusa

Like all sensible people, Italians love an excuse not to work. This is not due to laziness, simply a refined appreciation of the spiritual value of sitting at home in one's dressing gown, eating, getting stoned and watching schmaltzy crap on TV. To this end, shops are closed at lunchtime, and on Sundays, Monday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, and there is of course a wide selection of public holidays so that you can watch such televisual delights as C'è Posta Per Te in the name of the Lord. One such public holiday occurred yesterday, reducing Mirandola, a wheezing old bag of a city at the best of times to utter, post-apocalyptic stillness. I'm not even sure what the holiday was in aid of, but the Mirandolese were having their day of rest and that was that. And not just one day. It's traditional (a fine excuse for irresponsible behaviour in any situation, as trick-or-treaters, Old Etonians and Freemasons everywhere will concede) if a public holiday falls on a Thursday, to skive off work on Friday too, thus forming a ponte (bridge). But yesterday was Wednesday! What of our traditional ponte? This dilemma has spawned the finest word in the language - not gnocchi, or cazzo (fine words both) but MAXIponte! It is a fair tribute to the industriousness of the Mediterranean skiving effort that there actually exists a word to describe a Thursday and Friday on which one skips work because the one-day public holiday unfortunately fell in the middle of the week. And it's great fun to say, too.

Viva MAXIponte!

debt in venice

And suddenly, for the third weekend in a row, I find myself in Venice. It's an obscenely expensive, sickeningly beautiful city. These two factors are a winning combination for the local tourist industry due to the well-known economic equation beauty+money=romance. People throw away their money in a conscious display of gay abandon, hence the 15 euros you can pay for a coffee in Piazza San Marco, the 55 euros I paid for my dingy hotel room, and the frankly absurd cost of this internet cafe, which ker-chings in at seven euros per hour (although you'd be hard-pressed to associate the place with romance in any way). Now I am bracing myself for the cost of tonight's meal. Nevertheless, it is worth it, because it's impossible to get bored of the Romeo and Juliet scenery, and the sounds of the gondolieri crooning and melancholy strings which seem to be triggered by your mood like a cliched soundtrack. Fede always says, in her enchantingly Italian way, that the colour of the lagoon in the morning is a sort of harbinger for the day to come - a reflection of your psyche - and I'm inclined to agree with her. It's sometimes electric blue, sometimes pea green, or white, brown or a sharky grey. In the same way, the natural resonance of Venice means it can be romantic, threatening, confusing or sad, depending on how you look at it and what's going through your mind at the time. Whichever it is, though, it is always quite intense.

x'è ben!

It's been such a long hiatus that I really don't know where to start. I could begin by stating the fact that I am, indeed alive, but this should by now be self-evident to all but the most dense of readers (whom I've already contacted to give him a headstart). I could apologise for not writing anything, but anyone genuinely upset by my lack of posts needs to take a long, hard look at where they're going in life. Besides, I have good, solid, personal reasons for not writing anything since October, but this isn't the time or the place. I could start with some pictures of the amazing Alhambra in Spain, the breathtaking Basilica San Marco in Venice, or anything else I've seen in the past seven weeks, but alas and alack, my girlfriend has my USB cable. I could make like an essay-by-numbers Cliffnote monkey and Google in a couple of quotations, but I don't have the time today. So, I reckon the best policy is just to ignore everyhting and pick up where I left off...

Here I am in a small internet shop virtually next door to the school where I'm now working, in a small town called Mirandola near Bologna. I've been here for a week now (Mirandola, not the internet shop, doofus), and have grown surprisingly fond of the place. It's typically, charmingly Italian - bikes clank along cobbled boulevards, and a silly number of ice-cream parlours and pasta shops vie for the custom of about 30,000 inhabitants, most of whom seem warm, chatty and open. The food is great and the vita is dolce. It may be out of the way, but it's easy to get to Bologna, and on Sunday I went to see Fede in Venice - on the train, travelling across the lovely countryside, I was struck very suddenly by the realisation that I was extremely lucky to be on a train in the Italian countryside on my way to see Fede in Venice. It's a feeling which, as any TEFL teacher knows, comes and goes.

On the whole, it tends to come in the evenings and weekends, and goes away again on Monday morning. That I'm sat on a stool in an internet shop is testament to the fact that my school is woefully under-resourced. No computers, broken tape-recorders, a tiny blackboard... Last week I caused a crisis by borrowing the (not a) red pen. Computer access, something I usually associate with educational environments, is at least five steps away... Despite all this, the hours are easy, and the students are great. After a year of "the dog is in/on/under/behind the box", with kids too young and too culturally removed from me to understand anything but basic slapstick humour, I relish every single joke made and every single minute of meaningful conversation in the classroom, so teaching adults has, for me, so far proved to be everything it's cracked up to be.

Well that's the background, for starters. Secondi piatti when I have the appetite for it...

the curse of el horno

Of course, being at home isn't all bad. I remember several people saying that the culture shock on returning home would be worse, and they were right (as "they" invariably are). Retrospectively, this is probably what put me in a bad mood before, but now I'm feeling rather more chirpy about having moved on from Korea - due in no small part to the fact that I am leaving in less than twelve hours for Venice. And that I returned less than 24 hours ago from a week in Spain.

Purchena, Andalucia, in fact, in my parents' house which goes by the comical name of El Horno. Now, I was led to expect a week of shovelling rubble out of a bombed-out ruin while gnarled Hispanic crones peer over the windows over their knotted knuckles, but I was quite wrong. Apart from the crones, anyway. One such thorny hag, the house's previous occupant, in fact, had thoughtfully left us a welcome note in the form of a scrap of soggy card in a tin in the pantry. Its message translated as, "a turd upon the head of those who henceforth live in this house." The doubting Thomases among you will doubtless say, "I doubt it," but it is absolutely true - El Horno is cursed.

Though there was very little evidence of head-oriented faecal apparitions, we did experience a plague of ants, the manchego cheese gradually became coated in a sort of creepy green ectoplasm, and I swear a poltergeist threw a chunk of plaster at my head one night while I was sleeping.

Beyond the blighted walls of El Horno, we distributed our time in healthy portions between lying on sandy beaches, munching on tapas, drinking San Miguel and wandering around the Alcazaba and Alhambra - two fairytale Moorish palaces of which I have beautiful photos but no means to post them at the moment.

Home - which is to say, Aslockton, a tiny village just far enough from Nottingham to qualify for Backwardness Class C - has been much better, too. There have been a few nights out, and I have been in employment, of sorts, as a kind of bumbling amateur IT person ("OK, here's a job for you. Can you please make Outlook go 'PING!' whenever I get a new email?").

Nevertheless, being, as I am, quite keen on the Rolling Stones, and no great fan of moss, it's time to embark upon another adventure, hooray! Who really knows what's in store, but if everything goes right, by this time tomorrow I'll be slurping on an espresso somewhere in the vicinity of Venice. More will be revealed in due course, but in the mean time, here's where you can join in the fun (in addition, of course, to all your fantastic comments, every one of which is read and appreciated)! What the funk should I call this thing? Clearly "Eastern Seoul" will no longer do, and I am at a loss. So, answers on a postcard, please - the lucky winner gets to have his or her entry printed in large letters across cyberspace forever. And ever. Until I move again.

By the way, more astute readers may remember that I was having some difficulty claiming my "no sick days" bonus from my hagwon bosses in Korea. Well, it would be unfair of me not to point out that, minutes before I left for the airport, at a time when they could very easily have fobbed me off, they decided I should have it after all. Sue saves the day yet again!

wanderlust for life?

"There is nothing worse for mortals than a life of roaming." -- Homer.

"If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a 'wandering to find home,' why should we not look forward to the arrival?" -- C.S. Lewis.

The change of pace when coming home is hard to deal with, even though it’s a demon I’ve confronted twice before. It feels like my parachute has opened prematurely on the skydive towards Real Life (can’t be far now; I can just make out a pack of rats putting on their running shorts, next to a man with a whistle and a chequered flag). Sure, it’s great to see my family. It’s wonderful to eat all the food I’ve missed. It’s nice to stand in the supermarket aisles in awe of the plethora of deodorant, cheese and leopardskin-print-free underwear available to me. But ultimately I find myself back in a tiny village, on a small island, with little to do.

In the words of many a barstool Socrates, it’s all relative, of course, and I’ll probably get used to it in time, but then again maybe I won’t. Perhaps I’m doomed to meander around for eternity…

The psychology of travelling is not a simple one. It is a common assumption, and in my opinion a rather hackneyed one, that people who move abroad must be running away from something. In fact, on several occasions I have come across a certain kind of prejudice against those of us who refuse to sit still, preferably on a swivel chair behind a computer in a cubicle. I mean, hell, there must be something wrong with you if you can’t "make it" at home. While I know this to be true in many cases (a friend in Madrid used to refer to the breed of psychotic loser peculiar to teaching in Asia as "TEFL trash"), in my experience a lot of travellers are a lot more stable and better adjusted than their counterparts at home, not least because of the enlightening effect of travelling itself. This is not to say that there isn’t an element of escapism in teaching abroad – if there weren’t, what would be the point of going anywhere in the first place? But would those who bitch jealously about people "running away" from their "responsibilities" (even more laughable, considering our unmarried, debt-ridden station in life) just as readily accuse somebody who chooses escape through a love of music or films, a voracious book habit, or a passion for sport, of irresponsible desertion? I doubt it. Of course, the supreme irony is that while most of us on the TEFL circuit are happy to see out one year’s contract after the next, without any illusion of anything big waiting around the corner, the vast majority of recent graduates see their jobs as a stop-gap while they look for something they actually enjoy, usually for several years. Who’s "making it" now?

Well, for now at least I’m determined to try and enjoy the tranquillity of the English countryside. At this point in time, I am surrounded by grass and trees, I cannot hear anything beyond the whining of the cooling fan on my hard drive, and I am certainly not within 25 metres of another human being. All of these are things I haven’t experienced in over a year now. Besides, while my feet take a break, my head and heart are already taking root in Northern Italy, which is my next port of call. And who knows, perhaps my last…