Becoming Irish

As stated in my last post, I spent a few wonderful weeks in Europe with Mum and Dad. However, all good things come to an end and eventually I had to leave them and fly to Ireland. I have always wanted to go to Ireland since I was very young (although part of that may have been because the capital was called Dublin which coincides with a famous horseriding brand), and now it was happening.


I arrived in Dublin and spent two nights there. In Dublin I brought meaning to the name of this blog by falling over the cobblestones. After that I headed up to Belfast to visit a friend from school. Belfast was very cool. Not too busy and a lot of interesting recent history with some tenseness with the residual effect from some of these. After that I spent a few nights in Galway to register for uni before heading up to a small village called Arvagh with a friend from back home. His parents ran a hotel there and I was convinced it was fawlty towers, I tried Wakeboarding fro the first time there.. which was interesting. After that I headed to Sligo before heading back down to Galway to try and sort everything out.


Galway is a beautiful village. It is coastal with lots of canals which makes for lots of nice places to run. It has a latin quarter which is cobble stoned and packed with pubs and restaurants and a lot of buskers. It is a very vibrant city and very compact. Its population is only 75,000 but this is over quite a small landmass. I worked a shift at a night club on the first Monday that the students came back to town. The club opened at 11pm and there was over 150 people queued up before it had even opened! It was hectic. I have a flat sorted which I shift into tomorrow which I am very happy about. The flatting situation here is ridiculous and there is a lot of people desperate for flats and getting scammed by landlords so I was very lucky to find a place a few weeks ago.

I have now been in Ireland for nearly two weeks and my main observations are:
1. Irish people are friendly - people say NZers are friendly, and we are, but the Irish are a different kind of friendly. People in pubs and bus stations will strike up conversation with you and invite them round for dinner at their aunt's nieces brothers. People are profusely apologetic if they are even the smallest inconvenience and cars will stop in the middle of the street just so you can get across the road.
2. No one understands me when I say what my name is - this has become such a common occurrence that I genuinely have this internal debate when I introduce myself which goes something along the lines of 'Oh crap.. Do I say it with an English accent? Or do I say Jessica, or do I...' by this stage I have paused for so long that it gets a bit awkward so I then have to explain this whole story which I have just done now so that it doesn't seem like I have social anxiety, or don't know my name or something. Yeah, I'm working on that.
3. Paperwork to be able to live in a country sucks - I have been in Galway on and off for the past week and am slowly getting closer to getting through all the paperwork to be properly registered. It's the kind of situation where person A says you need this from person B then person C says you need this from person Q then person A is only open during these hours then person Q doesn't want the integration to go smoothly and person C just has a vendetta against you.
4. People know quite little about New Zealand - A lot of people assume that NZ is a tropical paradise... even though we are very close to Antarctica, but figuring out where on the globe we are is a whole different kettle of fish. My personal favourite though was being asked if we are called kiwis because we eat a lot of kiwifruit. My response was, well yes, and that's why they call you potatoes isn't it?



Anyway, things are gradually falling into place. Uni starts next week.
Hope you're all well
Much love
Jess xo

My week as a Londoner

Disclaimer: the app I downloaded to write this doesn't allow me to upload photos so the blog posts will be boring until I figure that one out.

In order to avoid my 22nd NZ winter, I packed up my bags and left for the continent. I landed in London and had possibly the easiest customs encounter in my history of Heathrow customs encounters. Either I don't look as young as naive as I used to, or saying 'I'm going to do my masters in Ireland' is a code word for easy passage into the country. Either way, success.

I spent about a week in London and played tourist for a few days before venturing out to further away and hopefully less populated places. My first tourist expedition it rained.. For most of the day. There's a lyric by a band called the national where they say 'you must be somewhere in London, you must be loving your life in the rain, you must be somewhere in London, walking everyday'. My first few days in London really exemplified this as I walked about 18kms a day.. In the rain.  

 

Anyway, I mastered the tube pretty quickly (and learnt from that that there are times when you should definitely not use the tube) which meant I could then use this ingenious piece of public transport to go further afar than Clapham and Big Ben. I gravitated towards places that had parks and water because I like them. I went to 'little Venice'.. Which seemed like someone who hadn't actually been to Venice was like 'hey these canals are so totally like Venice'. And the other person was like ok Jim, whatever you say. 

 

I also saw the famous blue door from Notting hill and wandered through the suburb of Chelsea.. Whereby I really felt my wealth (or lack of). By these days the sun was making an appearance so I ventured out to the parks. I explored Hyde park (where there's a secret pet cemetery.. Cool) and the watched the swans go upside down under the water cos it looked funny. I also explored st Dunstans in the east which is the ruins of a Church which is now a communal picnic place, as well as St. Paul's cathedral and Hampstead Heath. 

 

 

By now this 'heatwave' has hit and it was very hot.. Perfect time to jet off to even hotter weather in Portugal! All in all a great week... I could totally pull of being a Londoner but not just yet maybe. For now I'm happy being a nomad.

Peace and Aroha

J 

Don't question it... It's China

So my China adventures have finished. Yes, they may have finished a few weeks ago but since then I haven't been in a constant place with good internet for very long so here is my 'China is over' blog post.

China. People ask me how I found China and the words that I say about 94.5% of the time are 'interesting.. interesting but good'.

Our two main quotes of the trip were 'don't question it', and 'it's China'. Sometimes these just combined into 'Don't question it, it's China'. Because at the end of the day you were best to not question it, accept that it was the fact, and move on with your day. This mantra applied to situations such as when we had no money and the banks would not give us the emergency cash visa international promised us or where there were no buses going to that place because.. well because it's China.

Obviously...

Romantic lover wine because it's China

In saying that, there were some definite highlights. As I have said in my last post, Tibet was great. 10/10. End of story. Another highlight was Juizhaigou. This was a national park. It had nice scenery but turned out to be pretty hard to get to and none of the banks there accepted our cards so we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere (pretty much) with no money. Shout out to our buddy Mark for helping us out there. 7.5/10.

 

In Chengdu we saw the Pandas. That was pretty cool. They didn't move an awful lot and just ate heaps. But they looked like fun to cuddle and had nice personalities. 8.5/10.

Babies cuddling

We ate hotpot, saw a giant Buddha and ate some sweet tofu and steamed buns in Chengdu too. Also fun, but Pandas took the cake for Chengdu highlights (literally.. cos they eat heaps).

Steamed-bun-goodness

Giant Buddha

We went to the Avatar mountains in Zhangjiajie. If you google it you can see some pretty epic pictures. We got fog and mist... But we saw monkeys and they were pretty cool. 7/10.

What Google shows

What we saw

Monkey

Finally to escape the cold we went to Sanya, a tropical island off the south of China. There we ate mango, lay on the beach and explored some rain forests. We also went to a beauty pageant because, well.. it's China. Upon returning from a pageant event one night I was told by the hostel manager 'Wow you look pretty.. I didn't know you could look pretty. Seeing you around here the last few days I wouldn't have thought that but WOW'. I bit my tongue and said 'thanks'.. which was pretty nice of me seeing as by the end of my time in China my 'being-nice-to-dickheads-fuse' was pretty short. Luckily it was sunny there and I had been swimming that day. Sun and exercise generally make for a less grumpy Jess. 8.5/10.

Beach

'Tropical Forest'

Beauty Pageant final

So in conclusion, China was a pretty crazy but cool experience. I learnt a lot and had a fair few pretty unique experiences. There were many laughs and great memories made. But now it's time to get back to reality and apply for jobs and unis all the while awaiting my next big adventure!

MASSIVE shout-out to Steph for surviving this adventure with me

Stay Golden everyone.
Peace and Shaka
J x