Shopping makes me happy.
It really does make me happy - it's like a chemical effect or something.
At the moment my office is in a street off Oxford Street in London - the most famous shopping area here. This is bad.
December and January have been the worst months i've had since i left home. Everyone told me that Londoners get the winter blues during this time, buuuut i didn't really believe it would happen to me.
After i got back from Egypt i had to face the cold and the dark again, along with work and the freakin tube (work had moved to it's new location while i was away). And my very first Christmas without my family. Also, a lot of my friends had left the country for this time of year (they knew! - they knew better than to stay in London and watch each other contemplate suicide - why didn't i believe them?)
Plus i had to face up to the fact that i had waaaaay over spent on the Egypt trip, and hadn't really accounted for Christmas and New Years. After the regular expenses like rent and travel card, almost my entire December pay cheque went towards paying off my credit card and covering the holiday season. And to be honest covering all the Christmas parties during the two weeks before the holiday!. All the remaining money i used to buy very very basic groceries. Chicken breasts, frozen vegies, soup, bread, cheese - that's it for a month. No alcohol, no socialising (unless it was free activities), and NO shopping! On Oxford street! During the SALES!!!
It was torture. Not being able to go shopping made everything a whole lot worse. Because, even though i was down, a litlle bit of shopping every now and again would have given me something to look forward to, and it would have cheered me up! So it was bad.
I didn't get paid again until the end of January when all the salas are over. I have learned a very valuable lesson, and will never make this mistake again. Next year i will hoard money for the sales, and camp out on Oxford Street waiting for the stores to open. Or i'll just go on holiday. And i will be very very happy.
Because, in the best year of my life, January - has been the most boring and depressing month i can remember.
Thank god it's pay day tomorrow!!! And all the missing friends have started arriving back too! Yay!
Sooo to celebrate - i took the credit card out to Oxford Street at lunch time today. I spent two glorious hours shopping, and came back £100 lighter - but with a great big smile on my face. I'm still buzzing off it a couple hours later :-)
There's got to be some kind of scientific evidence to prove that shopping increases a womans seratonin levels...
I've been told that a study was done on the effects of shopping on men, and that it causes similar stress reactions to what you'd find in a fighter pilot or riot police.
Hahaha! You poor buggers. You don't know what you're missing out on.
Big smiles! I wonder how long this will last me :-)
Winter Wonderland...
It snowed! This is the first snow i've seen in London.
This is the pretty sight we woke up to yesterday:
By the time i left the house for work it was already melting and i almost broke my neck. The two minute walk to the tube station took 10 minutes.
I'm over the snow - but this morning we just had ice. Definitely don't like ice.
Diving in the Red Sea - Bells to the Blue Hole
I had the most amazing experience of my life in Dahaab.
Over the first couple of days Anna and i had been diving to complete our PADI Open Water Divers course here in Dahaab (we had started the course in London). We finished that and became officially qualified divers at around lunch time Wednesday. The rest of the people we were travelling with were going to go snorkling that afternoon at a place called the Blue Hole. It's a circular coral reef with a giant hole in the middle that goes to about 250 metres deep. So, our instructor Rachal suggested we go and dive it. Unless you're a qualified diver, you're only allowed to snorkel there, and even if you are qualified you have to have a local guide with you to make sure you're safe.
It sounded like a great idea, but once we got out there and sat down for the debrief before suiting up, i realised what we were actually going to do and started to get a little freaked out. I'm afraid of the sea in particular and any water that i can't see through in general. If i can't see then i don't know if i'm going to hurt myself on a rock, or sharp branch, or if something that will hurt me or eat me will come up behind me. I don't like touching something that i can't identify, slimey or moving things, in case they bite or sting me. Also, i'm afraid of being stuck. I just don't like the idea of getting stuck and being unable to move and then eventually dieing. All pretty normal i reckon! Any sane person would be afraid of that sort of thing...
What we were going to do is begin the dive by jumping into the water from a rock further up the coast at a spot called Bells, or the 'Pond'. It's a tiny version of the Blue Hole but much much narrower, like a tunnel. Ok, so i was going to have to jump blindly into water i can't see through completely surrounded by rocks on all sides. Then i would be in a tunnel that we'd have to descend to 18 meters in, then swim through until when we reached the end, and then as we come out of the tunnel of rocks to our left and right is an enourmous cliff face of coral reef. It is rated as the number one coral reef to dive for in the world. Below us and beyond us is what is known as 'the blue'. Where we come out and all along the entire section of coast line, the ocean floor is 2000 metres below us - they call that bottomless because no one can actually go that far down.
Then we follow the coral reef along for a half an hour or so until we reach the Blue Hole, while we do that we have to hug the reef because if we get too far away from it we'll be caught in a current and swept away, but at the same time we have to be seriously careful of not touching the reef, both for it's protection and our survival. Some of the most beautiful pieces of life can be poisonos or deadly. Once in the Blue Hole we can 'relax' a bit because it's sheltered and not so dangerous.
Right, so, after the debriefing i'm sitting there shaking in my swim suit - probably had a classic horrified expression on my face. But I haven't pulled out yet. With all our gear on waddling like ducks up the coast to the entry point i pass a section of cliff covered in varous memorial plaques in different languages. One of them is in english, and it's a memorial for a man that died diving here. Fuuuuuuuuck!!!!!!! - all of the plaques represent people who have died diving here!!! Not just shaking anymore, good and proper freaked out.
The hardest thing i've ever done in my life is jump into that rock tunnel. I was standing on the edge of the cliff , my feet shaking in my flippers, huge heavey tank putting me off balance, looking out at the dark surface of the ocean with darker rocks and unidentifieable shapes underneath - scared the bejeezus out of me. But i did it... and i didn't die! Yay!
As soon as i was under the surface, breathing and realising that i was ok, visibilty was perfect and crystal clear, everything was suddenly fine. The surface of the ocean is much scarier than being underneath it. It was still scary swimming through that tunnel, but once we came out in front of the cliff face - i have never seen anything more beautiful anywhere in the world. I cannot describe it well enough to do it justice. I just spent the next half hour staring about in dumb wonderment. I wasn't afraid, i was too amazed at the colours and all the crazy looking fish. It's like a magical brilliantly coloured garden. The fish aren't afraid of us, they swim around us and ignore us completely. There was a huge cloud of tiny golden fish that surrounded us, and bright purple fish as big as my hand, there were Nimo's and other tropical fish all over the place. We saw an octopus. At one point Rachal pointed at this huge rock, and i couldn't tell what she wanted us to look at, then the rock moved and it was an enourmous fish almost as big as i was. All kinds of different corals, hard ones, living ones - a swarm of baby seahorses, a sea snake! so so many things.
We had an underwater camera. We have a few cool photo's, but they are nothing compared to the real thing! It's so disappointing that the colours don't come out on film. I want you all to go and do the same dive immediatley so you can see for yourself what i'm talking about.
I'm definitely coming back to Dahaab next year to do more diving. Dahaab is about the only place in Egypt i'm in any hurry to see again. Although i do want to go back to the pyramids and the Sahara one day too.
After those five blissful days, it was back to London and work... to suffer through the British winter.
Egypt! - Part 2
We docked in Luxor, which is a gorgeous city with great market places. Here we went into the desert on donkeys to see Valley of the Kings, Queens & Workers. That was a lot of fun, there were no proper saddles and the donkeys liked to canter and trot.
The temples in Luxor were huge, the biggest and oldest ones of the lot.
After Luxor we drove across the desert again to Hurghada, we stayed the night there and the next day took a boat to Sharm el Sheik. From there we drove through the Sinai desert this time until we reached Dahaab.
Dahaab was my favourite city in Egypt. It's a new development, it was a small beach town full of fantastic restaurants and shopping. We had 5 days in Dahaab and we were pretty much left to our own devices - this was the relaxation part of the tour.
Except for the night we were supposed to climb Mount Sinai. I opted out of that wee adventure. To do it they left the hotel at 11pm, drove for three hours until the reached the base of the mountain. Then it took them about two - three hours to walk up the paths and the final stretch was a half hour walk up a flight of stairs that was originally built to punish people. Then they had to wait on top of the mountain in freezing temperatures below zero for the sunrise. The sunrise takes approximately 30 seconds, and you're up there with hundreds of other tourists. Then you face the climb back down the mountain, and the three hour drive back to Dahaab. All for a 30 second sunrise. I was happy with the sunrises we saw on the Nile - i didn't need to kill myself climbing a mountain to see another one.
Instead i went diving. I'll tell you about that in the next post.
Unfortunately blogger is not letting me upload any pictures, but here is the link to where i keep all my travelling pics if you want to take a look: http://michelleinlondon.spaces.live.com/
Egypt! - Part 1
In the last week of November and first week of December i went to Egypt with two friends. We joined the Oasis Overland tour.
I arrived with Anna & Rolly a day before our tour started so that we had a chance to check out Cairo first. Cairo is enourmous, there are approx 20 million people, and i reckon twice that many cars. It is an odd mix of east meets west - all the signs etc are in Arabic of course, i finally feel like i'm somewhere foreign and then you see a huge blaring sign in english for Pepsi, Cadbury, KFC...
There are some amazingly beautiful areas of Cairo, but most of it is what you'd expect a city of that size to look like. It seems as though there is a level of poverty here, but if you look closer, that's just the appearance in most cases. The streets need repairing, and there are no sidewalks to speak of, the buildings all look unfinished or falling down, but actually, we found out that if a structure is left incomplete, then they don't have to pay tax for it, and we're assured that the insides of the buildings are normal. There is a layer of dust over everything of course, and donkeys being ridden amongst all the traffic on the motorways. My god, the traffic is insane. It makes it really really fun trying to cross the road!.
Cairo is where the great Pyramids and the Sphinx are. I always thought i'd get to the Pyramids and get a sense of surrealism - they always seemed like something out of a story to me, not quite real. But when we got there, it was great to finally see them, but i think i had been well and truly introduced to the realism of Cairo by then. It's not a relaxing city at all.
We went inside one of the Pyramids, through tiny enclosed sloping tunnels only a metre high, only a couple hundred metres or so into the middle, and it was like stepping into an oven. I'm sooo glad we came in November and not July. It's been about 25 degrees here on average each day, but quite a lot colder at night time. Also in Cairo i went on my first camel ride! It's not that exciting really... a lot like horses :-)
The people in Egypt are interesting. Predominantly Arabic/Muslim - and even though tourism has been around in Egypt for awhile now, most people seem to be fascinated by us foreigners. There aren't a lot of women around, they're kept hidden away, and the ones you do see are covered from head to toe with only their faces and hands exposed. Pretty much everyone i've come across can speak english. In the hotels and restaurants we've been to we get excellent service, the staff are eager to please and to pratice their english. But out on the street it's a different story. We were told by our tour manager that just for our own benefit, rather than not to offend people, the girls should keep their shoulders and knees covered in the cities and towns. The culture here has the idea that all western/white women are easy and will willingly sleep with them or even marry them. It's the whole sex before marriage thing, the notion is that if your white then you think that's ok and if you're ok with it then you must be a whore.
It's such a different way of thinking, i can't get my head around it. Emily our tour leader is a British girl, and she says that its safer to walk around Cairo at night than it is London. All that happens is that you get about two dozen people staring at you every step you take, lots of people say hello and ask where you're from - just trying to get us to talk to them. A few of the younger or older ones will call out comments and offers! But no one approaches you or touches you, so it's a bit strange, but it's fine. There were only three guys on our tour (15 of us in total) and if we're wandering around with one of them, we're assumed to be their wives. All of us. Rolly has been told many times that he is lucky to have two such beautiful wives. And by beautiful they just mean white. That's fine as long as he doesn't offer to sell one of us for some camels...
It's different again in the market places and tourist areas, there they mostly just want your money and they know we're all a bunch of suckers that have no idea as to the true value of anything. It's a good place to practice my haggling skills - but after while you get quite worn out by fending off all the tradesmen trying to entice you into their stores. If you show the teeniest amount of interest then they get in your face hassling you for a sale and offering deals, following you down the street, asking questions to keep you there. And there's always three more a metre away to fight your way through. And after them are the children with post cards and crappy wee bracelets who follow you for ages and make you feel guilty. You're so busy either talking your way out of a sale, or rushing past the next guy to avoid the whole conversation again, that you barely get a chance to look at the goods. If they only understood how much business they're scaring away...
The obsession with white skin is strange. There is an ad on tv here of an Egyptian girl who tries to get a job as a news presenter but she gets turned down. then she gets the bright idea of buying some skin whitening cream - she uses the cream, reapplies for the job - and this time she gets it. But really - i suppose it's not that different to all the ads for fake tan. We just don't get told by the media that we won't get a good job unless we have a tan!
Anyway, after Cairo we took an overnight train to the much smaller city of Aswan. From here we left at 3am to drive through the Sahara desert to get to Abu Simbel. It was here that i finally ot that sense of bewilderment at being here. I was looking out the window at the black rolling hills of endless sand under a perfect bright starry night - and i just realised - i was in the Sahara desert. The Sahara desert! Who even goes there!?! I never once in my life ever thought i'd go to the Sahara. It hit me how far i'd come all by myself, to places i couldn't even imagine. I thought about how much i'd already seen and done in the past 8 months and how much more i've got left to do. Egypt is the fifteenth country i've visited this year... still a lot more to see though.
While in Aswan we had the awesome opportunity to visit a Nubian family in their own home. They are a native people that have kept their language and culture alive so that they are living almost exactly as they did 5000 years ago. With added extras like electricity, running water and cell phones! Haha, we came across one guy who lived in a grass hut on an island in the middle of the Nile and even he had a cell phone.
After Aswan we boarded a Felucca, which is a sail boat desined by the Romans way back when, still being used today. We sailed down the Nile for two nights. We lazed around on mattresses sunbathing and being served food and beer by the two Egyptian men sailing the boat. The man who owned it is amazing. He's been sailing for over 20 years and he has learned english solely by listening to and talking to the tourists he totes around. He has a really good memory and would stump us with puzzles and tell jokes. At night we'd sit around a camp fire with people from other boats and the Eyptians all brought out their drums and teach us songs and dances. They were a lot of fun. It was good to get the chance to meet the Nubian family and the sailing crew, beause you don't really get much opportunity to get to know other people here.
So it's been awhile...
Ok - I've been guilt tripped into posting again. Mostly because i've been
tagged by something called a
Meme... basically i now have to reveal 5 things baout myself that people don't know.
Ummm... i don't have any secrets! This is hard.
#1 I'm allergic to cheap jewellery. I kid you not, i can only wear precious metals in my ears or they go all yucky.
#2 I count things. For example if i'm on a bus i'll count all the windows on the buildings that we pass. Or if i'm sitting in the lounge watching tv i'll count the ceiling tiles. Or at work i'll count how many people are in the room etc I also count to try and get to sleep - i don't mean i count sheep, i just run the numbers through my head over and over again until i fall asleep, i guess it's a little like meditating. I can even do it in three different languages!
#3 I hate computers. That may seem a little strange since i work in the IT industry - but there you have it.
#4 I get more upset by animals being hurt than i do by humans getting hurt.
#5 When i was a kid i wanted to be a vampire when i grew up. I don't know why - i think it might have been something to do with wanting to be able to fly.
Ok, now that i've got my posting groove back i'll do a bit of back logging about what i've been up to.
