Well, here I am, finally, on the eve of the Grand Adventure. People keep asking me if I'm excited yet, but to be honest the whole thing still feels pretty surreal. Occasionally the vague realisation of just what exactly I'm about to do hits me, like when I'm drinking a mug of tea and think "Won't be able to drink any more of this for a while!" but generally it still all feels not quite real. That said, I am feeling a sort of pent-up nervous energy that's kept me awake for the last few nights, and I already know that tomorrow I'll be very excited all the way to London, then for about the first three hours on the plane. I pity the people sitting next to me and Amy, because the first few hours of their journey will basically be the sound of "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". Then I'll probably be bored for the next twenty-or-so hours, but I'm sure it'll feel very surreal. I have a feeling the thousand songs on my iPod and the Graham Greene book will only entertain for so long. At least I have the few hours stop at Doha at 6am to look forward to! Haha, Amy and me in the Middle East in the early hours, god help us all!
Apart from asking me if I'm excited yet, people are constantly telling me to look after myself and keep safe. In fact, the three most common responses to news of my plans for the last six months have been:
When I mentioned this to another gap year buddy Alex she said she hasn't had any of these reactions, so apparently there is just something about me that exudes irresponsibility. That said, in the video of us packing my backpack together earlier todayit is me, not her, who is wearing the owl mask. So maybe everyone has a point.
Anyhoo, I'm now an official Gap Year Nerd. The proof is in the fact that whenever Alex and me meet up we get overly excited about travel blogs and mosquito repellents and backpack weights, and spend way too much time swapping websites like www.seat61.com and www.hostelworld.com. Dear lord. It's especially sad when I'm on the phone to friends living incredibly wild and interesting lives at uni whilst all of my stories entail the pros and cons of various brands of anti-malarials, or, even worse, "This one time at the bakery…" Those stories are never funny in the re-telling.
I swear: cake factories are not as fun as you would think. Don't let the photos mislead you, those were taken in an empty factory when everyone, facing redundancy (Woop! Economic turmoil!) was past caring. The preceding five months were more soul-crushing than anything else. And this comes from the girl known as "The Human Dustbin", whose English teacher wrote in her leavers book about her "voracious appetite…for literature obviously!" and who coined the word "foodgasm". Even I lost my appetite for crying out loud.Although what does make me laugh is how quickly I learned how to lie when job hunting in the summer: "Are you going travelling at all?"
"Well… maybe… it'd be nice…. If I could get the money, maybe for a bit…. But nothing's firm" I'd reply, tickets booked.
Thank god it was a temporary contract at the Bakery, so I didn't become too embroiled in lies. That said, I managed to avoid mentioning that I'd gone to a grammar school for the whole time. Not that it helped much, haha, of course my lack of a local accent pegs me as posh (or, bizarrely, "Irish", as one person thought) and therefore someone to be confided in about a secret love of golf, Disney or Tudor novels. Not that I discouraged this much, as whenever people learnt that I was doing English Literature at university and said disapprovingly "Oh, like… Shakespeare and that?" I'd reply "Oh no! Not just Shakespeare! Not even just drama! Chaucer for instance, I LOVE Chaucer! He's this Middle English poet who…" So yeah, that's how I manage to alienate myself pretty quickly. Valuable lesson learned: Don't mention Chaucer quite so indiscriminately in future. (It is a struggle though- he is a legend).
Still, I suppose the Bakery wasn't without its upsides. Food fights are always fun, but even more so in an industrial setting. Revolving tables and glue guns can provide hours of entertainment, especially on an eight-hour shift. Actually scratch that: anything can provide hours of entertainment on an eight-hour shift. And I think it was no coincidence that as time went by and our souls died a little bit more day by day, more and more of mine and Amy's conversations began with "On our gap year…"
The "free" (read "stolen") cakes were not a bonus * shudders at memory * but the real fun was in the stealing: at one time Amy and me escaped with two bin-bags of reject cakes. My favourite memory was when Amy ate an entire seven inch bakewell round by herself in our first fifteen minute break, then spent the rest of the day in extreme pain. O! What larks! And my friend Sophie freely admits that whenever she brings me up in conversation with her uni friends she mentions the time I fell into a box. Sounds worse than it was, though no less embarrassing. It was a five-foot-deep box to be fair, and in leaning in to get to the bottom the side I was leaning against sort of gave way. It was quite scary really.Thank god for the gallant Polish lad who rescued me; extricating yourself from a giant box is surprisingly difficult when upside down. Still, all this was probably no less embarrassing than my appalling driving skills that I freely demonstrated every day in the pot-holed car park- a twenty-one year old Nissan Micra without power steering, a fifth gear, reversing lights or decent suspension is cool enough on its own. That my radio didn't have FM, so I used a portable bathroom radio, with Amy in the passenger seat holding the aerial up trying to get signal, in retrospect probably added to the hilarity. Throw in the fact that in the first week after passing my test I managed to drive off from the petrol station without the fuel cap as well as getting stuck in a ditch and having to call my parents for rescue (I still owe Amy for those white shoes; as she can't do hill starts she unfortunately had to push) and yes, you probably never want to get in the car with me. I don't blame you. It's quite the experience.
I have strayed somewhat in this blog but never mind. Now you have some idea of the months of boredom and planning that have fuelled this trip. No organised tour for us! And a lovely shoestring budget! CANNOT WAIT! NEXT POST FROM THAILAND! SQUEEEEEE!!!
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