I don’t remember what happened before we came back to Australia in February, thankfully I have photos to act as a prompt. Welcome 2006, you hurt when you came into effect with a serious effort at the Putney Boathouse on NYE followed by backing up with our housemates at local nightclub Inigo the following night. January generally hurt, 31 days of hangover.
January 10 oversaw my reaching the age of 25. Quite a demeaning milestone given that I now no longer fit into the 18-24 category listed on so many forms. Fi and I snubbed Paris in favour of dinner at Brighton for my birthday (which I just realised that I payed for!?). Mid-week we went to a Moroccan restaurant in Waterloo and my housemates cooked me a birthday cake to make me feel even worse (thanks Di). Fi bought me some cool iPod speakers, work bought me a subscription to the Ecologist magazine ‘for people who care’. Yes, I’m a hippy.
We celebrated Australia Day with a bottle of Pinot Noir from NSW which was suprisingly good. Candice, Krystal and Verity cooked up some traditional fayre including Anzac cookies (wrong date girls), sausage rolls (are these really Australian?) and wagon wheels (well they bought these). Happy belated Australia Day (treating you with the same indignance as the original British heirachy, sorry old chap)!
Amsterdam rounded off our January. As we approached Stanstead Airport (still in London at this stage) I realised that my passport keeper (Fiona) had not fulfilled her duties and that my passport was still at home (all her fault of course!). So, as Fi sailed off to Amsterdam, I made the two hour long journey back home to get my passport and returned to Stanstead because my new flight was to hard to get to unless I slept the night at the airport. Sleeping upright in chairs and on stone-cold cement flooring is not as fun as spending a Friday night in Amsterdam, so I was pretty pissed off. Thankfully there were many others sharing my plight (you can’t find reliable passport keepers these days) and I wasn’t stalked by some akward airport janitor. I arrived in Amsterdam early Saturday morning. Despite sleeping on a concrete floor, I looked better than every other person in the city. We stayed on the fringe of the red light district and eventually took a wonder through, unbelievable! You don’t believe it until you see it, funny stuff. We hired out some bikes and went for a ride through the city, canals and parks. Bikes are big here, 80,000 of them are stolen each year! Outside of the main area, this is an incredibly beautiful city, with beautiful apartments lining the endless canals. Saturday night we took a cruise on the Supper Club, a huge yacht housing a top-level bar and lower level dining area. Everyone is served a 5 course meal while they sit on a giant bed with huge pillows and at the end of the night an abstract dance act completely writes your sense off. Of course I fell asleep during dinner (thanks for that trait Dad) and Fi took 30 photos of me dribbling all over the pillow. The next day we wandered around the city some more and found ourselves at the Van Gogh Museum which was actually one of the best musems I’ve been to. Sunflowers is a really complex and textured piece, despite Fi telling me she could easily paint it.
The rest of February, until we departed for Australia, was fairly uneventful, apart from Steve Jones’ bucks party the weekend before we left. The bruises from paintball have only just disappeared.
