Twenty-thirteen

I make quite detailed resolutions so I thought I’d share them, I apologise in advance if this is the most boring post ever! I like to keep busy, but after exhausting myself in 2012 I set the productivity bar very low for 2013 and it’s been my “sloth” year off. My resolutions included going on holiday, going to the zoo, moving out and learning to drive.

I completed nearly all of them. The best one was taking James to Mauritius! James is the first person outside of my family I’ve been to Mauritius with and it was one of the best trips I’ve had, (and an excellent opportunity to air my floppy hat collection – 4 is a bit excessive for everyday UK weather).

 How adorable is the teenage chicken! I love teenage birds, they look so weird as their feathers change. They are rarely photographed at this stage of life because they look so strange.Despite my year off I did do a few things: relocate WOLF PACK to London, create two concerts, go on two tours with Rhum & Clay to perform A Strange Wild Song (performing in Bath, Cornwall, Chulmleigh, Winkleigh, Devon, Liverpool, Oxford, Bristol, Margate, Leicester, Derby, Exeter, Ilfracombe & Reading), create a website, go on holiday to Mauritius (with James), Rhodes and Fetiye (with my bestie Philly) and Manchester (with all my friends!),  move house (twice), pass my driving test, triple my private students and start volunteering at a charity shop.

I’ve read a few blogs mentioning resolutions centred around personal growth, career development and health and fitness. Mine are never like that! I basically just have a list of stuff I want to do. It’s possibly a bit unrealistic but I am quite an ambitious and driven sort of person.

My 2014 goals:

Keep to a maximum of three projects to focus on

Hang out with (long list of friends I don’t see enough)

Tour North America

Go to Monkey World

Go to New York, Disneyland, Brazil and Cambodia

Take James to AMNH (my favourite museum in the world)

I’m lucky to have been given so many opportunities and to be able to shape my own career and do something I love as a job: although it’s hard work, difficult to justify at times and insane hours I never contemplate doing anything else.

Lastly I started my blog this year! Thank you to James, Philly, Justin, Dave and everybody else who helps me with photos and all of my friends for sharing this year with me! Thank you so much to all of you who read, I never ever expected to meet so many lovely people. I’d love to know what you’d like to see next or if you have any suggestions – leave me a comment or have a click in this little poll below! What are your plans for 2014? Happy New Year everyone, I wish you all museums and good times. Thank you to everybody who was part of my 2013!

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Old Town

This will be my last post on Rhodes and I’m sharing my pictures of the old city with you. My travel companion Philly and I were so enchanted by the old city that we spent our last evening there, getting lost amongst the cobbled street and staring wistfully at the beautiful displays in all the shops. Most of the roads are nameless and the city doesn’t follow any kind of grid structure so it’s very easy to lose your way. Philly and I soon gave up trying to use the maps dotted around the city and just followed our noses until we arrived at a gate.

The city was warm and welcoming in the daytime despite the imposing stone wall, but by nighttime the old town was magically lit up with strings of fairy lights. The maze-like quality of the streets was enhanced by the darkness and it almost gave the impression that the minute you turned a corner the rest of the town was shuffling itself around behind you! Most of the shop in the old town are open front, with huge archways leading directly into the display area. As we walked past we could gaze in to the colourful, meticulously laid out displays inside with shops selling all manner of items: lace, carpets, swords, honey, ceramics, gold chains, sandals, postcards, stationary, musical instruments, statues and traditional wood and leather crafts. The best way to spend our final evening in Rhodes!

Thank you to Philly for all the photos of me in this post (and my last two Rhodes posts here and here) and for being such an awesome travel companion! You can read her blog here, and follow mine on Facebook, bloglovin and twitter.

Port of Rhodes

 On the very first day we were in Greece I found a very old postcard which featured the beautiful arcades above, flooded in golden light. The postcard was dated 1972 and didn’t credit a photographer or include any information about where the picture was taken. I was completely enchanted by the photo, and I imagined that the photographer who had probably spent a huge amount of time waiting to get the perfect shot of the arcades. I fancied that even if we managed to locate and visit the same unknown place on our trip in 2013, it would likely be some sort of built up tourist attraction hell, forever to be remembered by the golden 1972 picture.

Four days later Philly and I visited Rhodes and stumbled across the exact same arches drenched in the later afternoon sun. It was amazing discovering this secret place simply by chance when wandering around. The Prefecture is literally next to the harbour so admittedly it wasn’t exactly out of the way, but this kind of miraculous discovery does seem to happen more on holiday. I often think when I’m travelling I feel a bit more connected to the world, and I wonder if this is simply because of the technological cut-off. Had I been able to immediately identify the area on the postcard (google image search), read the caption (dictionary translate) and direct myself to the location (apple maps), I wouldn’t have been able to chance upon this place in a moment of complete serendipity and bask in the warm sunlight that drew me there. Dress – vintage, £12. Hat – Monki, £3 (sale. Flip-flops – Aldo, £12.

Lindos

Hello! Today it’s really rainy and gloomy in London but you can see how hot it was in Greece! I spent a week in Rhodes with my good friend Philly and we had amazing sunshine every day. I got back last week but have been recovering from food poisoning, hence the delay in posts! These photos are taken in Lindos, a picturesque town on the south east coast of the island. Philly and I travelled to Lindos via boat which was a 4 hour round trip from the village where we stayed in the north west.

Lindos is notable for the huge Acropolis which sits at the top of the mountain above the modern village. I’d normally consider myself more interested in science than anything else, but my week in Rhodes has sparked a nascent interest in history. It was fantastic wandering around the ruins and looking for traces of the people who had built them. My favourite bit was a huge discarded slab which somebody had trodden in whilst the concrete was drying. Seeing a huge footprint in the block somehow enabled my mind to leap back thousands of years and I felt immediately able to imagine the ancient Greeks walking around on the same patches of dirt that we were, moaning about the same heat and looking out at the same sea.

Lindos is also notable for using donkey taxis. Donkeys, like horses, have been domesticated over thousands of years to carry all of our rubbish but donkeys are much smaller than horses and their knees often buckle in old age due to a lifetime of transporting heavy loads. Donkeys are quite independent and if they don’t perceive a threat they won’t do something (unlike horses who can easily be scared into things using noises). I feel very passionately about animal welfare and whilst I enjoyed playing with the donkeys, it was really upsetting to see these poor animals transporting tourists up and down a steep hill in such hot weather. One of the donkey owners told me it’s ok because the donkeys are used to it, which is insane. If you smack somebody in the face every day for a year they’ll get used to it, does that mean that’s ok? It was nice to spend some time bonding with this 1 year old donkey anyway; he kept licking the flowers on my dress.

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