Category Archives: Life

Learning, Life, Medical Testing

Being A Stubborn Sick Person

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Those who know me personally will know that I am stubborn as a mule. We’ve already established in previous posts that I hate asking for help (and am still yet to do my help challenge six months on). This week’s stubbornness and argumentative battle is between me and multiple viruses, bacteria and fungi.  And believe me when I say I am seriously pissed.

The unexpected visitors arrived on Australia Day and sent me home from work to roll around in a pool of my own feverous sweat instead of drunkenly rolling around in the sweat of others with my friends at a club party. Despite how upset this made me, I was determined to not lose my income as well so I drugged myself to the eyeballs so I couldn’t feel my face and went to work only to have my colleagues force me to go home by lunch.

By Friday, and still in a state of extreme high from my marvelous concoction, I’d contracted a stomach virus on top of the cold and I was exhausted. I curled up in a ball on my yoga mat underneath my desk on the office floor and passed out for an hour and a half. Upon waking, I discover that kids have walked past the door, saw me on the floor and decided to raise the alarm. I am lucky that my boss found this funny and told them it was fine. Apparently “surviving” is an appropriate way to spend professional planning time. “Planning efficient use of the little energy one has in her expenditure”.

Anyway, I survived to the weekend. I had barely eaten in 4 days (apparently naming your stomach infection Billy Bob and celebrating the loss of 5 kg and getting skinny is not the appropriate thing to do in this case) and I figured that by the end of the weekend I could kick it. And let’s be honest, I was also bored as hell and couldn’t do any more movies. So I haul arsed out of bed and went down the road to buy 6 chicken Kievs and a couple of onions.

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Onion all be just chillin’ on the desk and shit.

According to the Internet onions in your sock help detox the body. And garlic in your ears acts as an anti inflammatory. And cut onions in your room absorb all the nasties. As a scientist I put all of this to the test and sat eating 3 of my Kievs upon return of appetite rolling around in onions with garlic in my ears watching Bridget Jones (I may or may not also have been high on cough syrup). And while all of this may have worked in my mind (or it could have been the drugs), it was one of the few entertaining days I had whilst I’ll on my own with nobody to entertain me.

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Hanging with some Bridget Jones with some garlic in my ears

Add to this whole thing that I have been having voiceless shouting matches with my moron landlord about the mould problem in my room and I was in fighting form. Imagine my response to ‘but the leak is from clean water so the mould should be clean mould’.

 

 

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Yep, that be some pretty clean looking mould right there.

Anyway come Sunday, I am worse again, and I have gotten fed up with this shit. I can’t afford the loss of income so I dragged arse to the walk in clinic. My friend Tim always says “by the time you make it to a doctor you are about 36 hours too late”. He ain’t wrong. Though in this case it’s about 4 days too late.

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Onion slices in the socks and ready to go!

 

So they will apparently see me in 2 hours after their massive waiting list wanes and sent me off to entertain myself for a while. So here I sit in Pret A Manger drinking hot chocolate, high again on cough syrup and drugs “finding Wally” (a man in a Wally hat as he goes up and down the street much to my humour) waiting to be reunited with my bestie after a 2 month hiatus of friendship ridiculousness. With a bit of luck that will be it for my 2 yearly visit to a doctor and I can go back to being a lucid, face-feeling human being instead of living life like that song by The Weekend. “I can’t feel my face when I’m with you…..”

TWO HOURS LATER…..

After passing the painful waiting room time with a bestie catch up, I managed to get in to see a doctor. She graciously gave me the most kick arse antibiotics she had in her cupboard. She also sent me off with what I like to refer to as “my ventolin bong” to open my airways. Between the pure sweet smell of oxygen and salbutamol, the tasty tastiness of cough syrup and antibiotics coursing through my veins, I am starting to feel somewhat normal.

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Me and my new ‘ventolin bong’ hanging about drinking tea with my bestie in the Costa Coffee.

Go home, roll around on the shower floor for a while because that is what you do when you are ill and high (or drunk), then step on scales…. wonder a) how high actually am I because scale gives ridiculously low number? b) after double checking said figure about four times wonder how I have managed to lose 12kg in 6 days…. and c) decided this was enough of a reason to eat 3 more chicken Kievs. Well done Billy Bob. You did good. High five! Shame about you immune system. You suck….

 

 

 

Learning, Life, Travel

Shit I Learned In Belgium

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After eating my way through the Netherlands, this continued as I journeyed through Belgium. Whilst in Belgium I explored the essence of waffles, chocolate, beer and a whole other spectrum of personal demons as we prepare to bring in the New Year… so here it is, some personal, some ridiculous and some factual, this is Shit I Learned In Belgium!

  • There is a statue of a small boy pissing in the city centre known as the “Mannekin Pis”. For some reason this has become a national symbol of the Belgians and it is hilarious. On top of the Mannekin Pis, there had to be a lady version of this bought about to match the humour of the boy. As such, they have the “Jeanneke Pis”. This is the cheekiest and most amazing statue ever! I am in love with her and find it a total shame that they have hidden her in a back alley.
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Cheeky lil Miss Jeanneke Pis!
  • There are three things I totally hate in this world. One is coffee. YUK!! Massively detest. The second is olives. And the third is beer. For some reason I seem to have this avid loathing of all things that other people seem to love. And yet, here, in the country of beer, I DRANK MY FIRST BEER!! OK so it was a Lindeman’s Raspberry flavoured one and it tasted nothing like beer and more like a raspberry soft drink, but hurrah! Winning! Am a beer drinker! (Well, kinda….)
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The beer in question
  • “French” fries are actually not French, but actually Belgian. As French is spoken in Belgium, it appears that the American’s who came over to visit and took them home gave them the name “French fries” with the misunderstanding that despite French being spoken there that they are not in fact French. In the many years I have been going to the pub to have meals and they are served with a side of salad and fries I never realized that this is where it comes from. So what else do you eat for your New Years Eve dinner except a Flemish stew with a side of fries and salad. Delicious!
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Traditional Belgian Flemish stew
  • On the topic of New Years, I decided one evening in the company of a friend and under the influence of much wine that deleting the phone numbers/messages/Facebook profiles of any ex boyfriends or even dates was a smashing way to start over. Of course the great man Murphy is not having any of this shit and sees to it that you get messages from majority of them in the following week of deletion, even from ones you dumped two years ago, just to test how strong your resolution not to message the fuckers back is. So far excellent. No messages despite how much I want to tell them they are ginormous nobs. Well done me! Have learned self control this week.
  • The word for whipped cream in Dutch is ‘slagroom’. I literally cannot help but find this funny.
  • The only European colonization of a country where the profits reaped from this country went to a solo king and not to the state was when Leopold invaded and took charge of the Congo.
  • Speaking of the Congo, I did not realize Tintin was a Belgian cartoon and the second of the comic books was ‘Tintin in the Congo’ featuring one of the most racist representation of the African’s you have ever seen. You can Google this and find the comic online but apparently this is an amended and tamer version than the previously more racist version… it is still however, quite racist.
  • And the final thing I learned in Belgium is that pretending that you don’t speak French, Dutch or English by speaking Spanish instead will always get you into trouble because everybody seems to speak about a million languages and the ones they speak are totally unpredictable. I got caught speaking to a strange man in the street because he spoke Spanish…. excellent!

Keep you posted on the next adventures! Until then, happy reading and learning!

Challenge, Learning, Life

This Year I Almost Died….

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Looking back on the year that was 2015, this was the most life defining moment. It has probably been one of the most defining moments I have ever had in my life. It lead to 6 months of struggling to do things I could ordinarily do with ease. It lead to having to face my capabilities as a human that I’ve never had to deal with. It lead to further illness in India which saw me nearly hospitalized again. It saw me accept that I need a rest. And so I moved to London. I know I have been slack on the posts lately as I have been so frantic educating the youth of London but I promise to get these going again. It’s time to take from what I have learned in 2015, grow, move on and be better. Happy New Year all! I’ll be seeing you soon!

Thomas Takes On....'s avatarThomas Takes On....

So I embarked on Everest Basecamp super optimistically. I had the whole thing planned out in my head of how it would go. I had my diamox to manage altitude sickness, cotton wool to stuff between my toes for blisters, an array of different medications for pain, swelling in my knees, general antibiotics for skin/chest/sinus infections, even pseudoephedrine in case I got a head cold. I was more prepared than most. And yet what I was moving towards was nothing that I could have prepared for…..

Two days out from leaving for our trip, if you had have asked me who was going to make it to the camp of me and my friend, I would have put money on me. She had gotten a chest infection from the dusty pollution of Kathmandu and I worked tirelessly for two days doing everything I could in my power to get…

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Learning, Life, Medical Testing, Music, Promotions, Travel

Things I Have Done To Make Money

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As I approach the first “grown up person job” in a while, I thought it might be fun to look back on some of the crazy different jobs I have worked and other things I have done to make money to fund my travels…. Some of it is pretty funny so enjoy!

  • 14  years old…. 1st job… KFC. Did it so much some nights I would come home and dream of putting chicken into a box with tongs… nuff said!
  • Singing in pub bands. First pub band was Freefall and some of the best times of my life. Started at 17, still somewhat ongoing. On and off I have played more gigs with bands such as Alphanumeric, Platinum Datsun,  Multigroove (Melbourne) and quite a lot of acoustic duo work.
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Typical Friday evening pub gig at the Royal Oak Hotel in Launceston, Tasmania, with my good friend Andy.
  • Driving a 50 ton suspended crane in an aluminium smelter. 12 hour rotational shifts in the baking furnace baking carbon anodes to be used in the electrolysis process. Dirty and hot work.
  • Farming… cabbage harvesting, poppy seed harvesting, broccoli harvesting, organic farm work, more poppy harvesting….
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Eastport Organics Farm, Newfoundland, Canada where I gardened and weeded for a week or so for food and accommodation.
  • Laboratory technician for a biotech company. Mostly sterilization, chemical solution preparation and dish washing.
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Hanging out with my good mate Cyril the Skeleton in the lab.
  • First Year Chemistry Department at Monash University. Fingers in so many pies here…. Laboratory demonstrations, tutorials, exam marking, practical design, preparation of chemicals, troubleshooting, the one on one help centre.
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One of my lab classes at Monash University in the First Year Chemistry Department.
  • Folding children’s clothes at a kids clothing shop.
  • Selling watches and handbags
  • Selling hair and make up products at Aveda.
  • Singing in the drag bars of Toronto as support for Drag Queens or as a part of ensemble shows. I swear this was one of the most fun jobs I have ever done! Too good!
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Another Christina Aguilera number in Crews and Tangos, one of my favourite Drag Bars to sing in.
  • Medical testing…. I have written a blog post about this. I spent a lot of time doing non invasive brain function tests for the hospital research centre.
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Chilling in the the medical research lab with my EEG cap on ready to do some testing on perception of musical tones
  • Walking flyers and posters around the neighborhoods.  I have done this for at least a good 3 months every day.
  • Online reviews of cities and hostels.
  • Driving forklifts, doing crop reception and sweeping and shoveling for poppy harvest.
  • Substitute teaching and short term contract teaching involving every single subject you can possibly think of including kindergarten music.
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A surprise some of my year 7 students left on the board for me on my last day of teaching them for 3 weeks.

 

  • Can collecting and bottle return… (may or may not have stolen cans from campground recycling bins throughout eastern Canada to fund our accommodation and petrol bill.
  • Online surveys
  • Focus groups
  • Cleaning and managing the front desk at a backpackers hostel.
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Cleaning at the hostel was dirty work. The “Friendly Morning Cleaning Lady” left lots of interesting notes, like this one with regards to the handsoap in the mens shower…..
  • Promotions and marketing…. now this is a big one because each of the jobs I do are different. Many many sampling programs for things like milk, shampoo, icy hot packs, cans of Nestea and Quakers bars. There is also lots of hustling different contests. Below we will specify some of the more ridiculous jobs.
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Looking like a Ghostbuster while distributing free hot chocolates to the masses in winter.
  • Driving a popsicle van for 3 weeks.
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Chillin’ in my popsicle van and distributing the joy of flavoured ice.
  • Dressing up in ridiculous costumes such as Shaun the Sheep or Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.
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Dressed as Timmy the Sheep and trying to hide from all the kids during break that were pulling on my tail and grabbing at me. Hard and hot work.
  • Placing stickers on men’s urinals in pubs so they can pee on teams they don’t like.
  • Filming a commercial for Edo Japan as the Edo Elf.
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Out on the streets as the Edo Elf. This guy told me all kinds of fun stories about his days in the Masad…. ummm… yeah right…. not quite sure about that one.

While this is a non-comprehensive list as I am sure I have probably forgotten something, it is still pretty ridiculous and funny. What is the worst job you have ever had? And better yet, is there anything here you’d like to know more about? Happy reading and I look forward to your input! 🙂

Challenge, Learning, Life, Travel

Leaving Canada For Good

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This time 5 years ago I was sitting in my unit in Melbourne packing my entire life into boxes. I would never have anticipated any of the things that happened to me over those 5 years to come and yet somehow here we are, not even sad in many ways to be leaving somewhere that was my second home for 5 years and teetering on another massive change. Like a relationship gone sour and that has gone on for too long, it is time to walk away.

But like with any relationship that ends, it doesn’t mean that you don’t look back on it from time to time with fond memories. And of course there are always the hard lessons that you learn and take with you.

So I wanted to take this chance to look at the years that passed, the highlights and some of the lessons learned.

2010

I arrived into Toronto for the first time on the 12th October, 2010. My friend from high school that lived there picked me up from the airport, which helped make such a daunting move a little easier. I moved into the HI backpackers hostel on Church St and was soon met with Tash, one of my closest friends from home. She came on a visa to meet with me. I came on a visa to meet with a boyfriend that had fallen to pieces months before I even boarded the plane but not before I had booked my ticket.

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Tash and I spending our first Halloween together carving pumpkins a month after arriving in Toronto.

We shared a room and ridiculous room mates in a place that still to this day holds some amazing memories for me. My first ever proper Halloween in the snow, my first hockey match, my introduction to the infamous Tim Hortons and so it goes on.

I got three jobs. My first being at Fossil selling watches and handbags, then at Aveda as a Christmas cashier and also at the Children’s Place folding kids clothing. I busted my arse 80 hours a week and it was only here that I started to learn the real value of money, doing it hard and having the arse out of your pants. After my first ever white Christmas, the work stopped and so we saw in 2011 (dancing down the street chanting like a pack of losers to the most anticlimactic fireworks you’d ever seen).

2011

The year started hard. As I lost two of my jobs, with Aveda being the only one left I learned the importance of good friendships in times of utter boredom. The girls at Aveda kept me going with their amazingness, jokes and incredible support. These are the best work colleagues I have ever had and even though we are now spread all over the world I love them dearly. It is because of one of these “gurls” that one night my broke arse wound up in the drag bar Crews and Tango competing in Candice’s Star Search for the prize money to keep me fed that week. This started me getting jobs supporting other drag Queens in their shows and I became a semi regular about the place. It was incredible fun and taught me how to be a better performer.  I will never forget the experiences I had in this place and the accepting nature with which I was taken in.

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Singing in the drag bar, Crews and Tango on Church St

Upon entering into March I was starting to get shitty. No hours. No money. I didn’t move halfway across the world to work for 10 dollars an hour to have all of my savings drained on keeping my head afloat during winter. So I quit my job, packed my bag and went on a 3 month camping trip around the United States.

After my whirlwind trip around the US I came back revitalized and broke. The plan was to go west, then go home and make some money. But as fate was to have it, I met a boy and stayed another 3 months in Toronto. It was in this time I started working promo work, handing out chocolate bar samples or restaurant cards in guerilla type activations. It had good pay. I also went back to doing some more work in the drag bars and getting involved in showcases. It allowed me to live more comfortably. The thing was, I had booked my ticket home, and so I went. It was the hardest time of it I had leaving Canada. And yet I was to be back.

2012

After a stint of teaching and harvesting poppies at home I went back to Canada in March. I spent my days living in the backpackers hostel in Kensington with some of the biggest weirdos you will ever meet. One woman was convinced that her husband had paid off all Tim Horton’s employees to try and poison her…. but in among those crazies were also some great people. I walked flyers and posters around the neighborhoods for 11 dollars an hour for 5 to 7 hours a day every day. I was in essence scraping the bottom of my Canadian finances to survive. One night I was walking to Chinatown after paying rent with ten dollars to my name to feed me for 5 days when I saw a sign for a dishwasher for the night and took it. Luck me in that 8 hours later I left with 80 dollars, a three course meal and three grocery bags of leftover food. I made it work until my then boyfriend got out of the military and in July we set off driving from Toronto over to Newfoundland for 3 months.

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Hanging about on the coast of Nova Scotia on the eastern road trip.

We camped, we explored, I got a better understanding of Canadian history. I saw and ate my first ever moose. I picked wild berries from the bushes and ate them. Some of my fondest memories I have of Canada were spent in the days I lived and worked on Eastport Organics Farm.  We sat on the beach with the dogs and ate pizzas and played guitar and sang. We went to kitchen parties with the locals. We had bonfires. It was a simple life and life at its best. I was happy there. But time was getting away from us and we headed back to Toronto to pack and leave for Central America.  My first 2 year visa was almost up and it was time for a new adventure.

2013

After 8 months of travelling through Central America I decided it was time to go back and get my junk and make a move relocating west. I spent about a month in Toronto doing the odd promo until I found out I had a car lined up to drive across Canada from Montreal to Vancouver.

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The famous Wawa goose in Ontario on my east to west road trip.

I arrived in Vancouver as usual, disorganized, with nowhere to stay, everywhere is booked out due to Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z in concert and I am having a freak out. I eventually found a backpackers hostel to stay in and spent some time chilling out and catching the sights before heading off to Vancouver Island for a week. Same went for Vancouver Island… didn’t book accommodation, had nowhere to sleep on Saturday night, pitched a one man British Army tent in the bush on an island that I thought was well hid and got caught by hippies. Many interesting times had by all.

I eventually double backed and relocated myself to Calgary. I started making beds and then doing the morning cleaning shift in the hostel I was living in and doing promo work. I worked so hard I barely had a day off. In the four months that I was there however I managed to see Drumheller, Dinosaur Provincial Park, Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, hike through Kananaskis, drive up through Jasper National Park, add a few trips to Banff and I’d seen a lot. Come December I had reached my tether with working so much and on a random whim booked a flight to go and see my friend in London for Christmas on my way home for the brothers wedding.

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A fossilized dinosaur skeleton from Drumheller.

2014

This was a Canada free year. I spent it at home mostly. Then in December I started travelling Asia again.

2015

I decided to renew my visa for the last time and go back to Canada as an option. My friend who I went to Nepal with and I had big plans for hiking and camping and all other manner of things.  And then the pneumonia happened and my body became incapable of most of the things we had planned. I went back anyway because my body needed to rest.

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At the top of Mount Yamnuska. First hike back after Everest Basecamp.

I took the odd promo work which was substantially less abundant than two years previous. I took a job at the hostel again, and it too wasn’t the same. With all that I had been through I had come to a few realizations.  Firstly that I am over doing menial jobs for shit pay when I don’t have to. In many ways the jobs I took were nothing to ever take seriously because I always had a better out. Many I took because they were amusing to me. But after years of it, I am bored. My brain feels like it is dying from the lack of stimulation I receive on a day to day basis.

So it’s time to be more and work for a greater purpose. The second thing I realised was that I need to stop travelling and being around travellers for a while. My frustration at the lack of variety in conversations and different people I was meeting was killing me and my want to be social. It is time to find a new group of people and work on ‘staying’ for a while. And so begins the new challenge…. so I packed my bag and move to London. 

 

Challenge, Learning, Life

Servitude September Week One….

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For those of you reading this for the first time and are not sure entirely what it is that I am doing, read my previous post “Learning To Ask For Help in Servitude September”. For all others, kick back, enjoy the ride.

The warm up…

It is the 25th August and we have started early. Despite working with make up before and having a keen eye for it, today I asked the woman at Sephora to help me choose eyeshadows that will match my new red hair and green eyes. She helped me out. We had a discussion about different life related things, it was interesting and I left with what I needed feeling somewhat amused that I asked for help with something I didn’t need help with.

Enter the real challenge….

September 1

I am not having an awesome run of things today. After last night’s train getting cancelled and being stuck overnight again in Cardiff I decided to make the most of my day there.

I dropped my phone off to get it fixed while heading off to the museum. When I got back the phone wasn’t ready and I was running late for my train rendering me in a mental state. So I got the phone, got on the train and then realized that I had just paid 40 pounds to have an air bubble installed over my camera.

I eventually made it back to London. Despite having to ask people for help with many things… ie my train card was for yesterday, what do I do? Where can I find this? Blah blah blah I had lost my patience with trying to ask anyone to help me with anything. Partly because I don’t want help. And partly because I am annoyed with people screwing things up… namely my phone….

September 2 

It was my first day in the agency for work. I allowed someone to get me a cup of water instead of getting it for myself. Hurrah. Helped. And then shit took another turn for the worse when my oyster card for the train decided to stop working.

After just seeing a dive of a room to let I tried to buy my weekly pass for the tube. Oyster card not working. The man in the tube station is no help to me. All I want is for my card to work so I can go to my other house to look at and this dick head just keeps rambling on at me about why they are striking. Got fed up with him, left and called London Transit on the phone so the woman could tell me all of the amazing hoopla I needed to jump through to get money off the card. I eventually ended up out of pocket having to fix this damn thing but when I arrived at Stockholm station the man there seemed not only lovely but astute enough to help me in giving me a new card within the space of 2 minutes and I was on my way. Not that hard really???

September 3

First day of school and I am pretty sure I drove people mental all day asking questions and for help getting all of the things I needed and my brain organized enough to deal with school. I am feeling a bucket load overwhelmed, and yet somehow still kinda ok.

September 4

I again asked for a lot of help today in understanding timetables, curriculum, beginning to plan lessons etc. I think the thing is by day 4, is that I have so much stuff I have to rely on others for right now that I find it too overwhelming to take time out to then also ask for help with things I could do myself. I would feel like a full blown menace to society. Instead, I have resorted to going home and having a nap because it’s all a little too exhausting….

The four day summary

So I guess what we can say about this entire week is this…. I am in one of the most stressful transitions that a person can go through.  I am too exhausted to ask people for help because I don’t trust people will do things effectively or correctly. Then it winds up costing me more time and effort fixing the problem that could have been avoided with me just doing it myself in the first place. Having bad luck with a whole bunch of things did not help this situation further. I am currently thinking that Servitude October might have been a smarter month as then I may be more settled and less stressed enough to actually deal with the challenge properly. That and I wouldn’t probably be failing quite so dismally at it as I am right now…. here is a novel idea…. maybe I should ask for help with asking for help! 🙂

 

Challenge, Learning, Life

Learning To Ask For Help in Servitude September

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My entire life I have had strong female role models. Well just strong role models in general. So much so that when my cars clutch goes to the floor at midnight on the way home, I drive it to the mechanic shop like a rally car driver with no clutch, park it out front and then start the hour and a half walk home because it doesn’t occur to me to call my house mate and ask for help getting home because it is my problem, not theirs. So much so that I will still be attempting to haul my own bags down the street 400m and up the stairs for an hour after just being released from the hospital after 5 days with pneumonia. So much so that I would crawl my way home after getting hit by a car and walk an hour and a half to get to the hospital for an x ray to make sure my arm isn’t broken.  The thing is, I never, ever ask for help. Like EVER. In some ways I have been taught that it is like admitting defeat that you simply cannot do things yourself. It is an act that has made me an incredibly strong and independent person, but in many ways it has also made me quite inaccessible to others as my walls are too impermeable.

So my good friend laid me out a challenge for the month of September that she calls “Servitude September”. She feels that “acts of service is one of the ways that people show love.  The theory is that you do things for people all the time, and it makes you feel good.  By allowing people to help you, it will create a space for people to start showing you love” and thus will help me become more open to others.

The challenge set is as such:

You must ask someone for at least one favour a day building up to five a day by the end of September. I must record what I asked for and how I felt about asking for it. I must ask a mix of genders for different things in equal amounts, so half men and half women for such favour. These things that I ask for must be things that I can do by myself without help from anyone else. This is the most important of the rules. It has to be something I can do for myself. If not it defeats the purpose of the whole idea.

To be honest, I am terrified. The idea of asking people for help makes me more vulnerable, regardless the size of the favour. I fear that people will see me as being less capable.  I feel like I will owe people and be in their debt. That it in many ways will strip down the strong and independent woman that I am. I am also terrified of the doors it may open up with regards to allowing other people in and letting them to not only help me, but to love me. I guess we just have to wait and see what happens. But I accepted the challenge. My friend in London is holding me to account on a daily basis and is super excited to watch me squirm while I do it. And as such, let Servitude September and all of its helpfulness begin…. with a bit of luck, it might just change my life!

Challenge, Learning, Life, Travel

The Challenge of Moving To London

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When I was working the Taste of Calgary last week, I met a German psychologist who uses his skills to read people’s auras and then purchases art for them. At the end of our two minute conversation he told me that when he looks at me he sees a lot of internal happiness, and someone that spends more time looking forward than back. I found this to be incredibly insightful for someone who had met me for two minutes. I have always said that you create your own happiness from within and truth be told, I always look forward instead of backwards. Sometimes too quickly. And this is how we wind up moving ourselves to London on a whimsical decision made in a state of unhappiness.

Most other people who probably should know me a little better ask me what it is that I am running from. But then maybe that’s unfounded as well. I prefer to see it as “running to”. Life is too short to spend time on things that aren’t working and moving on seems to have become a life skill that I am far too good at. So my job sucks. Find another one. People don’t like me or have issues, find different people to hang out with. Don’t like the city you’re in? Time to move.

This is all well and good for the most part until I was challenged in thought by a saying I came across a couple of days ago. It went something like this. “The hardest decision you will ever have to make in this life is knowing when to stay and fight for what you’ve got and knowing when to walk away”. For the most part, I always walk away…. (with the odd exception of trying to stick it out with rubbish boyfriends, in such cases I probably should have walked away). But anyway the point is, I have gotten so comfortable with walking away that my own personal challenge from here is to stay and fight for what I have and what I can gain. For the first time in my life I look at London as a long term challenge. Not somewhere to set roots for all of five minutes and then move when something goes wrong or upsets me. My challenge is to stay and fight for what I can build. My challenge is to create a life for myself.

So here I go… I’m in my last week here in Calgary and I face the ever difficult and horrid task of saying goodbye to people I know and have come to love. I face the notion that I am leaving my safety blanket of Canada. One that I have lived in on and off for over five years and that has challenged me immensely for the good and the bad. And most of all, I walk away from who I am now as a person and I start again in a way that is more tantamount to the person that I want to be.

It is time to tackle a meaningful job in which I can change the lives of young people. It is time to develop stronger relationships with the many amazing people I have in London that I am proud to call my friends. It is time to develop new relationships with work colleagues, new friends and even maybe a romance or two. Most of all, it is time to soften and be less hard and more approachable as a person. It is time to find my way in a world that is more real than the bubble of travellers’ life. Because if I constantly run and don’t fight to stay for anything, I will miss out on some of the best things in life. If I don’t open myself up and let the love, the disappointments, the excitement and the whole spectrum of the emotions of living into my core, then I will never have anything real or anything worth keeping.

So here I go! Bring it on!

Challenge, Life, Music

Keys to the Streets Vancouver

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I arrived in Vancouver approximately ten days ago really flat and a huge part of my turn around has been all of the pianos that I have found from one end of the city to the other. The Keys To The Streets program has been running for the last two summers in Vancouver and has bought much joy to the locals,  myself included.

The first I saw of this was when my friend took me to a park in Coquitlam and there was a piano on the dock for people to play. Small children gathered around and thumped on it gleefully. I sat down and played a couple of songs and then was on my way. This was the first time I had sat down and played at a piano in many years given that they are not very portable for travel. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the piano. While I love my ukulele, there is something within my soul that awakens when I sit at a piano and I play and sing.

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Science Centre Piano

So when I got to Vancouver and found my first piano in Chinatown I was super excited. I sat down and started to play a few songs and felt immediately calm and happy. People crowded around from the surrounding businesses and stopped along the street to watch me play and for the first time in a long time I felt the performer within me coming back. And thus began my quest of the ‘pianocrawl’.

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Piano along the river walk. It got wet one day in the rain and the keys expanded and got stuck. After a couple of hot days it was back to normal

Along more of my walks, I found a piano at the Science Centre, a piano along the river front and one underneath the Cambie Street Bridge. This piano was my favourite and the best sounding by far. While sitting along the waterfront, I observed some of the most amazing musicians sit down and play this piano. From classically trained pianists, to jazz pianists…. there were some amazing talents. Not only was I fortunate enough to witness some of the magic, but I was also granted the ability to play music with some of them.

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My favourite piano under the Cambie Street Bridge. Many an awesome musician was seen playing this piano, even in bands.

The first time this happened for me, I was playing for a while and when I was done a guy asked if I wanted to jam. He was a piano player and we tried to figure out what songs we both knew and harmonized and ad libbed things. It was a whole lot of fun and I remembered how much I loved jamming with other musicians.

The second day this happened, a group rocked down to the waterfront to use the piano with their other instruments. While they were getting things organized, I played a couple of tunes with the drummer and double bass player. People crowded around and were excited about the music in their streets. When they were ready, I relinquished up the piano to one of the best jazz pianists I have ever seen sit down and play music with the band. I sat and listened happily. The music had gotten into my body and my soul and I felt alive.

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Sitting under the Cambie Street Bridge playing the piano.

Over the course of the week I was in Vancouver, every time I walked past a piano, I sat and played it. I played five pianos in total and I made videos of many different songs that I have played. You can find them on my Facebook music page at following link. There will be more uploaded over the coming weeks.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Danni-Thomas/319464336076 Danni Thomas Musician Page

This whole activity has inspired me to find a band and start working again as a musician in the coming months when I have settled into my new life. It has also inspired me to start writing more music again. For more updates, join and follow along with the music Facebook page, otherwise I am sure there will be more updates coming about through the blog when it starts. To check out some more of what is happening in Vancouver check out the hashtag, #keys2streets. There have been some incredible musicians recorded around the city!

Challenge, Life, Travel

Traveling Adventures With Needles

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Post my little hospital visit in Nepal, I developed a secondary infection. One that would see my time in India being very uncomfortable for the first couple of weeks. I thought that the medication that I was on for it would do the trick. Unfortunately for me the infection didn’t go and what was left made me sicker and sicker and eventually I left Pushkar in a taxi bound for a doctor in Jaipur.

When I arrived I had high fever again and they made me go through different tests to identify the type of bacteria causing my infection and what antibiotics it was resistant to. While I waited for these tests to come back for two days they put me on a series of medications to manage my symptoms and I spent two days in bed watching Bollywood sitcoms and drama shows in Hindi that I didn’t understand.

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Hospital gowns… my most prominent Asian attire.

The day I went back to the doctor I sat in wait for the results. As he hands me the sheet of paper with the results, I nearly cried. Of the fifteen different antibiotics that they had run this bacteria against, only three of them worked. My infection was resistant to twelve different classes of antibiotics. As someone who has studied science, microbiology and chemistry, I understood the severity of this.

Of the three different types of antibiotics that they gave me, the one that showed the most efficacy was amikacin…. an injection to be taken every 12 hours for five days. The doctor says to me “so how long are you going to be around for? You will need to be injected by a nurse”. Me being me and stubborn as hell, I said to him “I leave tomorrow. I will give them to myself. Teach me.”

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The giant pile of drugs and injections they sent me home with.

Both the doctor and the nurse stood there dumbfounded because they weren’t sure whether I could do it or not. They demonstrated where I had to inject myself into the buttocks and I dug the needle in and pressed down on the plunger. Too easy. “OK, they said, you seem to know what you are doing, here is your bunch of needles and all of the other pills you will need to take for the next week or so. Good luck!”

I left the doctors office, got into a cab and went back to the hotel where I was met by my tour leader in the lobby. I started to cry for all of the thirty seconds that I allowed myself before telling myself I need to pull my shit together and get about it. There is nothing else I can do about it other than just suck it up and deal with it.

That night I didn’t sleep well. Nor did I sleep well any other night for the whole five nights that this went on. I dreamt of needles. I had anxiety about not doing it properly and my ever growing bruises on my arse. The first time I gave myself an injection unsupervised by medical practitioners I was freaking out. But I did it. I got up and I got on the bus and I went to Bharatpur.

On the third day of having needles I still wasn’ feeling too bad. My symptoms had started to disappear and I was feeling better. It was my day to go to the Taj Mahal. So slowly but surely, I went. I got dressed up in a sari, I did my hair and make up and I went to the Taj Mahal. It was a great experience and I am so happy and lucky that I got to go. Everybody keeps telling me I look so happy and healthy in the pictures. Pictures for the most part lie. I felt happy, but also very weak and very sore. My time at the Taj was cut short by my needle schedule and I had to depart to go back to the hotel to take my fifth needle.

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Looking apparently healthy at the Taj Mahal.

The following day after needle six, I was suffering big time. I could barely walk without pain. I had giant bruising on either side of my butt and it became almost impossible to manage. From here we had to leave however and go to Varanasi on the train. This was one of the worst times that I had with needles.

Because of my soreness, they put me in a side berth on the bottom bunk overnight. Many of the Indian locals however found it quite OK to use my hips as bag holders at 2 am when they were getting off the train or to lean over me and put their hands on my hips or knock me as the night went on. The amount of times I cried out in pain and started yelling at people I couldn’t count. And of course they had no idea what was going on and I couldn’t explain as I didn’t speak Hindi.

The morning bought with it a new challenge. Trying to give myself a needle on the train. As the train slowed to a stop, my friend climbed down off the top berth and helped me alcohol wipe down my skin and hands and take the medication into the barrel of the syringe. Whilst she grabbed a chunk of my flesh, I plunged the needle in and started to inject as the train started moving and we had to finish the injection while taking off. We were half concealed by a makeshift curtain sheet that I tied up that didn’t really cover very much and the men on the train sat staring as my butt hung half way out of my pants, but when it is your life and your health on the line, you kind of stop caring. We survived the train needle, needle number eight and we were on our way to the finish line.

My next needle was on the floor of a silk shop in Varanasi. We were visiting there to learn about how to identify real silk from fake ones. Three girls held up a cashmere blanket curtain and I injected myself again with help in style from behind the blanket. The whole thing had become oddly funny. Instead of scheduling my activities around my needles, my needles had just become a part of my activities.

My last needle was the following morning. Never before had I been so happy to not have to deal with anything anymore in my life. I was happy that I could finally rest without having to inject on to bruise after bruise after bruise.

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My left buttocks by day 3.

Upon arrival back in Delhi three days later I went to the hospital to get a check up. After x-rays, ultrasounds, blood work, urine samples and the entire works, I left the hospital and went to the hotel to await the results. Two days later they arrived. For the first time in over a month and I half I was infection free. My body had been put through absolute hell and I was tired. I didn’t care too much about being in India even. I wanted somewhere to sleep and rest. I wanted to eat a giant steak to get some protein back into my body to heal my bruised and weary muscles. I wanted so much to not be on the road. But despite all of this, I was incredibly thankful for the amazing doctors in India for figuring it out and dealing with it so thoroughly. And I was incredibly happy to be alive. There is nothing like a near death experience in Nepal followed by severe antibiotic resistant secondary infections to scare the shit out of you. From here on in, I look after myself every day the best I can and am thankful for my health being so good ordinarily.