Oh bollocks

My computer gave completely in, and now doesn't work; so I'm gonna have to return it for repairs... Am I pissed off? Yup.

Oh the other hand, I did buy a Xbox 360, and it is just awesome. Forza Motorsport 2 and Gears of War will just never tire out :). And when they do, I have Bioshock and Halo 3 lined up :D.

Twaize, out.

And now to something completely different: Florida

Because there are hardly any scouts on the island at the moment, we have been able to split them up so that half of the subcamp staff has the morning off and the other half has the evening off, same deal tomorrow except the other way round. So today I have the morning off, and tomorrow I have the evening off. Since I have all this newfound time and the computer cafe is almost empty, I felt that I would write something to round off my Florida vacation.

I do appreciate that my father took time out from my stepmother to take my sister and me travelling, but the whole thing almost went bollocks before it even began because of my stepmother. The original idea was that we were to go to Cuba, but my stepmother said no because the entire family had to go at some point (where I won't be going of course), and so we came up with New York instead, but my stepmother veto'ed that as well for the same reason. Seeking further it was decided upon Florida, a place I compare with the tourist part of Greece, a horribly overtouristed place that I will never like, and damn, I was right. So I declared myself out of the vacation, something that angered my father (surprise) and caused him to say that the vacation was then entirely off; which in turn upset my sister. So in order to be the grown up and diplomatic person I agreed to go to Florida so that all (except me) would be happy; and as it turned out it would be quite a poor vacation.

Now looking back on the vacation in hindsight, it tops up there as the second worst vacation I have ever been on. Number 1 being a week long golf vacation in Germany with my father and his new family (I don't play golf, and have no intention to) so I just did nothing and number 3 being a week on Barbados in a vacation resort doing nothing, but at least there was internet unlike in Germany, and I went diving once which was really cool.

But the whole episode with corporal punishment really set off an otherwise boring vacation to become something never to be forgotten; I have no idea really what to write, other then I won't forgive my father for it, and I will never ever forget about it.

Recap:
Days 1-3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9

Brownsea Island: Day 1, 2, 3 and 4

As in introduction, I am subcampstaff on Brownsea Island the birthplace for scouting, and this year we are celebrating the centenary of scouting, and I am actually very honoured of being here on the day, the very second that scouting is celebrated in its fullest ever. The subcamp staff will be roughly 50% british and 50% international. In my subcamp there are 4 british and 3 internationals, whom are Finnish, Guatamalan and Danish (me... duh). The camp will run (for me) from the 24th of july to the 8th of august, however I am leaving the camp on the 7th of august and then staying on the main jamboree camp in Essex at Hylands Park for the closing ceremony. The entire island is vegetarian while the camp goes on as we have to respect all faiths, beliefs and religions on this camp, of course they could just serve halal slaughtered horse or fish, as nobody technically opposes any of that except for true vegetations, but eggs, chese, milk and other diary products are served, so it isn't an attempt to be vegan, but just to make it easy to respect all faiths, beliefs and religions. In the wolves subcamp in which I am in there are 7 members of staff, the subcamp leaders Karen and George; and the rest of us, Panu, Bernardo, Graham, Andrew and Jens (me).

Day 1 (24th of July):

I had to get up at a starkingly mad 6 in the morning to catch my flight to England, check-in began at 8.20 and I was of course in queue at 8.00. When I finally did get it, I bought an M magazine and a small Marabou bar. Eventually after a lot of waiting, my plane was delayed 40 minutes :(

As I finally made my way into the plane I was seated next to nice quiet people. The flight was problemfree and the luggage arrived quickly. But I must say that I blinked once or twice when I was told that the price for the train-ticket to Liverpool Street St. from Stansted Airport, and I was soon to learn that trains in England are FAR from cheap. I mean the 4 pound ticket from Liverpool to Waterloo was acceptable, but the 35 pounds from Waterloo to Poole was maddening. 35 pounds? Whatever.

Anyway I made it to Poole trainstation 2 minutes (if that) before the bus that was to pick me up... Picked me up. In the bus I met the top media handler Neil Commons, and we talked all the way to Poole Harbour. At Poole Harbour I had fish & chips (in the pub Lord Nelson none the less), where it didn't looked like the fish had been battered to death, but instead just dipped into the frying machine alive, with the saggiest potato's available. Once across I discovered that all the work of the day had been done, and I was in for a nice evening with rubbish dinner (but I had already eaten, remember?). And as far as the tent goes, I was assigned to tendmate called Andrew who is a really nice guy, and very quiet as far as sleeping goes, which is REALLY good (no snoring etc.).

Day 2 (25th of July):

Breakfast was egg and hash brownies which is really good, followed by the raising of 2 very big tents. The rest was more or less just a long relaxation day where we didn't do much. Most of what happened was just meeting different people, and shortly setting up portaloos. It did rain quite heavily for some time but that was it. But what we really did was listen to some orientation and a tour of the island (of course in the period of time when it was raining), so that we wouldn't get too lost while we were showing the scouts around for the 3 upcoming camps. Dinner was lasagne risotto which tasted horribly and I ate some chocolate instead (oh Jens, you healthy thing). The rest of the day went on without anything spectacular or worthy of mentioning.

Day 3 (26th of July):

On this day the participants arrive, so there was a lot of action going on, with people preparing and some going to mainland to recieve them. For breakfast there was egg and pourage, which was great... I LOVE POURAGE; and yes I know that makes me mentally insane, but how does that make news? Anyway when they arrived one of them immediatly started crying (Ryan Michel), because he didn't know anyone and wanted to go home. So I decided to take care of him, making sure he stopped crying before trying to make him laugh (which I was very succesful at), and later found out what he needed, if he was to stay, and it just so happened that he had a friend in Bulls and would stay if he was transfered from Wolves to Bulls, and so he was. The rest of the day was just answering questions to which I didn't know the answer ("When will we get our neckers" etc.) and getting to know the participants which all happened to be from England (how boring does it get?). For dinner we actually had some nice pasta with tomato sauce and a baked potato. After dinner we all prepared for a party which turned out to be a lot of fun. There was live music from a really good band fronted by Laura Bettinson which started out with a lot of popular cover songs and then some of their own material which was truly superb. To get the crowd (the participants) going, some of us in the crowd went up in front of the scene, turned towards them, and started dancing synchronised to the music to get them to follow and do the same, and damn that was fun, and for the dancing we were all lead by the hispanics (2 from guatamala, and 2 from Mexico).

I danced all the way to the midway break (some left before, some didn't) but then I was hit by a really hard depression wave that I won't be getting into detail about right now. However I went up to the Brownsea memorial rock where I had my first kiss (with Frida), brought me sleeping mattress with me and lay down to think for about 30 minutes. When I was done I went back to the place of the concert and had a look around where nothing had changed except it looked like Adam (a really nice guy) and Jane (pretty girl) were getting something going on. But I was still very sad and went back to my tent to get some good sleep.

Day 4 (27th of July):

This morning (I am writing this on the 27th of july) I woke up at 6.00, as we have to be up at 6.15 so we can be ready to wake up the participants when the wakeup music begins playing at 6.30. We went up to the breakfast and I had egg with hash brownies. When we were done eating we had a lot of time to kill before I had to take participants out to the activities. We started out by doing Conflict Resolution but not before one of my subcamp leaders had lost a participant and I had to take her participants to their activity while she found her own, so Graham (I wasn't alone with my 10 participants, as once during the entire camp, we are two to a group of participants, and for me that was the first day) took the participants to the tent with conflict resolution. During the first half of the day, we had three 1 hour activities, and by the time I made it there, it was already halfway done, and it was to late to join in. However afterwards we went to circus skills where we learned to juggle, using one wheeled bicycles, and those who didn't know how to, learned how to play the devil game (two sticks connected by a string, spinning a timeglass shaped ball/object thing). Where I had a lot of fun trying to juggle with 3 balls together with another member of staff called Squeeze (real name, Andrew). Afterwards came the real fun though, when we were supposed to find the pottery, it had been moved and nobody had told us where. So we walked a very long way back to the main tent trying to find it, just to find out that it had been moved to the main tent (bummer). Anyway lunch was decent because for the first time I had a cheese sandwich instead of an egg/mayonaise sandwich, which meant I could take the content out (the cheese) and just eat the bread which isn't possible with the egg/mayonaise sandwich, for reasons that I am not going to explain. Later that same day we went on island adventure, however they only needed one staff to go along, so Graham would go have a shower, and for the second half of the activity which was cutting down rodondendron (most like not spelled correctly) Graham would take over and I would go have a shower. However I discovered that the showers had just been closed when I got there, so I didn't get my shower which I really wanted before I went to the big jamboree in Hylands Park near Chelmsford in Essex. The rest of the day went nice and easy, with lots of time spent writing on this blog (quite a big post, right?). But I'm here in a second sitting as I was torn away from the computer while writing and chatting as my subcamp leader (I'm just subcamp staff) needed me to herd participants down to our subcamp. So having brought them back and herded (most appropriate term) them back into the tent for a centenary scouting celebration and concert (live artists), and I'm back here. I am not interested is joining them as I'm still riding on my depression wave, feeling really sad, but maybe I will write a post about that when I get back (I will start a post and save the draft in order to remind myself) and I imagine the rest of the day will be me going back to my tent and... sleeping.

Graduation

Hey all of you

Yesterday around 13 o' clock I graduated from Aloha College, which means I am done here in Spain, and will now move away.

The present from my mother and stepfather was a 3 week touring vacation in Australia with them and my sister (she also got it as her graduation present, despite her not graduating for another year). However, I knew that it was coming. The big surprise of the event was my wonderful stepfather who gave me a gold dog tag. As a standard dog tag, it had my name, my birthday, my gender and my blood type; he knows that I am crazy with travelling (so is he), so he felt that a dog tag with that kind of information was important for me. The special part was the fact that it was gold. Now you may think, "what a waste". But it is made from 18 karat red gold as thus is extremely tradeable, especially in the middle east, Africa and east Asia; and that is exactly where such things may make a difference. Trading it for food, water or petrol is plausible if I ever end up in a bad situation (it is only a question of time).

Over and out!