Dreaming of Freedom

Probably my last blog before the Europe adventure begins but I wanted to tell everyone about this brill book I’ve found… The Curious Incident of the WMD in Iraq by Rohan Candappa. It’s very funny and well worth reading. Candappa also wrote the The Little Book of Stress, which is an absolute must for every book shelf, everywhere. Read it and weep with laughter!

Travel plans so far:
Day 1 Harwich to Amsterdam
Day 2 Amsterdam to Hamburg via Utrecht
Day 3 Meeting Lukas in Hamburg
Day 4 Hamburg to Copenhagan where we plan to stay with friendly Hospitality Club member
Day 5 Copenhagen to Oslo
Day 6 Oslo
Day 7 Oslo to west Norway to visit Keyvan’s friend Lydie
Day 8 Fjords galore
Day 9 Fjords some more

After that it’s down to Venice for the 15th - but that bit’s not planned yet as Keyvan has kindly left that up to me!

Finally lots of thanks to all the lovely friends who have been wishing me happy travels! See you all soon!

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A busy weekend spent hanging out with Karamoon, freshly off the plane from NY city. He pointed out that my blog titles were very similar to his, so I feel it is only fair to point you in the direction of his blog so you can see firsthand the inspiration behind my posts!

Karamoon’s blog

We’ve been drinking milkshakes with Anwara, taking tea with Edward and eating dinner with Rumi - altogether a satisfactory lifestyle.

Keyvan and I are almost completed planned and ready for our exciting trip. We set off early Tuesday morning - so be warned that photos will appear on the website and random blog posts may be more sporadic but hopefully much more exciting.

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Went to watch an educational and harrowing film yesterday: The Wind the Shakes the Barley. It is another Ken Loach film and as good as Land and Freedom so I would recommend watching it if you get a chance. It’s all about Ireland in the 1920s so only watch it if you need convincing that occupied countries are a bad thing or you are prepared to be traumatised in a character building exercise kind of a way. Although I confess to being very sensitive so don’t take my words as wisdom if you are more of a hardened character.

In between distressing myself I’ve been hanging out with my lovely family and visiting the Sainsbury Centre at UEA for free lectures on Polynesian warfare - not really my thing but certainly interesting and definitely free! I always feel that good stories are a better way to transmit information that lectures. Take for example Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings - which gave a good sense of the importance of warfare and the mysticism and power that lay behind it, in a palatable form. Compared to a lecture that touched on a similiar topic, albeit in a different culture, the novel causes the individual to empathise and thus leaves the ‘consumer’ with a powerful sense of the topic.

The family are all dashing about trying to leave to get to another free lecture - this time on Picasso and Bacon so I’d better dash too…

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We’ve just had the most amazing storm here - torrential rain, brilliant lightening and rolling thunder. I cycled manically home from the bookclub getting absolutly soaked and loving every minute of it! It’s such a relief to be cool after the weeks of oppressive heat. It’s a good thing I live in England and not somewhere really hot!

Ventured into town today, painfully died of excessive heat before wisely returning home just in time to see members of my family rolling up with sleeping bags, unicycles and straw hats. My brother and I have spent several happy hours playing with computers , interspersed with eating salad and catching up with news.

Keyvan let me know about this blog today - it’s very good! Check it out:

http://www.bzangygroink.co.uk/wordpress

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A lazy but glorious day, full of sunshine, fruit, films and books!

Hung out with Ella and drank lots of lovely vegan fruit milkshakes! Mumm! Will joined us and we ventured down to the Nelson pub to see Singing the Postman performed by Crude Apache, normally I love free theatre but maybe I wasn’t really in the mood and I didn’t really dig it.

Came home to have dinner with Rumi. It was very lovely, we discussed religion, politics and the rest and couldn’t really find anything to disagree with each other on.

Tomorrow the family descend on me in a reunion type way and there will be more festive rejoicing as Jon has returned from his travels. Visit his website for details and photos:

www.skorched.co.uk

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Today was a gentle introduction back into life in Norwich. I spent the morning cycling to campus and sitting under a tree with Rumi discussing life, the universe and everything.
Watched a fairly bad film called The Cinder Path, I wouldn’t advise the experience.

Trying not to think about the situation in Lebanon. If you want to sign a letter to Tony announcing your criticism of Israel’s actions then visit the link below:

Stop The War Coalition

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I had a wonderful weekend in London. Bumped into Richard L on the way down and went to see his basket exhibition at City Lit. Richard incorporated plastic bags into his weaving with interesting results. Hopefully he’ll be very famous soon and then you’ll see what I mean.

Keyvan and I wandered around London for 2 days and soaked up the culture that is to be found on street corners and in museums alike. Along the Thames we listened to talented musicians, were sold flowers by a girl with wonderful hair, and then entertained by a magician under a bridge in the pouring rain. See website for photos. I managed to convince Keyvan to spend sometime in the British Museum and the V&A; he wasn’t impressed.

Got back to Norwich in time to see the end of Casanova, which was being performed in the Castle Gardens. As it was Adam’s birthday, Jo, Adam and I all wandered into town to drink milkshakes. The lovely waitress brought Adam his ice cream sundae with some sort of elaborate firework style sparkler thing which made it all much more exciting for us and more melty for the ice cream.

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Have been very busy the last couple of days and this heat is killing me! I’m just off to London to hang out with my good friend Keyvan, and hopefully to go to big stop the war demo. I wish they would just hurry up and implement a culture of peace already. I should think most people probably quite like peace apart from arms manufactures.

Had a lovely dinner with my good friends Will, Ella and Joe last night; they very bravely ate my cooking without complaining. We ate lots of fruit for desert, which was good because I can’t really damage fruit unless I cook it!

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Have spent far too long on trains over the last couple of days. The trains really are very bad, they are late, somewhat disorganised, dirty, unpleasant and very expensive. I guess the owners are making some money but that is really very little consolation to the masses of people who just want an efficient, inexpensive public transport system. I haven’t really come up with the solution but I guess if we all ran a society that was sensible and was preoccupied with coming up with ingenious ways to help people then that would probably be better than one run on such a bizarre concept as ‘making money’.

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Yet another sunny day - it’s all a bit good to be true. Wandered into town to watch ‘Cliffhanger’ a thrilling and ‘real life silent movie’ performed by the Bash Street Theatre Company. They were amazingly good. Check out their website for a touring schedule; they are well worth going to see if you get the chance.
www.bashstreet.co.uk

The entertainment last night was also good. Fireworks set to ‘down with the people’ music and breakdancers on the steps of the city hall… Norwich City Council have tried their best! I think they deserve a big ‘well done’!

Screwed some flatpacked shelves together - never again.

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