Eliminate The Bad And Magnify The Good @hundredbillionbottles - Tumblr Blog

Whole buncha statues in front of a cathedral in Kraków 20.9.17

#Kraków #Poland #travel #Europe #church #statues

Warsaw from a hotel room 18.9.17

'Sam', Riga, a statue commemorating all the animals that died on space survival tests during the space race in the 1960s, designed by Denis Prasolov 16.9.17

#Riga #Latvia #animal cruelty #space #travel #europe #statue

Hidden rooms in the Viru Hotel, Tallinn, occupied by KGB officers throughout the 1980s 14.9.17

#Tallinn #Estonia #travel #Europe #Soviet Union #USSR #kgb

National Library of Finland, Helsinki 12.9.17

#travel #Finland #Helsinki #library #Scandinavia #architecture

Amsterdam Cheese Deli 11.8.17

#Amsterdam #Holland #cheese #holiday #travel

Country road leading back into Nailsea and Layde Bay, Clevedon with Ellie and Jess Home.

#friends #sea #horse #home #England

Just Chugging Along

A new coffee shop opened in Nailsea while I was away, replacing a pub which I had never been in and which was always skipped on even the biggest of pub crawls. I met Daisy there yesterday. Daisy is a girl in the school year below mine, just finished her A Levels, who is going to Colombia in January, enrolled in the same Gap Student Programme as I finished about a month and a half ago. She wanted to ask some questions about the job, the country, the culture, and I found myself almost self-indulgently spewing out any relevant information that popped into my head, rarely pausing to take breath. It felt good to rant so gleefully about my time away, instinctively babbling out advice and recommendations, having an answer to every question that she asked and seeing the nerves and excitement build in her as the conversation went on. It was like a confirmation that it had indeed happened, that I hadn’t just imagined or dreamed it; it was real and I loved it enough to want someone else to love it too.

In the nigh-on-month I’ve been home, the coffee shop is the only thing in Nailsea that appears to be new. A couple of shops and business ventures finding their feet in the town centre in January had ran out of legs by July it would seem, but everything else is basically the same; the same faces are scattered round The Moorend Spout on quiz night; the usually interchangeable neighbours in the house next to mine look as if they are the same; the buses are so late that they’re technically early in proximity to the next one, and the wind blows the first days of August silly and cold. Spoons is dead on weeknights and rammed on Friday and Saturday, full of the local football heroes, the ‘hands-on’ figures of the community, the hard-workers, the pre-drinkers, the students back from uni (usually grouped together with the pre-drinkers), and a small congregation of twats in the corner. And in the morning we all step outside to the same smell of horse shit and weed, the latter of which was so strong this past week that it actually made headlines in the North Somerset Times. But amidst all the similarities, I feel the comforting pass of time through every conversation I have. My friends for the most part are happier, more grounded in the people they are and want to be and firmly on their paths to achieve that. Nearly everyone I bump into has something to show for the past half-a-year; Ellie finished her first year at university with a first; Cop’s started designing and printing his own clothes; I haven’t seen Cara yet but she finished her A Levels as is currently blessing the States with her ridiculousness; I saw my old work-friend Genevieve in a play devised by her and her theatre company, whose existence I only knew of beforehand through snippets of conversation over early morning mass sandwich production. Hell, to be fair to them, the twats in the corner at spoons have progressed in some way, in that they’re into harder drugs now. So although the town itself is as still as it’s always been, I’ve returned in exciting times. I can feel everyone starting to get into their stride, transforming from school friends into real people.

I had a fantastic time in the States. I loved travelling, or rather vacationing alone, making my own spontaneous plans each day and meeting several other travellers whom I’d met the night before for breakfast. I drank malts with a couple from Brighton in Atlanta, I ate fried chicken with biscuits and gravy with a guy from London in Asheville, I sat at the counter in a roadside diner and chatted with the waitress and an older gentleman next to me about how ‘things ain’t how they used to be no more’. I went back to the same diner the next day and the same waitress (also named Alex) asked if I wanted ‘the usual’. From Asheville, I went on a 3-day hike up in the Smokey Mountains and saw a sunset atop Gregory Bald, the awe-striking beauty of which I thought could only exist in Google Images, with all the orange and purple oozing into the clouds and the steam rising from between the slumbering peaks and valleys. I saw 3 members of B.B. King’s band perform in Nashville and, in Memphis, stood in the spot where Elvis Presley first recorded and sat at the piano that he, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis all crowded round in 1956. That day also happened to be the 4th of July; the rain had washed out the already deserted streets of Downtown Memphis, and I couldn’t foresee watching fireworks in the lashing rain at a place literally named Mud Island being any fun, so I watched the festivities from the balcony of the Airbnb with Aisha and Tom, two other lodgers I had just met who were roadtripping their way to New Orleans. Once satisfied that the last red, white and/or blue firework had burst, we watched ‘The Nightman Cometh’ musical episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

On the night I got back I hugged my Mum very tightly and went out to see my friends at the place where all roads lead to: Ringers. I walked there leisurely, like I’d never been gone, not having to even think about where I was going and what were the best roads to take. Ellie was waiting outside for me and like me she’d changed her hair to blonde, then Jess came, then Harvey appeared and sprang straight into the tale of how he got stuck in a door in the London Underground earlier that day, then Joe and Charlie came, then Cop, then Chris. All these faces I knew as well as the route to the pub came round the corner and exchanged grins with mine like a reunion episode of some sitcom that’d been off the air for years, or like that really lame scene at the end of The Lord Of The Rings. The more people who showed up, the more I melted back into the familiar flow or banter and inside jokes, so naturally and so easily, as if the night were a record that someone had taken the needle off of 6 months ago and had just put back down. In the days that followed I caught everyone up on what I had done and where I’d been and who I’d met, and in the weeks that followed I came to feel completely reintegrated into the ordinary Somerset Summer daze, crashing out on Golden Valley field, binge watching some TV show when the rain comes, turning up late for every social outing and crushing cans of cider in the garden of whoever’s been kind enough to offer it.

With every new day, everything feels more normal and Colombia feels a little further away. And as bliss as coming home has been, how much it came at exactly the right time, there are things and people that should be here but aren’t here and which Nailsea could never recreate. I think about my housemates from Bogotá every day. Those thoughts manifest in things as little as songs on the radio that I think they’d like or in grand visions of them bursting through the Spoons doors as part of some massively extravagant and completely-out-of-their-way surprise visit. I went to a rave in Bristol with Dom and I’m going to Norwich this weekend to see George, but as I write I suspect that Stephen and Ela may be wrapping up their extended travels in Bolivia and arriving at their respective homes in Roanoke, Virginia and the British Virgin Islands, so very far away. I realised on a dragging Greyhound journey from Atlanta to Asheville, miles and miles away from anyone I even remotely knew, that from now on, no matter where I go, it’s a certainty that I will be far away from at least one person that I love. This fact is actually a good thing, the slow dispersion of loved ones is a symptom of everyone finding their way and achieving their goals; I accept this, but I am still entitled to a touch of sadness every day when I don’t say ‘good morning’ to my friends in the Gap House and every time I go to bed without saying ‘good night’.

The stars over Nailsea are better than I remember. They splash and scurry across our countryside sky in ways I never saw in the orange, cloudy haze of the Colombian night. Sometimes walking back late from Charlie’s or Jess’, I crane my neck up at them and wish that my friends across the sea, in the States, in Spain, in the BVI, could see them, and then I remember that they probably can, and that’s a nice thought. To borrow some words once spoken by a sleepy, traffic-frustrated Stephen, life is ‘just chugging along’ everywhere, and everyone will keep achieving things and developing themselves and I’ll just be so proud of them all.

Be proud of what you’ve done so far this year, and if you feel like you haven’t done much then there’s still a lot of time left in it for you to change that.

#travel #writing #colombia #north somerset #usa #england #memphis #nashville #asheville #smokeymountains #atlanta #home #bogota

Embalse del Neusa, Cundinamarca 11.06.17

#neusa #lake #Cundinamarca #Colombia #Bogotá #nature #dog

Everything Works Out In The End

I wrote in my first blog entry way back in January that my ride from the airport to what has become my home felt like the start of a movie, the way I wearily gazed at the lights from the fleeting cars and streetlights blurred against the passenger seat window. The movie ended at Neusa Lake, out in the green and the hills of Cundinamarca. Our house-parent Clemencia was taking us out for one last excursion, in which a short speedboat ride took us to a shore, where we had a bountiful picnic facing an island shaped like a giant shoe. We played cards and read a little bit and collapsed into the strong spells of sun that pierced through the overcast. Dom, George and I went for a wonder round the surrounding woodland before emerging back out to the edge of the lake. Lying completely still and undisturbed, like a giant stretch of cellophane, the lake reflected the grey and swirling cloud exactly, thus stretching the sky to twice its size. For a moment no one said anything… then I said “Oh shit guys we might be about to have one of those lake-staring revelations”, to which Dom replied “Yeah this is probably the moment we realise what good friends we’ve become”. The three of us half-heartedly chuckled. Role credits.

It was a lovely day out, attaining a tranquillity which was necessary after the recent jam-packed weekends away, but I won’t say too much about it; I’d like to dedicate this entry, as it is my last one in Colombia, to the people I’ve met over the past five months and my overall inner experience. The is a well-known joke, rightfully so, about the notion of going on a gap year and ‘finding yourself’. Don’t panic, I’m not about to scrawl a few paragraphs justifying that notion. I already knew who I was before coming out here, even more so the person I wanted to be; what has happened in this country is I have met people unlike any I have met before, and the way they live and act has given me the means to become that person. And as I draw nearer to the sudden transition from seeing them every day to not for a very long amount of time, I feel ready to borrow parts of their character and staple them to my own, so that I can remember them through my actions and not through some artificial scribbled tattoo that says ‘Colombia2k17 Boys’ or whatever. I will borrow Liv’s direct honesty and tenacity to get things sorted out, Greg’s astounding work ethic and insistence that if he can imagine something then he can make it happen, the way George belts Miley Cyrus’ ‘Party In The USA’ in fluctuating octaves whilst getting ready for a night out. I’ll borrow the focus that Stephen puts into his art and his refusal to sit still for more than a few minutes to ward off any hint of stagnation, Marce’s bizarre dress sense and constant bouncy nature, Guillermo’s general kind and welcoming aura towards new people such as myself. I’ll borrow Christina’s sheer lack of giving a shit. I’ll borrow Ela’s inspiring ability to see the good in almost everything and to make time to pursue all of her hobbies and interests, without letting any of them fall completely by the wayside. And of course, I’ll borrow Dom’s absolute composure, the total calm which surrounds him to the point where he can just wing it almost all of the time, always ending up unscathed, all the while repeating that “everything works out in the end”.

These are people I needed to meet exactly at the point in my life that I did: at the start, at the pivotal, terrifying cross-road point in any 18-year-old’s life where they just don’t know what the hell is going on. This goes for the friends I made at Nailsea School and the friends I made at my job I had before leaving; these people have given me direction and blocks on which I can build. And maybe the traits and attitudes I’m borrowing from them conflict each other in some ways, but that doesn’t matter because you don’t have to limit yourself to being one type of person. In fact, you can be every kind of person. You can completely well-rounded and you don’t need to travel half-way across the world to begin to achieve that, you need only to surround yourself with positivity; positive people; positive actions; positive thoughts.

If you’ve kept up to date with my blog then you’ll know that this experience hasn’t always been easy and it hasn’t always been fun; the whole thing began with me sobbing into an ice-cream on a plane hovering over the Atlantic Ocean, and I would go on to cry many more times. There was the time I cried after hanging up a Skype call with my friend Ellie back in February, realising the length of time that lay ahead of me before I would see her or any of my friends from home again. There was the time I blubbered down the phone to my Mum and Dad because my head was batting around too many conflicting emotions for my heart to take. There was the time I wholeheartedly and hysterically broke down altogether because I hit my head on one of those poorly placed, sticking-out triangles of wall…. There was the time when I was off-work ill and Ela came home briefly to bring me tea and biscuits, and I cried when she left because no one had ever been that nice to me before. There was the time I cried at an amazing message of support I received when I was going through a rough patch, from my Uncle who had undergone a similar experience to myself at my age. There was the time I cried with laughter at the sight of a man on ecstasy suddenly halting his delirious dancing, ducking down and crawling through the crowd to get to the front at an impossible, mole-like speed (he was later christened Moleman). There were the three other times on that same night when I cried with laughter, each time at separate things.

For every time I’ve cried with sadness I have cried harder with joy, and contrary to the words of landmark Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the words at the top of this blog page, I don’t wish to “eliminate the bad and magnify the good”. I originally stacked that quote at the top of my blog to symbolise how I wanted to focus mainly on the great things about this country and not the horrendous perception of it amongst most of the English people I’ve spoken to in the past year and a half. Of course the good should be magnified, always the good should be magnified, but I can’t disregard the bad as insignificant. The bad is the ultimate teacher; it allows you to build yourself and learn from mistakes and become the best possible version of yourself. Yes there were bad things about this experience, yes there are bad things about Colombia, but when the badness fades away, what is left in the space is room for improvement. If everything ran smoothly, worry-free from the off, then I’d return home only as a version of myself that was exactly the same as before he left, except now he eats way more avocado.

To anyone that has been reading my blog, to anyone who has dropped me a message of support or just dropped in to say hi, to anyone who has in any way been part of my time in Colombia, thank you. Thank you for everything.

I’ll see you again soon, I promise.

#travel #colombia #south america #bogota #Cundinamarca #writing #friends #positivity

Desierto De Tatacoa, Huila 03.06.17

#desert #huila #colombia #Tatacoa #South America #travel

Go Fish

The sun condensed into form over the mountains and everything around us died. This is not a line taken from a half-hearted 3am tribute to T.S. Eliot, but rather an attempt at a description of riding into Desierto De Tatacoa in the back of a jeep. Fresh off the back of an overnight bus to Neiva, the Huila region’s capital, we were now catching a collectivo into the desert. The wind blasted in my squinting eyes, but the watery peering I managed to withstand permitted me to see out over the customary green of the Colombian countryside, before it suddenly, in an instant, descended into a total wasteland. Just deadness, nothing but skeleton branches and withered cacti clambering out of the dirt. I looked around the jeep at Stephen, envious of his sunglasses shielding his eyes from the bugs in the wind, then at Ela, whose head was dozily bobbing with the bumps of the roads, and finally at Roy, Ela’s Dad who was visiting from the British Virgin Islands. I’d come to know Roy (The Boy) slightly over the course of a number of meals the week before; a family soup night at home; some exquisitely greasy burgers in Zona Rosa, and a colossal, almighty, death-defying banquet at a Lebanese restaurant. The sheer amount of food consumed on that night carried us all the way through to hopping off the jeep into the now sun-soaked desert that nudged into the South West of the country.

After some breakfast, we went for an explore which almost immediately bore fruit; we located a hostel which overlooked one of the most remarkable sights I have ever seen. A maze. A maze of bizarre rock formations sloping and weaving between each other in their shades of scorched red, orange and yellow. Only when we climbed down into the labyrinth did the sheer size of these ramps become truly apparent; they danced around each other in a way both incredible and daunting, incredible because they were bloody massive, and daunting because of how easy it could be for one to get utterly lost in them. We wondered about in the dried river bed for an hour or so, chatting about this, that and whatever, sometimes Roy calmly and measuredly recalling anecdotes from his time travelling in South America years before, sometimes Ela challenging me to do impressions of animals if they were humans. After building up a disgustingly drippy sweat from my impression of a stingray, we took shelter back in the shade of the hostel, in our hammocks which we had rented for the night swinging under a wobbly tin roof.

When cloud began to blanket over the blistering sky, we felt it appropriate to continue exploring for a while, and I was transfixed by the very notion that a landscape as barren as this could exist in the same country which also harbours tropical beaches, rainforest and glaciers, and blown away by the reality of the notion. However, the patchy sleep of the bus and length of our day soon exhausted us, so we called it a day. That night, in the ill-lit reception area of the hostel, splitting the pitch black night, we played ‘Go Fish’ and introduced Roy to Poker beer, and as the beers kept coming in, the game got more hilariously aggressively, to the point that it may as well been remained to ‘Go Fucking Fish You Piece Of Dirt’. Friendships, nigh on direct family ties almost can crashing down by the simple question “Do you have any queens?”. We exchanged stories and laughed a lot, laughing more each round, but also getting sleepier. That night my hammock cradled me into a monumentally memorable night’s sleep; I almost slept the whole way through, were it not for a brief intermission caused by the crashing of rain on the tin above my head, a rapturous, pounding noise which I was overjoyed to be awoken by, even more overjoyed to be carried back off to sleep by.

However, just before I sank into slumber, Stephen asked Ela and I to join him up on a rock to catch a photo of the blackness on his film camera, using some fancy photographer technique involving a whole bunch of words I don’t understand, but I was happy to oblige. Scarcely able to see my hand in front of my face, I clumsily stumbled across the sand and up the crumbling mound in my bare feet and boxers, and sat. Out over the cliff there was black. There was nothing but a flat crease stretching across where the land ended and the sky began. Behind there was the latin music and light coming from some camper’s car, but in front there was nothing except us and each other’s company, Stephen in his creative element on the right, Ela humming quietly on my left, and myself in the middle, radiating love for both of them. On what will most likely be our last major excursion out of Bogotá before flinging off in our separate ways in two weeks time, I reflected in the dark over how much meeting them and knowing them has benefitted me, how much their energy, productivity and creativity has brought out the best in me, and shunned off the worst in me, in the past half-a-year. For a little while I was totally content, enveloped in the how completely fine everything was at that moment and how privileged I was to be here and with such good friends.

When my eyes opened up to the sunrise, it was over. That feeling. Colombia. This chapter of my life. What was left was satisfaction. Everything on my to-do list is ticked off. And on the long bus ride back to Bogotá, once out of the Huila heat and back into the refreshing Andean wind, I was happy, happy that this whole trip had happened, exactly the way it had. Happy I’d learned so much, done and seen so many new things, met such wholesome and inspiring people. It’ll be tough to say goodbye, but amazing to see them again a year or so down the line.

#travel #neiva #huila #bogota #desert #tatacoa #colombia #south america #friends

The Great Big Tienda In The Sky

In last week’s entry, I wrote that my enthusiasm for Colombia was gone, it had been slowly dripping out of me as I got more accustomed to Bogotá life and more excited to see everyone back at home. However, I wrote that before I went to a Santa Fe game, an experience which essentially refilled my bucket to the brim. I thought I understood this country and knew what to expect from it, but I was in no way expecting the energy and all-out madness of a football match between one of Bogotá’s teams against a Bolivian side somewhat inappropriately named ‘The Strongest’ (that’s not me translating from Spanish; the team is literally called ‘The Strongest’), in La Copa Libertadores, which I assume is the South American equivalent of the Champions League.

Stephen and I arrived only twenty minutes before kick-off at El Campín, after the most delayed TransMilenio trip of our lives as Bogotanos, and were confronted with streets flooded with Santa Fe red which blurred in with the night time orange of the city. We thought surely there would be no tickets left, but then we were directed to a tiny booth cut out of the side of a caravan, in which resided a man selling the remaining seats. There was no queue; we just leisurely strolled up to it and got two tickets, before frantically sprinting amongst other rabid fans to the turnstiles as it became abundantly clear that the game had started. Once inside, we were swept up into absolute frenzy for the next hour and a half.

The stadium was packed and rocking, other than the away end housing little over thirty The Strongest fans who had made the trek from Bolivia. Behind our seats (which weren’t being used as seats, but rather standing platforms), a full brass band played constantly, dictating what the unrelenting crowd would chant next, and across the pitch the northern stand pulsated in time with the belting drum beat. The referee’s whistle could not be heard over the cauldron of noise, and any time a Bolivian player fell down injured they were pelted with coins. It was the most bizarre, chaotic, barbaric, all-round hilarious display of mass human behaviour I’ve ever seen in my life, and when Santa Fe scored the opening goal on 27 minutes the madness erupted into full-blown pandemonium. People forgot who they were, and for a moment transformed into baboons bouncing around the place with intense ferocity, like the way a tele screen judders when you pause a VHS. In total contrast, The Strongest’s deciding equaliser on 40 minutes stunned the place into total silence… for about fifteen seconds, then the standard hysteria resumed.

The enthusiasm of the Santa Fe faithful – the noise, the energy, the sprinting to the stadium, the enraged shouts ‘PUTA!” – really rubbed off an me immediately afterwards and for the days following, so now I had gone from fairly impartial about our Puente trip to Medellín to compellingly excited. We stayed in a hostel in El Poblado, a district, almost like a village, bursting with fantastic restaurants, countless bars and clubs and endless cafes. You could amble round it for hours, which is essentially exactly what we did for the most part. Nicknamed ‘The City of Eternal Spring’, the city exists at an altitude in the Andean region which permits it to remain in 24-26 degree sun all year round. So, in a heat that was strong, but pleasant, one that touches you on both sides of your face and fills you up with contentment, we strolled around, indulging in an inordinate amount of food and drink, occasionally taking a rest to ride the city’s perfectly functioning metro (the only one in Colombia) to some points of interest such as Plaza Botero and the stunningly beautiful botanical gardens.

Whilst the city, drenched in its golden sun all day long, illuminating all the wonderful pockets of culture to be found, is a shining testament to how far Colombia as a whole has come since the days so brutally and so exaggeratedly portrayed by Netflix’s ‘Narcos’, the definitive highlight of the trip was the excursion to Guatape, a site two hours outside Medellín. Guatape is a big rock. There is little point in sugarcoating it to be anything other than that; even all the tourism companies in Medellín advertise the trip with posters that just say ‘Big Rock!’. However, such is the bigness of this big rock, it is a breath-taking sight to behold. Waking from my doze in the front seat of the bus there, where I had to sit because I had a ticket for seat 27 and the bus only had 26 seats, I was confronted with the big rock out of nowhere. Bam. It was just there. Completely out of place in the otherwise flat landscape, just rising up out of the ground like a colossal thumbs-up to God. Once we got to the base of it, in the thick of the vibrant market, alive in its distribution of the usual tat, I looked up and saw massiveness, a physical manifestation of the word ‘huge’.

We climbed over seven hundred steps to the summit which was buzzing with pointing tourists and sweating, frenetic empanada venders. The view from up there was an unforgettable sight; the area that surrounds the big rock is made up of an arsenal of small lakes, which when positioned as they are between islands of forest, are made to look like giant puddles which glisten and sparkle a deep turquoise in the reflection of the cloudless sky, filled only by the occasional wondering vulture or hawk. We looked on it, on this tremendous creation of nature or God, or a collaboration of the two, for a long time, before deciding to treat ourselves to the definitely human creations of beer and empanadas. Procuring those two items from one of the sweaty frenetics, we crowded round a small circular table like we did the first time we went to the tienda down the road from our house in Bogotá (before it shut down forever), and fought against the wind blowing our napkins all over the place. We talked about dumb stuff and laughed about dumber stuff, and kept going up to the counter to get severely dumb stuff to eat (i.e. a cheesecake flavoured ice cream that had a literally clump of frozen cheese in the centre like a cornetto sent by Satan). Eventually, we descended down the big rock, down from the great big tienda in the sky, and sat by the lake reading and waiting for our return bus. I was glowing inside with the bliss that comes from a nice day in the sun, from a new experience, and mostly from a plan actually being actualised.

I guess the thing about this country that I’ve been reminded of this past week is that it’s so diverse; no matter how much you see and do there’s still going to be surprises, there’s still going to be something you’ve missed, either hidden away in some remote part of the country, or in plain sight at the local football ground. And I won’t see it all in the next two weeks, I won’t even come close, but I’m alright with that because that means I can come back some years down the road with a totally different itinerary. This weekend Stephen, Ela and I are reattempting our trip to the Tatacoa Desert which fell through last month, this time with Ela’s visiting Dad Roy tagging along, so I guess that will be one place I won’t need to go when I return.