by The last few days I’ve been humming. During the day everything has been beautiful, amazing, wonderful, and at night I’ve hardly slept. On Thursday, after my fifth night in a row of sleeping for a couple of hours max, I decided to take a sick day, only my second in over two years there. It was the perfect day for it, the sun was shining and my flatmate had moved out the day before. I walked around my local area for two hours or so, wide-eyed, taking photos of beautiful trees and houses that were now so much more colourful than I remembered. Other than that I gave the bathroom a good clean (it needed it – my flatmate was a rather aggressive user of the toilet) and studied some Romanian.
I’ve now got my Google set to Romanian: the “I’m feeling lucky” button is now “Mă simt norocos” and if I search for Sibiu I get aproximativ 32.100.000 (de) rezultate in just 0,57 secunde. The same goes for Google Maps, Google News and Google You Name It, everything is in Romanian including all the suggested search terms and my supposedly tailored results. As anti-Google as I can be at times (they are so pervasive), that’s pretty cool. There’s also a social network, Google Plus, which I’ve joined. It’s much smaller than Facebook or Twitter, with “only” a few million active members. I find the network part of Google Plus as confusing as hell (and of course all the terminology and help pages are in Romanian for me), but what I like about it is that it’s great for viewing and sharing photos, and I’ve spent hours staring at colourful photos of Sibiu and elsewhere. I might even post some photos of Wellington at some stage, and I’ll post the link here if that happens. I’ve even got an animated Romanian flag as my mascot or avatar or whatever you’re supposed to call it. I had to find one that wasn’t so fast as to drive everyone batty and to re-order the frames so that the first one looked nice (sometimes you only get to see a still photo and it defaults to the first frame). Yeah, working with animated images, or GIFs, is fun.
I think what’s made me hum is the realisation that I’ve got so much freedom. I can be who I want and for years I didn’t even know it. Isn’t that something? Billions of people around the world don’t have that. In my own country we do pretty well in the freedom stakes, but so many of us are constrained by the situations we end up in. Take my boss. He plans to move house soon, but can’t move more than a mile or two because his three kids would have to move to a different school otherwise. He works extremely hard and his mind works extremely quickly but to me, as I watch him shove TV food down his throat while he rushes from one bullshit meeting to the next, none of it seems worth it. I used “TV food” there because of something I saw on a train in America. The guy in front of me in the food car dropped an armful of processed crap on the counter, and the bloke behind the desk tried to stop him from buying it: “You don’t want to be spending eighteen dollars on all that TV food.”
It would be criminal for me to waste this freedom I have. I haven’t got a two-mile radius dammit, I’ve got a great big map. My train itinerary which will cover some of that map is likely to be:
- London to Paris via the Eurostar, 2½ hours;
- Paris to Munich, humming along at 200mph on a double-decker train (Seat61.com tells me to get a top-deck seat for the best views), 5¾ hours;
- Munich to Budapest overnight, 9¾ hours, and I’ll have a few hours to look around Budapest when I arrive;
- Either Budapest to Timișoara, 5 hours, arriving in the evening of day two, or Budapest to Sibiu, 10 hours (why so much longer I have no idea), arriving in the early morning of day three.
Without Seat61.com I don’t know where I’d be.
A week ago yesterday I had my performance review, the last one that will matter in my current job (and I’d prefer not to ever have another job where they’ll matter). I got through it OK, and that felt pretty good. The same evening I went to a regional tennis awards presentation. Someone at the club nominated me for an award for those nine consecutive singles wins I had, but there wasn’t much chance I’d ever win it. Most of the prizes went to the elite players who already win heaps of awards anyway. The best moment of the evening was when a bloke of about eighty, who had done so much work organising competitions over decades, was recognised with the volunteer of the year award; it brought a tear to his eye.
Talking of freedom, having this apartment to myself again, and the freedom that gives me, feels incredible.
