At this point, Greece was so long ago that blogging about it seems to require a bit of a ‘throwback Thursday’ theme. But today isn’t even Thursday… GAH! this Phd business is being so exhausting right now! We’d seen the ruins of the Athens Agora peeking out at us through the trees, and boy did it look lovely. So, early* on the 27th we set out to gambol in its glory.
Sometimes, the biggest surprise of travelling, is the surprise of finding out that the place you travel to is unexpectedly closed.
So said my sister, after being met with confusion when asking whether we had visited the Temple of the Olympian Zeus. Turned out we had visited it, but we hadn’t really realised what it was called. And that’s the thing about Athens, you’re walking through a fairly ordinary looking city, and then you turn around, or you walk up a hill a bit and …BAM!…
Today felt like a ridiculously long day. Mostly because our group meeting ran for three hours… which turns out to be at least two times longer than the ‘sitting still’ capacity of most experimental scientists. Luckily, ‘being an adult’ means getting to reward yourself for hard work, in your own chosen way.
A normal childhood requires a great many stories, and demands that at least some of those stories have a little bit of magic thrown into them. For my sister and I, led by my sister’s obsession with all things Ancient, and with our young imaginations rather firmly captured by a particularly wonderful book, this childhood magic filtered in through the escapades of the Greek Gods.
This year’s Christmas tree was a bit of a rush compared to the ‘homemade pastels’ of last year, the ‘grey and red knit‘, or even the ‘guesthouse miniature’ of our very first family Northern Hemisphere Christmas. And so, ok, I went back to my default setting of ‘RED!’
I’m pretty excited that this year I finally managed to get together the ingredients and equipment to make my family’s traditional Christmas cookies.
So, I know that Halloween is well and truly over. I know that some among us are well on their way to embracing Thanksgiving, that some more of us are getting slightly nervous about the rapidly approaching Christmas season, and that almost all of us are feeling particularly concerned about the fact that another year has whizzed on by. But because of that whizzing, I still didn’t get a chance to show you how pretty we were on halloween. So here goes.
Hi all, I finally managed to convince Andy- the mostly silent partner of FishwithWhiskey- to do a guest post. I just feel like he is more in touch with the Fatherland/Poland than me- given that it is actually the land of his forfathers. Here goes:
There are many great things about life in Australia, and being Australian. You get to lie to inform people about drop bears. You get to surprise your foreign friends with Vegemite (and now, even Vegemite chocolate). You rarely have to cancel holidays because of rain. But one of the crappiest things about being Aussie, is how far Aussie-land is from everywhere else.