yay for italy winning last night. shame i missed both goals against the czech republic since the electricity went off twice... lately it's been really bad, no electricity for at least 3/4 hours a day. almost worst than our house in italy. :)
it makes me really sad to know i won't see the house this summer. i think it'll be the first summer i'll miss going there since i was born (and before actually, since when my mum was pregnant with me she was there). i love that house. it's so beautiful.
i read the place i stayed in on chaweng in ko samui (charlie's huts) is shutting down. thank god for that - it was horrible!!! imagine a thousand bungalows crammed into a tiny bit of land, and i had the one right next to the bar which meant being kept up by annoying gay australians until 2 o'clock in the morning. it's a shame samui is so overcrowded and overbuilt - can you imagine, my aunt was there 10 or 15 years ago and she said it was a tropical paradise, and now it's completely ruined. it's a shame i'm not going to ko pha ngan again, actually. but i guess i have no choice really, and apparently ko samet is quite nice as well. i'm particularly excited about angkor wat, of course, and southern laos (4,000 islands! and boloven plateau, waterfalls, and jungle!).
how much will i have changed by the time i get back? my 9 months away, what will they have taught me?
two things i have already learnt are: a. south east asia is definitely my favourite part of the world so far; b. sadly, i am fundamentally european and i do miss 'home' pretty often, so i better get used to that.
i am in a melancholic mood today, not sure why... maybe because i'm leaving soon, maybe because a couple more months of break from everything, i'll get started with a new era of my life: oxford and postgrad. i didn't think i'd get here last year. just a year ago... well, a bit more, since a year ago exactly i was more or less trying to rebuild myself from the thousand shattered pieces i was. but i remember thinking: i'll stay in london, and work, and earn some money. but nope, i will be a student for two more years, and at the end of the day it seems so right because - hear hear - i love studying. i can't wait to be intellectually challenged, to spend my evenings in cute old pubs with new, incredibly intelligent friends, to take walks in the green of oxford, and start a new life once again. my fourth (fifth if you consider sigli) city, another fresh start. the feeling of it is amazing.
i now also know i've been accepted into wolfson accommodation, which is good news. shame they won't tell me which one of their halls/houses i'll end up in until i get there! so i don't know if i'll be in the nice brand new ones or not.
i can't wait to put all of my nice thai and lao and malaysian and indonesian and cambodian things into my new room, buy new sheets and cushions and towels and all sorts of pretty things, and make the place mine.
(i also can't wait to buy lovely hand-made photo albums in chatuchak market in bangkok and then fill them out with all of the wonderful photos i'll get printed out, and have some photos printed out a bit bigger and frame them, and put down in words and pictures my memories of these 9 months)
this will be the start of me being active: i want to join clubs, take advantage of the free language courses (spanish or german?), become better at photography, write, learn. and spend time with my friends, as always, new and old.
see, i am in a weird mood today...