Appropriate

Last day of work (yay!) before the holidays, and the Friday Five comes up trumps:

1. How are you planning to spend the summer?
Well, in 52 hours I’ll be leaving for the airport to embark on “Linda and Robin’s great Irish (and some English and Scottish, too) Adventure”. That’ll cover the next two weeks. After that it’s nose back to the grindstone – working the rest of the summer (I will need some time off again in September). There will be interruptions in the form of weekends, obviously. Hopefully we will manage a long-talked-about weekend in Arvika and I really need to go to Bergen at some point.

2. What was your first summer job?
You know, I can’t remember… Probably the girl-of-all-jobs at my dad’s place of work, because I worked there for several summers on and off. I did all sorts of odd stuff – it’s a research institute of the biological persuasion – numbering all the lakes in Finnmark, catching butterflies, sorting through riverbed samples for anything resembling animal life while breathing in the fumes from the alchohol used to preserve them (which left me rather light-headed), sticking errata notes into 1000 newly printed conference proceedings. You know, the usual stuff…

3. If you could go anywhere this summer, where would you go?
Uhm. Ireland? It’s not as if someone pointed a gun at our heads and said “I know you’re just dying to go to Bali/Yukon/Patagonia/Uzbekistan, but you will go to Ireland and have a miserable time instead!” If money was no object, I’d quite like to go to Bali, Yukon, Patagonia and Uzbekistan as well, but Ireland is actually the first choice this year.

4. What was your worst vacation ever?
I don’t think I’ve had any “worst” holidays. I know this is not logically possible, that one or two of them must have been less brilliant than the others, and that that would make them “worst” by default, but I can’t remember any holidays that I haven’t enjoyed. There was the one year when I was at a camp in Sunne, Sweden and we were assigned a space for our tent which was in – well, no other way to accurately describe it – a hole in the ground, so that after the first rainfall we had 20 cm of water in our tent. That could have been miserable, but in fact we had a great time and laughed about it even then, not just in rettrospect. The closest I’ve come to “bad times” while on holiday has been towards the end of a stay when my travelling companions have been getting on my nerves because I haven’t been allowed enough time on my own to recouperate from all the company.

Oh, and there was that long weekend in Senegal. We drove down from the Banjul area across the border into Senegal and stayed at a hotel where the food was terrible (there was fish – I didn’t like fish – and potatoes – I didn’t like potatoes – but in my defence my parents like both and they thought the food was terrible, too) and we couldn’t swim in the sea because there had been an upsurge or something of portugese men-of-war. Parts of that one were terrible, but I had a pretty good time anyway, enjoying the novelty of replying appropriately to the greetings of “Salam maleikum” and then have people jabber at me in French to which the best I could do was shrug my shoulders (I had had a little French at school, but the only thing I could remember clearly was “Ou est la chatte?” and I figured this would not get me very far in conversation) and say “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French” as clearly as I could in English.

5. What was your best vacation ever?
As you’ll gather from the previous answer, I think most of my holidays have been pretty amazing, so it’s hardly to single out one in particular. In honour of this year’s choice, I am going to settle on the previous holiday Linda and I had, when we went to Wales for a little over a week. We travelled down from Telford (where I was living at the time) to Hay-on-Wye (which was brilliant, but unwise, because it meant our backpacks were unecessarily heavy for the rest of the trip). We then stoppen over one night in Cardiff before heading out along the south coast. Memorable moments include:

– the B&B we booked in Carmarthen, only it turned out it was quite a way outside Carmarthen… No poblem, “Let me know which bus you’re on and I’ll come and pick you up” says the landlord. We arrived and were treated to scones and tea and then announced our intention to walk to the nearest pub for the evening meal. We were given directions and the startling instruction – from the landlady – “Now, girls, if you get too drunk to walk home, give us a call and we’ll come and pick you up.” Maybe they just liked driving? On the way to the pub we passed a field full of sheep, not an unusual occurrence in Wales, it must be said, what followed was more unusual, though… Along the field we were hidden from view for the sheep (and they from us) by a hedge. We got to the far corner and the gate and the sheep saw us and – as one – charged at the gate. We both jumped several feet back. We’re used to Norwegian sheep whose utmost reaction upon seeing you is a half-hearted bleat, and here sheep were actually running…

– the truck driver who picked us up when we tried our hand (no pun intended) at hitch-hiking and insisted on driving into – I think – Haverfordwest, where he had no business, to drop us at the bus station, because “Hitch-hiking is very dangerous!” (to be honest I’d be more afraid of the tourists than of the inhabitants in that part – if a car with foreign license plates had come along we’d have pretended to be enjoying the view and pointedly not be looking for lifts, I think)

– the local pub we fell into in St. David’s, which had a very grand name (The Empire Hotel or something), but was rather shabby, where we spent a long time in the lounge – which had comfy, plush-covered sofas – not getting served much as the barman was in the other section chatting to his regulars, and we finally realised we had much better move into the bar, where we found uncomfortable stools but genial company, including a guy who did boat trips out to the bird-covered island just outside St. David’s (can’t for the life of me remember what it’s called), which we were persuaded to join the next day (though somewhat sceptical as to his ability to get up in time considering the state he was in by the time the pub closed).

Ah, memories.