Plotting and Scheming

January's been a pretty busy month considering all my best intentions to keep lots of time available for completing things on The List. Work wrote off the first week and a half really with 10pm (or later) finishes, and once the time-critical things were done there was a lot of catching up on the day-to-day left over. That said, I still squeezed a fair bit into my free time.

Two weekends of afternoons were spent filming a mini-sitcom for YouTube with the brilliant Paul Richards. Paul and I have always worked on a lot of theatrical projects together but this year with both of us writing solo shows for the fringe we haven't had much need to spend our evenings reading through script drafts and eating spicy chips at our favourite cafe. This little project was great fun and a nice excuse to hang out together. Intended mainly as a way of recording some of Paul's writing, it's a 4 part series of 10-15 minute episodes of a sitcom about characters Emily and Michael who recently broke up but have ended up sharing the long and awkward drive to Bristol to visit new partners. It's unrehearsed and undirected, filmed exclusively on an iPhone which gives it a gritty, claustrophobic atmosphere that works surprisingly well. Hopefully we'll be releasing the episodes in the next month or so and I'll link them here.

It's also been a surprisingly sociable January with a few parties, a Burns night supper in London, and the first 30th birthday shindig of the year which was a great excuse to see some of my favourite people that live too far away to see anywhere near as regularly as I'd like. Chatting to a few people over the last few weeks I've been given a few ideas for 'back up' items for my 30 Before 30 list too - for just in case anything on my list becomes impossible to complete for any reason. They're certainly not cop-out alternatives, but I think it's wise to have a back up or two in case...

Most of all this January I've been comforting myself over my heavy workload and the miserable weather by daydreaming about holidays and planning how to get some more countries on my list. To this end, I've booked time off work in April around the Easter weekend to visit some Eastern European countries - flights are booked to go from London to Sofia (Bulgaria) and back home from Ljubljana (Slovenia). I plan on hopping on some trains in between to visit Belgrade (Serbia), Budapest (Hungary) and Zagreb (Croatia). It's a squeeze for ten days but with a little planning and my friend TripAdvisor I reckon I can squeeze a lot in.

Better get stuck into the guide books I suppose...

                            

    

Merry Christmas

Just a very quick post to wish any readers a merry christmas and a happy new year!

I expect I won't be making any New Years resolutions this year given I already have 30 challenges to complete, but I have been playing some festive tunes on my ukulele and have a very little something to share...

Apologies for the terrible quality of the recording - one take on a music recording app doesn't quite cut it, but it's a bit of Christmassy fun nonetheless.

Merry Christmas x

https://soundcloud.com/izzy-rees/santa-baby-a-nerdy-girls

A Little Bit of Zen

                         
As long as I can remember I've always been fascinated by different cultures and spirituality within them. I've visited countless places of spiritual worship in various countries and love walking into a calm building and soaking up the atmosphere - whether it's marvelling at the brightly coloured stained glass windows and Saint-ridden interior of Notre Dame or quietly kneeling and lighting a candle before a golden Buddha at a hilltop temple in Chiang-Mai.

On top of this, from quite a young age I remember having a specific interest in the idea of meditation. I once ordered some audio cassette tapes on how to meditate when I was about 10 from a catalogue - being a terrible hoarder I don't think I ever actually listened to them, they just sat on my bookshelf gathering dust. So when compiling this list, I thought this was something it was about time I tried.

Last summer in the run up to the Edinburgh Fringe I ended up busy every night and all weekend throughout the whole of July, on top of a heavy workload during the day. I found myself craving some alone time, and found the best way of getting it was to go for a walk at lunchtime from the office and to sit quietly by the nearby lake and do nothing. After a couple of days of this I realised it wasn't a far cry from actually trying to meditate. I'd tried a couple of guided meditations on YouTube before but found them hard to get into so I decided that when I planned my list of challenges, I would add meditation and go on a proper course.

In October I rocked up at the nearby Buddhist Centre to attend the "Introduction to Meditation 1" course, braced for the possibility that I might end up having to spend the evening with a group of hippy-types talking about visions and spirit animals. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in a lovely group of people who were all intelligent and interesting and a joy to be around. Better still, most of us were very willing to talk honesty about how difficult we found some of the exercises, and there was a real sense of camaraderie within the group.

The sense of well being I started to get from the meditation sessions was lovely, as difficult as I found it to switch off from work mode to do it. As it went on it got easier to go into it, and I developed more control over the practise. I began to notice the difference in my behaviour at work, with an increased ability to multitask and juggle difficult projects, as well as a greater sense of control and positivity when things were very difficult and stressful.

I finished my six week course and immediately signed up for the level two course. I went to that, finding it even better and more interesting than the first course - I suddenly found I was able to meditate without guidance and just choose what worked for me and my mood and adapt to my environment too. That sense of improved well-being continued and the discussion in the classes was always thought provoking.

But most of all, I went back again because my teacher and the rest of my class were an absolute joy to spend time with. It's such a pleasure spending an evening with such a kind group of people.

I'm starting the third course in January.

30 Things Stats:

Number: 3 - Try meditation

Completion Status: COMPLETE

Summary: Want to improve your sense of contentment and well-being? Try it. I'm so pleased I've gone to a proper class, it's been really lovely. Really the fact I'm about to start my third course speaks for itself...

I Done Some Running

My legs really hurt the next day. I'm ashamed to say I totally underestimated how tough it would be without any training. I mean, 1.1 miles? That's nothing. I walk that road around the science park some lunchtimes and it takes about 20 minutes, so running it would be over much quicker at least.

I forgot that I'd struggle to breathe and have to slow down to regulate my breath and get back in control of my feeble asthmatic lungs. I forgot that when I do ever run, my left knee throbs for a few days afterwards. I forgot I turn tomato red after cardio and might feel a bit stupid like that around my work colleagues afterwards.

But I did it. Yes, I had to slow down for some bits so I didn't die, but I did it. I may have had a quick chat with a nice girl from one of the companies on the other side of the park who was also struggling half way round. I may have got to the end, handed over the baton to our next runner and immediately dropped down to sit on the floor for a few minutes before regaining the energy to stand and grab a bottle of water and a banana. But I did it.

And even better, we raised a load of money for Children In Need. Running has given me more of an achy body than an endorphin rush, but the warm fuzzy charity feeling's better any day.

30 Things Stats:

Number: 13 - Run a race

Completion Status: COMPLETE

Summary: I did hurt a bit - but really only have myself to blame for not managing to make time for training. In fact, I think I might get back into my zombies 0-5k training app and see if I can improve.

Run, Fatty, Run

               

      

Running is something I've simply never done before. I've always had asthma which can really leave me struggling to breathe during exercise, so doing a lot of cardio has never appealed. I've also never entirely trusted running as a sport - it looks tedious and harsh on your knees, unlike lower impact activities that are done with friends like rowing or hockey.

Around the 30 years old mark seems to be when sports hobbies become very popular though - certainly among my friends anyway. My entire facebook feed has moved on from the posts about trendy cocktail bars and hangovers and is now full of weddings, baby pictures, new fancy bikes and sponsored marathons.

A friend of mine tried out one of the 'couch to 5k' apps on her phone recently that provide a structured running programme to get you from doing no exercise whatsoever to being able to run 5k. As a result she's become frighteningly addicted, and seeing her slimming down at the same time as getting hooked on it has been tempting me to give it a go. Then I found a 'Zombies, Run' app that has a 0-5k training programme with a storyline and zombie chases where I get to save Abel Township from the undead hordes. SOLD.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed it the first few times. Unfortunately the past month in the office has been so ridiculously busy I've barely run at all which means although I hope to get back into it now things are calmer, I've not really improved my fitness at all. Then a friend from work told me about the Cambridge Fun Run on 15th November for Children in Need. It's a relay race in teams of 4, each person running 1.1 miles around the Cambridge Science Park. He'd already signed me up. 

So that's what I'll be doing on Friday morning. I'll be exhausted and sweaty, having an asthma attack in the middle of the science park in front of my colleagues. HELP.

Denmark

                       

I've recently got back from a short work trip to Denmark, which is the first of my new countries to visit. I was sent out there by the company to train the new employees in the Copenhagen office we've just bought on using our systems and generally to be charming and make them feel welcome. They, of course, were the ones who ended up making me feel welcome. And really so did all of the Danes.

Now I'm not terribly used to going to places where I don't speak the language. Having been brought up by a Spanish mother and having learnt French and German at school, it feels like it's not often I don't get to use those - that or I'm in an English speaking country anyway. Even visiting Italy I understand the majority of basic conversation through speaking Spanish, it's only when I open my mouth that I'm found out (although I think we can all agree that the phrase "un gelato fragola per favore" which was the first Italian I ever learnt aged 5 will pretty much see you through).

Danish is a funny old language. When I asked my colleagues there they told me it's a Germanic language that shares a lot in common with Swedish and Norwegian. It makes sense, and also explains why I can guess the meaning of a few words that look a bit German when written down, but can't make head or tail of spoken conversation. Even that's not terribly helpful as the bulk of written Danish I see is the instructions on the tax authorities' website or on invoices, and my favourite of those is still the name of the energy provider 'Dong Energy' which makes me laugh like a 12 year old every single time. In the hurried preparation for this trip I'd only managed to make time for learning the words hi (hej), yes (ja), no (nej), and thank you (tak), so I spent the trip being extra polite and smiley to make up for my ignorance. 

I needn't have worried. The Danes I interacted with were lovely, reserved but welcoming and with a dry sense of humour. Though I was mainly there on business, I found myself some time to go exploring on Friday evening, which involved a walk into town to see some of the area around the city hall (including some geeking-out over the city hall building itself after far too much time spent watching The Killing). I then wandered over to Tivoli Gardens for the rest of the evening to explore it in all its Halloween-decorated splendour. I fell a little bit in love...

The gardens house a large number of stalls, restaurants, fairground games and rides, as well as an aquarium and various other attractions. At the moment they're covered in pumpkins, giant spiders and cobwebs for Halloween (I assume it wasn't just a lack of cleaners) and they have performances on the main open air stage in the evenings, with a light show at the end of the night. I spent a wonderfully relaxed evening exploring all the areas of the gardens with a cup of Gluhwein in one hand and my camera phone in the other and marvelled at the world's tallest carousel as it spun its riders around and around, 80 metres above the night-lit city. 

By about 10pm it had started to rain and I decided that I'd prefer to walk the 20 minutes back to my hotel than wait in the rain for the light show. When I got back I thought I'd treat myself to a Cosmopolitan at the lobby bar while I dried off, and while sat flicking through my photos of the evening I got chatting to a couple of guys from Norway. It transpired that they'd both been en route to Norway and their connecting flight at Copenhagen had been cancelled, so they'd had to stay at the hotel. One was a student on his way back from holiday in Madrid and the other a helicopter pilot heading home from working for several months in Greenland. A number of hours and several stories of travel, DIY house building and polar bear attacks later, we eventually headed to our separate rooms at 2am, setting our respective alarms for 7am taxis to the airport - though only once I was satisfied I'd persuaded the pilot that his British TV references of 'Mr Bean', 'Keeping up Appearances' and 'Embarrassing Bodies' were not giving him a representative view of the Brits as a population.

30 Things Stats:

Number: 18 - Visit 30 countries before 30

Completion Status: 23/30 countries completed

Summary: Copenhagen's gorgeous. I will definitely be going back to eat some smorrebrod and go on the carousel. Now excuse me while I go and find the first series of Borgen to watch and reminisce.

Visit 30 Countries Before 30 - Planning

                  

I've already acknowledged on the list that this particular item may be the most ambitious of my challenges. I thought initially my main constraint would be expense, but actually once I started looking at a full list of countries of the world I saw there's plenty of potential for utilising cheap Sleazyjet flights and combining countries into a single trip that make that a lot easier. As it turns out, the biggest complication this year will be finding enough time from my work holiday allowance - particularly tricky since 10 days of it have already been put aside for the Edinburgh Fringe in August!

I started by finding a suitable list of countries to work from online. A little bit of googling unearthed a few versions, and to complicate matters further the status of a lot of principalities as countries or states is heavily disputed which makes things pretty difficult to define. In fact, according to the site "listofcountriesoftheworld", only 191 countries are not in dispute. Still, I had to start somewhere, and their list seemed as good as any so I've decided to work from that.

From a first review, I've already visited 22 not including England (which I decided was a cheat since I was born here). I was a little disappointed to realise the four US states I initially wrote down wouldn't qualify but never mind. My 22 already visited are:

1) Australia

2) Austria

3) Belgium

4) China

5) Czech Republic

6) Egypt

7) Estonia

8) Finland

9) France

10) Germany

11) India

12) Ireland

13) Italy

14) Japan

15) Mauritius

16) Spain

17) Switzerland

18) Thailand

19) Scotland

20) USA

21) Vatican City

22) Wales

So now I'm fully into holiday scheduling for 2014. I'm lucky actually because through my work I already know I'll need to visit Denmark which I've never been to before, and that also opens up the possibility of crossing the bridge to Sweden while I'm there as its just a short train journey across to Malmo. It doubles up as a brilliantly geeky adventure for a girl who loves a bit of Skandi-Crime, visiting the locations of "The Killing" and "The Bridge"...

I'm also hoping that work requires me to visit the office in Nice again, because although I've been to France multiple times already, a trip to Nice would give me the chance to visit Monaco only a short drive down the road. 

Other than those though I'm pretty open to suggestions. I do of course have South America on my list so that will cover more - but for now I'm off to spin a globe and stick a pin in it.