Of Doors and memories

On balance, I haven't really been doing a whole lot of reading lately. With the move and everything, I suppose I might be forgiven this lapse. At least part of the trouble is that I was just a little tired of the implacable turning of the Wheel!

On the trip over from India I was too stressed out with things to actually be able to focus on anything new. So I decided to pick up the Neverwhere re-read I'd been putting off for months. I must say, it was a very good choice :). Immersed in the world of London under, the imminent troubles faded away. Despite the gap of a few years since I'd first read the book, I wasn't particularly surprised (as I often am, with re-reads) by the flow of events. However, I'd forgotten much of the details, which rather greatly improved my enjoyment of the adventure :). The thing with it though. like a few other books by Gaiman, this one just begs for a sequel to be born. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Since then, I've decided to join the local book club. More as an excuse to hang out and talk books with some people once a month than anything else really. But the first book I came across has been quite the revelation. Kitchen by the curiously named Banana Yoshimoto. I can probably confidently say that this isn't something I'm likely to have ever come across in the usual run of things. But there you have it, I was completely taken by the unusual method of the story-teller.

They have been taught, ..., not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness... What I mean by "their happiness" is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone.

I mean, seriously? Who puts that in the middle of an otherwise outstandingly soft-spoken and quietly reserved narrative punctuated by the most beautiful imagery? There's lots of moments like that, when I was left wondering what would make anyone in their early twenties think that way. And at the same time thinking that it was true, in a way. Some stories have that quality, of stripping off the mask from that game of hide-and-seek people often play, hiding from things we know to be true but don't want to be, behind things that we know aren't true but wish otherwise.

On a rather different note, winter seems to be having a hard time leaving this year. After several days of bright sunshine, it suddenly started snowing again late in the week! I didn't particularly mind, since that meant that the slopes at Kongsberg actually extended their season by a week! This time quite a few of us managed a trip. The slow, wet snow made things somewhat more eventful than some of us would have liked, as did the absence of the chair-lifts. 

On the other hand, the virtually empty slopes and the slo-mo nature of my tumbles gave me the perfect opportunity to improve my control while turning :). It's like suddenly your reflexes have become so much faster and that confounding blur of activity that sent you sprawling ten feet down the slope becomes oh so very obvious! So yeah, I was quite glad we went yesterday.

Since then, the snow's turned into a particularly cold drizzle and I suppose the white will soon turn into something a little less pristine.

Currently: sleepy
Listening to: Dido / Kendrick Lamar - Let us move on

Arrival

It was a pretty uneventful trip, all things considered. Well, it wasn't really. But minor annoyances relating to excess baggage and faulty card swiping machines aside, it went quite all right. Didn't miss any flights, didn't get delayed, and rather importantly, none of the positively huge amount of baggage I checked in went missing :).

When I did land up in Norway, as I'd been told, winter was still very much in evidence! I must say, showing up for work on a Friday afternoon has its perks, the weekend that immediately follows provides some of that much needed settling in to happen. Or in my case, a quick day trip to the slopes of Kongsberg with a snowboard!

As it turns out, today was the last day of this ski season, so I'd made it just in time :). I had an absolute blast, once I got over the initial wobbles one might expect after an absence of two and a half years from the slopes. I dare say, it is a little like learning how to ride a bike. You can't really forget how :). It even snowed a little! Barely enough for us to miss the sunny skies though, so all in all it was really quite perfect :).

I suppose now we'll have to see how the work part of it pans out. But with such a start, it's hard not to feel at least a little upbeat :).

Currently: excited
Listening to: Lifehouse - Always somewhere close

Departure

They say, you never really know what you'll miss about a place till you leave, about people till they leave and about a life till it's left you, or you've left it, well and truly behind. I don't know if it matters which way for that last one...

I have learnt the truth of some of this over the years. And I use this as my primary excuse now, as I actively avoid thinking of all that I'll miss about... well, everything. Right, so that's it. The bags have been packed, weighed, unpacked and then packed and weighed again. I guess that was the easy part.

Currently: hmm
Listening to: Danny Elfman - Silver Linings titles

Odds and ends

Old habits die hard. Sometimes the same seems to hold true for old troubles. It's been another interminable wait for, wait for it, a visa! Now I might be mistaken, but this should be the last one I need to worry about getting for the immediate foreseeable future. So what happens? My paperwork goes on an unscheduled holiday to Kuala Lumpur for a few weeks...

Anyhow, looks like I'm finally headed to Norway sometime in the coming week. And by the looks of it, winter's still very much holding its own up there. Maybe I'll get that one weekend of snowboarding yet! Not that I'll mind a little drop in temperature too terribly. It's been getting pretty hot in Cal these last few weeks.

In the mean time, I've been keeping myself entertained, no, not by yelling at visa handling agents. Well, not all the time anyway. But with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. And thus far, it has proved a fairly fulfilling read! But then again, I'm only closing in on the end of the fourth book, there's a long way to go :).

I must say, I find the relatively straightforward progression and the many characters that don't die all of a sudden but continue mostly unharmed from book to book, a huge relief. Plus, it took me a while, but finally I wizened up to the clues in the symbols at the start of each chapter :). It's quite the grand fantastic mystery. If only there weren't all of fourteen books (including the prequel, which was pretty awesome, I thought).

However, I seem to have forgotten entirely about that other awesome book I read on my way back from South Africa. Robert A. Heinlein's Have Space Suit - Will Travel! Ever since that dedication in To Say Nothing of the Dog, I'd been meaning to read it. And once I finally got to it, it was totally worth the anticipation. (Although in retrospect, I'm not entirely sure that dedication said much about this book. I suppose I just thought the name was too awesome :D.)

I loved the suddenness of it all :). The weirdest things just sort of happen as you read along, and somehow, they seem to be the most natural thing! All things considered, it came as a little bit of a surprise exactly how long ago the book had been written. Then again, I suppose some things don't really change all that much over time.

I haven't really been taking photos lately. I suppose I should get over this thing about waiting for something to happen 'worth taking photographs of'. In the mean time, a few roads from the past year...

Currently: blah
Listening to: Lifehouse - Nobody listen

Everything that has a beginning...

aka Swansong - V

As far as spectacular cities go, Cape Town has to rank quite highly, no matter how much of the world one has seen. Of course, it helps no end that the Table Mountain towers above the city in all its magnificence :). It was approaching a smoky dusk as the flight made its approach and night had fallen by the time we made it to the Inn on the Square, our final stop.

You couldn't get much closer to the middle of town, I imagine, than staying at the Greenmarket Square. As an added bonus, it is a perfectly festive sight that greets you as soon as you leave the hotel in the day time, thanks to the colours of the flea market in the square.

We really had only two things we had to do in those last couple of days, and visiting the top of Table Mountain was one of them! We decided to be lazy and took the cable way to the top :). It was a gorgeous day, cloudless with a fresh sea breeze! We spent several hours travelling different paths till we lost one another quite thoroughly. But I, for one, found some spectacular views. Some, that I seemed to have entirely to myself :).

One of these days I'll look at the geography of those mountains closely. Somehow, I never quite got the lay of the peaks of the Western Cape :). Each different perspective seemed to yield a deceptively familiar vista, only to turn out to be something other than what I expected. It was quite entertaining, seeing how it is practically impossible to actually get lost as long as one stayed on the 'table top'.

Eventually we found each other, and our way back into town. The rest of the day, as we explored around the square, I kept stealing looks at the rocks soaring up above, wondering what force of wind and water had struck such shapes. The thoughts that crowded my mind as we drove out of the dark night into a grey misty dawn the next morning were similar. Only this time, we seemed to be treading the edge between rock and water as we headed towards Gansbaai.

Yep, the other thing on the must do list was diving with the Great Whites! That drive, though, really had something of the surreal in it. To make it in time for the dive boat, we'd had to leave the city pretty much in the dead of the night. As the first patches of light drifted through the valleys, we'd left the highways far behind and I found myself the only one awake to witness the surroundings.

A narrow road ran arrow-straight, snaking high and low along the rolling foothills, but never veering to either side. The hills ran along one side as the water made inroads along the other. Both sides covered in a mist, which in that half light, could have given wings to many a creature of fantasy. And every now and then the sun would crest the horizon just at the point where the road ran to meet it :).

But then the spell broke and we were off on another adventure, to see the sharks! I suppose on the best of days it's a matter of chance, whether the sharks show up or not. But we must have been quite lucky! More than one Great White chose our boat to sniff around, and after two stints in the cage, I was quite thoroughly satisfied. I'd managed to forget how cold the water on this side of the country was :).

Before we headed back to Cape Town again though, we decided to visit one last spot. Cape Agulhas, the southernmost part of the continent of Africa! It took us a bit to figure out the way, but we did finally make it. It's not like you can actually tell the difference, but we tried anyway, looking this way and that, to see if the Indian Ocean looked any different from the Atlantic :D.

And thus it was that our long, convoluted and frankly somewhat crazy trip of South Africa drew to a close. Through a coincidence that somewhat defies belief, around the same time it appeared that my sailing days were destined to come to a close. Nothing was decided, but somehow it seemed a fitting end. So when we toasted to the end, from the depths of some extremely comfortably worn armchairs at the Irish pub :), it wasn't just the end of the trip, but also the end of an unexpectedly entertaining, roller-coaster seven and a half years at sea.

Currently: in limbo
Listening to: The National - ADA