At this very moment, I stare at a
blank Word page trying to figure out how to connect all the events from last week into one single post. Brainstorming with myself to find some
ingenious and humorous connection that allows for me to smoothly described them all.
Truth is, roadtrips, sea lions, the former President of Poland and trash tv are
not the most obvious interrelated events. Perhaps their common ground is the
fact that my life, as dull as it usually is, has a way of putting me in different
scenarios in a five minute time spam.
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| Kaikoura |
Saturday morning I was drastically removed from my bed by diligent German politeness: “Sofia, open the door! We just arrived in Christchurch and we’re going to Kaikoura for the day. Let’s go!”. In fifteen minutes time, there I was, barely out of my pajama, still half asleep and eating my cereals inside a car named El Cheapo. If taking a shower in a cold river feels like becoming a born-again Christian, than this must be the closest experience to a kidnap I had so far in my life (or at least to an episode of MTV’s Room Raiders). Two hours later, Kaikoura was in the horizon.
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| Saturday: eating fish & chips... |
A little town by the ocean,
tucked between cliffs and beaches with the main touristic attractions being whales, dolphins and sea lions. Whales and dolphins were nowhere to be
seen but, fortunately, one can always count on sea lions' lazy life style of
sleeping their day away in sun heated rocks to allow for jealous humans to take some
pictures of them. Also, a little biblical adventure was in place when we had to
crossover an ocean stream at the beach, which my city self had a little trouble
accomplishing. Lesson learned here: if you’re going to make fun of your friends
for accidentally producing unappropriated home videos, make sure they don’t hold
a camera themselves when you are about to battle Nature.
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| crossing the |
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| ... and admiring sea lions life style |
Comes Sunday, and the weekend theme of heading to the beach was kept. This time I revisited Sumner, a place I like more and more every time I go there, even though the effects of the recent Earthquakes are still very much an open wound. Also, there’s nothing like having a Cookie Crumble ice cream while witnessing people learning how to surf (if all it takes is to sit on the board and enjoy the waves passing underneath you, I can do that too!).
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| Sunday: watching surfers at the beach |
On Monday it was time to shake the weekend sand off me and put on a nice dress for a fancy event at work. The Mother of All Conferences promoted by NCRE was taking place and the speaker for this year was Aleksander Kwaśniewski, President of Poland between 1995 and 2005. I'm not Polish so I can not judge the man for his ten years as President, but for his forty five minutes as a speaker he was extremely sharp and humorous. My favorite part was at the very end in one of those moments when renown politicians with nothing more to prove and nobody else to please, just do whatever the hell they want: when the Q&A was long overdue and the chairman wanted to give the last question to the French Ambassador, Mr. Kwaśniewski (thank goodness for copy paste on this name) made the Ambassador wait so we could take questions from the anonymous human beings in the back.
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| Monday: with Aleksander Kwasniewski, former President of Poland |
Funny how forty eight hours before the Conference I was watching a sea lion enjoying himself and two hours after it I was home with the soon to be gone Germans watching the Kardashians on tv while pouring some kiwi beers, but at that very moment I was taking pictures with a former President and shaking the same hand that previously touched (among better people) George W. Bush at the White House. Surreal.
Oh, the eclecticness of my
days.
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