Nothing like a first time

My first holiday abroad: filled with misconceptions and oversights that have all helped to make it seem so magical. Like the fact that as exciting as the plane is, when you arrive at Palma Airport you still have a long, stuffy coach journey to get to your hotel that acted as my first taste of foreign weather. I am also unaccustomed to passport control and all the rituals of an airport, but this being the first time (well, nearly, as the only other time I only had hand luggage) meant that I was undeterred by the waiting times and the monotony of baggage claim. For me it was a new world, and I felt angry at all the little darling children *cough* who were complaining that this was taking longer than last time. I had not experienced a “last time” and for me it felt like I’d had my holiday just by being in the airport. This was helped by the fact that I was surprised by my well-travelled girlfriend to the private lounge at the airport, with food and drink galore!
This is obviously strange coming from a guy who is nearly 18, but then again I am still excited on Christmas Eve and travelling through the air in a tin can was just the start of my excitement. Over the past week I have tried new foods, been able to swim in the sea without having to psyche myself up beforehand (Wales!), been on glass-bottomed boats and tried a large amount of cocktails because I’m just that manly. But as I said before, it was the oversights and small dilemmas that added to the sense of wonder; accidentally locking us out of our hotel room before breakfast: trying to navigate a new place and realising that I’d gotten lost for the fifth time that day: not realising that I had to pay for water in the hotel. Beyond all else the most monumental mistake was trying to book a trip to a water park without researching it first; believing ourselves to be heading towards water slides and overpriced attractions, we actually ended up in what I can honestly describe as hell on earth – Marineland, Palma. The gravity of our mistake (we had wanted “aqualand”) was realised when we requested our two adult tickets and the rep simply replied “oh my god!” Instead of a park full of exciting attractions, we got a small “zoo” full of bored children and suicidal adults. The slides were replaced with an abandoned play park. The attractions were replaced with mistreated turtles and a monkey with nazi-sympathies, in full view of a bird that was wholly cannibalistic. We trudged around the place in 10 minutes and, deciding we couldn’t stomach the depressed dolphins, we left and waited for the coach home on a beach for 5 hours.
But I recognise this as just part of the fun, a story (although an expensive one) to tell people who would laugh at our mistake. This, combined with the hilarious waiter who gave me a suspicious amount of tequila, the boring receptionist who held a grudge over a bottle of water, and the elderly couple we kept running into complaining about the resort, will always stay with me. If it had been crap, it still would have been mine. But this holiday was amazing for all the right reasons, and the shine of “first-time” really made all the difference.

Confetti

365 days
Around 50 posts
Around 70 followers
And I haven’t said anything useful. I wish everything was as rewarding as blogging. Sure, those aren’t really impressive stats if you wanted to do this for a living but for a guy who set the thing up on a whim in the hope that I’d find a use for it as I went along, it’s pretty impressive indeed. I still don’t know what im doing, and there have been times where I’ve almost closed the blog due to lack of direction, inspiration etc, but it realised that what I have is a record of my thoughts, and my life, at an important time. I was thinking of a witty post to publish to mark my “anniversary” but typically I couldn’t think of one. You’ll all have to deal with this overly cheesy post instead.
My bad.

Lost in Translation

Fairly baffled to find that a post that I just published on my site has disappeared from my dashboard and reader, and I can’t seem to understand why. Maybe my connection was bad, and it got lost whilst being sent? Or maybe my site is just confused, as it hasn’t actually changed the name of my blog on my iOS app despite me doing so about a month back?
Although there is another slight possibility….
Can WordPress take posts down? Because if so, they may have been slightly annoyed that I titled it “win tickets to the World Cup, sponsored by WordPress”. I can assure you that this was for Ironic purposes only, but the computer does not seem to have detected this technique, and if it has I’m half expecting a post to appear in it’s place that just says “clever-dick”.

“These walls, thy sphere”.

Have you ever tried to remember the last thought you had before falling asleep? I’m not an insomniac, but everyone’s had their fair share of nights where their brain is their own worst enemy, and their duvets hold them down on to a mattress that’s suddenly seemingly been stuffed with bricks. Last night was perhaps my worst ever experience of this, and after attempting to get to sleep at 10 so as to be ready for English Literature A Level today, I was still awake at 3 in the morning swearing at my pillow for it’s sudden lack of comfort.
As always, these nights end. I woke up before my alarm not feeling particularly rested but not exhausted either. Obviously the fear of my most challenging exam was partially to blame, but I also get like this on Christmas Eve, still excited by something that should have stopped affecting me now I’m in my late teens.
But this brings me back to my first question: what is the thought that overrides all the others and finally lets us sleep? Is it a thought that all humans have, issued by the brain to bring about rest? Or is it a different, happy memory that is constant? Or does it change all the time?
Perhaps it is as simple as realising that whatever your anxieties are, there’s always a world outside your bedroom. Sleepless nights are frustrating, but they always make the following day seem more welcome.
Even with 2 and a half hours of a poetry and drama exam to struggle through.