GenesisDreams

Beautiful Brussels

Friends - Fun - Personal - Travel My student visa expires tomorrow. If I stay in the country past tomorrow I'll be living here illegally. I had two options, either apply to the consulate for a further leave to remain on a visitors visa, which would cost me £150, or leave the country and come back in during April and get a six months visitors visa for free on re-entry. I opted for the second option. Later tonight Nikkie and I are heading down to her parents place in North London, and then tomorrow we are heading off on the Eurostar from London, down through the channel tunnel, and then across to Brussels. We are staying two nights at the Five Star Sheraton Brussels Hotel before getting the Eurostar back to London on Saturday. I'll be out of the country, have a fantastic time, and come back in getting my visa for the same amount it would have cost me to apply directly to the consulate. I found the deal on lastminute.com, it's fantastically priced for what we get, including Eurostar tickets and two nights 5* accommodation at one of the best hotels in Brussels with breakfast included. The hotel looks amazing, with large rooms, comfy looking beds (^_^) and a heated indoor pool up on the 30th floor with a view over the Brussels skyline. It's right in the heart of the city too, within walking distance of all the major attractions. Brussels is a beautiful city. I've only been there once before, and then only for a couple of hours as I was making my way down from Bruges to Paris, but what I saw made me want to go back and spend more time there. There will be lots of premium Belgium beers to drink, as well as copious amounts of quality Belgium chocolate to consume. I'm really looking forward to the trip, I'm sure we are going to have an amazing time; positively indulgent! Some people may think it's a little strange for Nikkie and I to go on a romantic holiday, particularly to a different country and staying in an expensive hotel, when we haven't even officially been going out for three weeks. It's a big step, a serious thing to do, and for many people it may seem like we are going along incredibly quickly. But we know better. In our minds we've been together for three months rather than three weeks, and we both liked each other long before that. We've been almost inseparable these last three months and have become closer than I would have thought possible. We've lived with each other, we know everything about each other, and we were best friends before we became involved. There isn't a single day since we've been officially going out that I haven't seen her, spent some time with her. It's been very intense, very passionate, and so I don't think you can judge us based upon the time we've been "officially" going out. We're going to enjoy this time away, have a fantastic break, have lots of fun, and then keep going on as strongly as we have so far. Anyway I've got to start packing and getting ready! My next entry wont be for a couple of days, but when I get back I'll let everyone know how it was. Written while listening to Vertical Horizon - Everything You Want (Cheesy, I know! ^_^)

Happy Easter!

General Happy Easter everyone! I almost forgot it was happening this year. In fact I haven't had any chocolate at all so far today! We will remedy that tonight! ^_^ The clocks also went forward an hour today, which I had no idea about either. That's an extra hour of sleep that was robbed from me! I've been forgetting a lot of things recently. Too caught up in other stuff I guess. I hope everyone, all my family and friends around the world, have a fantastic holiday.

Forms And Football

Work I was up in Liverpool yesterday, doing work. I had a bunch of forms that I needed to fill out, and I also went along to a meeting at Goodison Park, home of Everton Football Club, to meet up with some of their people to discuss a hush-hush development. Very cool indeed. Now I am back in Nottingham, in this big lonely house all by myself. Nikkie handed in her research proposal today, and now has four whole weeks off! She's due around in about ten minutes and then we are going out to dinner. Ads is up in Edinburgh with Bruce at the moment. I got a very drunken phone call from the two of them at 4am this morning. It sounds like they were having a great time. It's strange, becuase I'll probably be up in Liverpool by the time everyone gets back. The work looks like it is going to be extremely interesting, however I am really going to miss it down here. I'm still trying to avoid thinking about it for the moment, I don't want anything to affect how happy I am right now. Ok! Nikkie's here! Got to go! Hunters and Collectors - Throw Your Arms Around Me is playing right now. Heh Nikkie says I'm such a sweetie ^_^ Anyway I'm off! Be happy everyone!

Abandoned, Alone, Happy!

Friends - General So one by one my friends are abandoning me. Graeme left to go back up to Liverpool a couple of weeks ago. He is changing courses and so is repeating his second year. That being the case he didn't see much point in showing up to the rest of the lectured he had this term. Nikkie moved out more than a week ago now, and the last of her stuff is finally gone. The house seems really cold and empty without her. Bruce got the train up to Edinburgh on Friday. It’s Easter holidays and he is going home, first to Scotland, and then over to Dubai. He wont be back till the 17th of April, when he will be down "taking part" (or watching as I prefer to call it) in the London Marathon. Viki left on Saturday. She was getting the train all the way over to Cardiff, where she was going to spend the night (and celebrate Wales' Six Nations Grand Slam Victory!!) before heading home for a couple of weeks. Ben left on Saturday as well, up to Liverpool to party and sit off at home for a whole month before having to come back here for the start of next term. Ads leaves tomorrow. He is flying up to Edinburgh to meet up with Bruce for a bit and then travel around Scotland. He's been here for three and a half weeks now, and it has been great seeing him again and hanging out. I must admit I've been a bit of a poor host. I've been spending almost every free moment with Nikkie lately, and so Ads has had lots of days and nights sitting off with the rest of my housemates watching DVDs or reading books. Sorry about that mate. So that leaves me. Alone. Abandoned. In this big old house, all by myself. The good new is that Nikkie has another week of lectures before her Easter holidays start, and isn't planning on going home until April anyway (and she has invited me down then as well!) so that means that I probably wont be so alone in this big old house. In fact I doubt I'll be by myself very much at all for the next couple of weeks. We are going to make the most of this time together, while I'm down here, before I have to move away. We are going to have some quality time coming up, totally for each other, without having to worry about other friends, or work, or study, or anything else at all. I can't wait. Written while listening to Alex Lloyd - Amazing.

Alton Towers Adventure!

Friends - Fun - Guest Entry Yesterday Nikkie, Ads and I drove down to the theme park Alton Towers. We were meeting up with Jackie, Jo and Tom who were coming down from Liverpool. It's Jackie's birthday today, and so the Alton Towers trip was a sort of pre-birthday fun-filled excursion. --- ads override --- So Wigs is getting his Neighbours fix at the moment (despite declarations he is not hooked enough to watch the same episode twice a day, this is today's second viewing,) so the burden has fallen upon my heavy shoulders to summarise yesterdays adventures. And maybe add my 2 cents about eurobackpacking, life, the universe and blogs. Actually screw that, I hate blogs :D After 2 hours sleep (long story) I was awoken at half eight in the morning by Wigs (booming voice) for Operation Alton (dinner-out is a go). A bowl of cornflakes (Sainsbury special), a 50 minute burl down the motorway (M-1 through M-69, it seems), 20 minutes through the archetypically British, picturesque Alton countryside (complete with winding roads and blind corners), and a 5 minute walk from the Alton Towers carpark to the theme park proper (monorail inoperative) and here we were (where?). It'd be nice to say that going to Alton Towers embodied some sort of symbolic return to the UK for me, as going there had been one of the last things I had done before emigrating to Aus. Alas I couldn't actually remember anything about it, except there was lots of fun to be had. And fun there was. Oblivion. Nemesis. Submission. Rides appropriatelly named. A disconcerting indicator of the degree of intensity of a ride is given by the tightness of the harness on your crotch. And these rides were real crotchbusters. Which isn't a necessarily bad thing. Everybody has pondered what exactly would happen if your harness failed mid-ride. Most likely they'd be scraping you off the pavement. This is why I was expecting some sort of sympathy, concern and/or worry when the ride diagnostics said there was something wrong with my harness on Air, and the supervisor had to come and check it out. But no, instead Tom and Jo just point at me and burst out laughing. Thanks guys. More of the same after the second ride, when my ankle clips (yes, Air has harnesses to secure your legs) didn't unlock. Ride after ride, one by one we bugged out. Jackie on Enterprise, Jo - Ripsaw go #1; shortly followed by me on go #2, fighting rising bile as my stomach was palpitated by my intestines. Inertia is funny that way. Nikkie on the Tea Cup ride. The Tea Cup ride. After braving the Tower's top 5 adrenalin busters, the oldschool 'all round fun' Tea Cup ride may seem a peculiar choice for a black flag. But that is an opinion reserved for those who have not experienced the singular pleasure of 5 people, damp to dripping wet (see below), crammed into a giant teacup screaming, singing and spinning while tracing gracefull, high velocity spirographs in an area the size of a front yard. Ripsaw made me mildly nauseous. Mr Tea Cup ride OBLITERATED me; this thing is the destroyer of worlds. I wasn't alone. It is the most underrated ride there. I cannot overemphasize how bad. Fighter pilots do not experience g-forces quite like these. It was followed by unanimous agreement to grab a coffee and have a 10 minute sit down. Make that 30 minutes. Somewhere along the line Wigs and I stopped for a game of DDR, much to the digust of everyone else. And of course no theme park excursion is complete without the water rides - or namely, the conspiracies to get the unsuspecting soaked on said rides. And the conspiracies were abound. After the Wigs-Tom-Jackie (these three being the most mischievous) entente to drench the rest of us only resulted in their self-soaking (viz. Tom - 'My bottom is swimming!') on the rapids, we proceeded to the flumes. Better known elsewhere as the log ride, to those not in the know, it involves a bathtub sized conveyance (indeed, our particular vehicle at this venue was called a bathtub, nuff said) taking a narrowly winding water path with some sudden drops and accompanying splashes. These get progressively larger. The main 'fun' (and I use this term loosely) comes from seeing who gets drenched at each drop. It's sadistic, random, quite unfair and oh how we loved it. Here we were all mightily impressed by Wigs, who chivalrously offered Nickie a seat where he assured her she wouldn't get drenched. How sweet. Then he sat behind and used her as a water shield. Careful, oh intrepid readers: this man is devious. However, Tom and Jackie were the real show stealers. Jo and I, having escaped lightly on the rapids, were afraid the law of averages might catch up. But providence smiled. On us at least. Tom and Jackie had some dirty plan to avoid the water by hiding in the enclave at the front of the bathtub, yet making it fore-heavy to increase the splash for others (ie me, Jo). Make no mistake about it, log ride dynamics is apparently an intricate subject. In this case however, all it did was submerge the front of the tub on the drop and effectively dump buckets of water on them. There was one particularly memorable drop, done in the pitch black of an artificial cave - I braced for the drop, felt the impact, heard the splash. I was thinking 'that wasn't so bad' when Jackie let loose a gawdamighty loud splutter-cum-shriek. Music to my ears. When we got off that ride, Tom looked like he'd been under a shower for 20 seconds; Jackie like she'd jumped in a pool. She took it well, or better than I would've. Once again no sympathy. Not from this bunch. Come late afternoon, the crowds disperse; Tom and Wigs (the rest of us drained) to hop on Nemesis something like a billion times in a row, while I stay to talk fashion with the girls. I can say with confidence Gucci handbags are still in, by the by. So we finally make our leave from Alton Towers. Now when Wigs says 'we' drove, he more means Nikkie drove, he talked, and I slept. We did stop by a pub for some typically excellent British pub food. By now everyone's stomach is settled enough to eat - fish and chips, Yorkshire pudding, shepherds pie. There are some things about Britain I'd forgotten I'd missed.

Crash Into Me

Friends - Fun - Personal Well it's been a long weekend. I only just got home. Saturday I got the train down to London to meet up with Anna and Sarah, the two fun and crazy girls I travelled around most of Italy with last summer. Sarah is heading off in two weeks to the Middle East for six months to do some work for her firm. I hadn't seen her since Christmas so I wanted to take the opportunity to catch up with both her and Anna before she left. So I got the train down, had a lovely lunch with Sarah, and then went back to her apartment to find Anna just crawling out of bed after a heavy previous night. We sat around and had some coffee while I enjoyed their fantastic view out over the river Thames. It was good to see them both again, and we had a lot of catching up to do, but soon the afternoon ran out and I had to come back up to Nottingham. Anna and Sarah both wanted me to stay the night, come out clubbing with them to the Kross in Kings Cross, which was open to 6am that night, but I had to beg off. That night was Nikkie's physiotherapy ball and I had to get back! So after a long day in London I jumped on a train heading back home, and thankfully made it back in time. I think Nikkie would have been quite displeased if I had made her late for the ball ^_^ On Sunday Nikkie's parents were coming up to bring her some furniture and stuff for her new house. I had met Nikkie's parents a couple of times before; once while in Newark hall, and once when they came to our house. They are both really nice, but meeting them this time was a little different. I was no longer just the friend/housemate, I was now the boyfriend, the older boyfriend. I was a little worried to start with, but the day actually went really well. I helped Nikkie's dad put together Nikkie's chest of draws and desk, and then we all went to lunch together. Nikkie's mum quizzed us a little during lunch, because she really had no idea what had been going on (!!! I hope she never finds my blog ^_^) but it seemed cool in the end. Nikkie's sister had also come up, and it was nice to finally meet her as well. Nikkie talked to her mum on the phone later than night and said I made a good impression, so that made me feel good. My mum also rang that night, and I told her all about Nikkie and what had been going on. Mum was typical mum, asking all these awkward questions, and telling me to look after her. Of course I will mum! Come to think of it, Nikkie's mum said the same thing to me just before they all left. So come Monday morning, after spending a grand total of about four hours at my house all weekend, I got Nikkie to drop me into town on her way to Uni, and I came home. I'm tired, it was a busy weekend, but a really fun and enjoyable one. I hope all my weekends to come are going to be this good. Written while listening to Crash Into Me by Dave Mathews Band. P.S. Calvin - I'm an emo rocker too according to that quiz. Fragma - I appreciate all the comments, and "D" is the right option ^_^

This Is The Story Of A Girl

Friends - Fun - Personal - Work So this is the story of a girl. Or wait; maybe it’s another story entirely. They are all intermingled really. Or perhaps they are all independent, but just occurring concurrently. I’m too tired right now to actually figure it all out. I just thought it was about time that I told you all about it. Apart from my two random entries a couple of weeks ago, I’ve written nothing since my birthday, more than a month ago now. A lot has happened since then. I don’t even know where to start. Ah yes! There was mention of a girl. I guess that’s as good a place as any to begin. Nikkie and I have finally quit our (in hindsight rather stupid) efforts to resist each other and are now, to quote my good friend Calvin, ”brilliantly, disgustingly lovey-dovey”. I really like her, she really likes me. We have wasted so much time and have finally decided to waste no more. So no more of this random, drunken, fooling around bullshit; we are serious, committed and both hopelessly besotted. And I’m really happy, happier than I’ve been in a very long time. Nikkie makes me happy, she is caring, smart and funny; and of course it also helps that she is a stunning blonde half-Dutch goddess who is almost as tall as me! ^_^ Ah boy I can’t stop grinning lately. Nikkie is moving out of our share house this weekend into a smaller two bedroom house with one of her physiotherapy friends, Jade. This move had absolutely nothing to do with her and my relationship; she starts her final year after this summer, has her dissertation to finish and lots of lots of placements to go on, so she really needed to get out of the non-stop party place that is our house. At the time when she decided she was going to move out she and I weren’t even together properly and so it was a completely independent decision. It’s just a bonus now I think because it means we can have some semblance of a proper relationship separate from that whole living together thing. There are perks though that I’ll miss of course ^_^ It takes about 10 minutes to get from her new place to our place (officially named the PartyHouse). So commuting that distance won’t be a problem at all. It takes about two hours to drive to Liverpool from here, so commuting that will be a bit of a problem, which brings me to my next story. I’ve gone and got myself a nice shiny new job; or rather it has come and got me. I’ve been offered a job in Liverpool, with a great salary, company flat thrown in, and lots of interesting work. It’s a fantastic opportunity, all my working visa worries are being worked out, and everything made easy for me to move up there. It’s just not something I actively looked for (I was headhunted in effect, but it’s a long story as to how that came about). Liverpool has its benefits; my cousin John lives up there (lucky coincidence), I am familiar with the city, and I already know people who live there. It has also got a terrific nightlife (as long as you stay away from the chilli shots!). The only problem is that it’s two hours from Nottingham, which means two hours away from all my friends here, as well as the person who is constantly on my mind and making me so happy. So yeah that sucks pretty hard. I can’t start work properly until my working visa goes through though, and even though I’m doing the occasional day’s consultancy work on my student visa, that means I won’t be moving up to Liverpool until at least mid-April. So we are going to see what happens. I’m definitely taking this job, it would be foolish not to. I’m going to be moving to Liverpool at some point in the future. Two hours isn’t that much travelling time though, and I’ll have lots of weekends free, and Nikkie has her Uni holidays. At the moment we are still in the “disgustingly lovey-dovey” stage, but we’ve talked about it and are going to do the long distance thing if needed. That being said I’m going to London tomorrow for lunch and coming back tomorrow afternoon, and it is two hours each way there, so it’s doable, we’ll survive. In other news Ads is still here, in the UK, staying with me still actually. He is having a great time just bumming around and catching up on all the movies, TV shows and anime he has missed over the past three months. He will move on at some point, but right now it’s great to have him here, and if he has already stayed for two weeks, why not stay for another two I say! ^_^ I know I haven’t filled in a lot of the blanks here, and have more just updated the current status of my life rather than detailing how and why it came about that way. All those unwritten blog entries over the past month were suppose to cover that stuff. I didn’t write them though, and there is just too much to say right now, so be content with what you get. To all of my friends whose emails I have neglected to reply to recently please forgive me. I’ll get around to responding soon, and I’ll fill you guys in more on what’s going on. I’ll also endeavour to start writing blog entries more regularly again. It’s amazing how you can get so caught up in your life sometimes. It’s a funny thing life ^_^ Now I’m off to cuddle with my girl and be blissfully happy.