Grizzly guts

Having a bit of a low day today for some reason I can't put my finger on. Lots of pressure on at work, the big Boss is talking about sending me to Japan for anywhere between 3 to 12 weeks in the next 12 months, and I am getting absolutely no info about it. I'm actually totally pumped about going - it’s just a bit stressful not knowing what is going on!

I had three presentations over the last week and I have another one on Tuesday that I have to spend all weekend on. I'm also trying to rewrite a paper so that I can tick that bugger off my 25 before 25 list!

Missing my Love, we've had so much going on these past two months it’s been a bit hard not being able to share the experiences :( he had his first job interview for an academic position and was offered the job! Professor Love certainly does sound good! Unfortunately it wasn't quite what he was after, so he’s going to stay at Stanford for a couple of years before going back on the market.

I am training for my skating half-marathon next month :S it kinda snuck up on me! I've also been increasing my running in the hopes of running the Avon women’s 10km. We'll just wait and see how that goes!

Berlin is light again, I'm still not used to the backward seasons in this hemisphere! I’m a spring baby in NZ, but here September is not springtime!

Time for a quiet weekend to catch up on sleep I think!

23. Go on a walking tour of London with my Mum

I tried to write this without sounding like Harry Potter gave me some sort of abandonment issues, but it just wasn't going to happen - so here goes … we actually went on two walking tours! We used the website: walks.com which are good because you don’t have to book and they take roughly 2 hours.

The first walk was the Harry Potter London Town Tour with Richard Walker, and I have to say it was amazing for me personally, I'm not sure what it would be like for general audiences but I can give you my experience - starting with my Harry Potter background - WARNING this is going to be totally nerdy, I am wearing my dork-heart out on my sleeve here!

I read the first two Harry Potter books before I turned 11 - the age of leaving for Hogwarts, I waited and waited for my Hogwarts letter to arrive - obviously it didn't and I was devastated. I kept reading and adoring the books, and even read one in French to practise my French. When I finished the last book, I had this weird feeling like Harry Potter had betrayed me a little for not being real, because it felt so real when I was in the middle of a book, and then all of a sudden it was gone, and I had heard Joanne Rowling talking about how that was the real magic of Harry Potter, but it seemed so fleeting. So I had kinda been walking around with a little Harry Potter-sized chip on my shoulder ever since I put down the last book and the magic wore off. 

Don't get me wrong - I still LOVE it, and whenever the movies came out I was so excited, I just felt a little betrayed by it - I know this sounds lame, but you need to know where I was at with the franchise before the tour.

I also hadn't seen a huge amount of London, just the neuroscience department at UCL really. The tour is set in the location around where Joanne Rowling worked at Amnesty International while she was writing the books, she has (according to Richard Walker) talked a bit about how the location inspired certain locations in the book. 

Arguably one of the most important locations in the first book is the Leaky Cauldron, for Harry this is where he steps into a seemingly ordinary bar/shop front and this is his portal to a whole new world full of magic that he could only imagine before. The street that The Leaky Cauldron is located on is Charing Cross Road, which is known for it’s second hand book stores, which are -in their own way- portals to different worlds, several different worlds. Richard took us around several locations making a lot of the book seem a bit more real, a small alleyway that Diagon Alley was based on was my highlight. It was during this trip around the old bookstores and around the locations of the books and films that all that Joanne Rowling had been saying all along about the magic of getting lost in a good book finally clicked with me. Now I don't feel cheated for missing out on being a part of that world (unintentional Little Mermaid reference), because I did get to go to Hogwarts, through the magic of literature, and it was real for me for a time. Anyone who has had a real book hangover (where you are actually mourning the friends that you have lost by reaching the end of the book and saying goodbye) knows that it really is it’s own sort of magic. I'm not going to flip out and start writing Harry Potter fan-fiction or anything, but it was very cathartic for me.

Anyway - enough weirdness (or maybe some more) - the second walk was also another of my old obsessions! The Tower of London Tour! I was an absolute nut for anything Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn (or any of his wives or daughters really) when I was in high school. It was so cool seeing all these locations where these people, who had really just been characters in books to me, had really walked around. As much as I had always known that they had been true stories they hadn’t seemed more real to me than any of the other books I had read at the same time. I read anything and everything I could find about Henry and his wives as well as his daughters, both historical novels (based loosely on facts) and more rigid reviews of the knowledge and sources available - still filling in the gaps a bit but less likely to bend that facts for a good story (as if the real story wasn’t good enough!). But I hadn't come across some of the other characters of the Tower in quite as much detail. So where some of it filled in the background of historical scenes that I thought I knew very well, other areas brought new fascinations and characters to light - which I started researching as soon as I got back to Berlin!

I really want to go back to London again :) we also went to the Portobello Markets in Notting Hill and I found the most wonderful dress stall!! I bought my new favourite dress there - I might see if I can manage to take a picture of it for the blog :)

We also found a store full of vinyl decals of street art that I just adored, I absolutely love the street art in Berlin and I know I will miss it when I leave here, so it’s nice to know that I will be able to mimic the greats in my home when I am missing it :)

The snow is starting to melt in Berlin and I find myself prematurely singing songs about Spring :) I LOVE Spring, it’s usually a sign that my birthday is approaching - but that is not the case in this hemisphere … just as well - I have a fair few things left on my list before the big 2-5!

My Love has been flown to a University for an interview for a Tenure-Track position!!!!! Such proud!