Memory of the day (March 28 2010)

Catching sight of a pair of wild jaguars in Manu National Park, Peru.

I spotted them accidentally from the river boat we'd been travelling on. I'd gotten lazy on the looking out for wildlife front after two days in what was little more than a big canoe surrounded by caimans, and as a result was only using one half of my binoculars to drag my eyes along the edge of the Madre de Dios.

Suddenly, the viewfinder filled with spots. No jaguar shape or body part in particular, just an eyeful of jaguar spots and an instinctive certainty of having seen a wild beast. I squealed "OHMYGODIJUSTSAWAJAGUAR!"

The guide killed the engine and we drifted in a little. Where was it?? I KNEW I'd seen it, but now there seemed to be nothing but the sandy coloured dust and collections of driftwood by the water. Our guide giggled, and said "There's two."

There they were! The exact colour of the rainforest earth, sitting on the shore like an old couple on their veranda, and staring at us with an unimpressed air. Seems we had interrupted their afternoon date. The little girl jaguar eventually rolled her eyes, stretched, and wandered away into the forest with her boyfriend close behind.

They flicked their tails at us as they went, like a pair of grumpy kitties.

The Lost Generation

You hear it everywhere you go nowadays; recession, recession recession. Economic apocalypse! Dismay, despair! The squandering of decades of growth! They are already calling us "The Lost Generation"; the bright-eyed, ambitious kids fresh from their graduation ceremonies, red cardboard tubes barely out their hands... and already on Jobseeker's Allowance with no hope of that glowing career they were promised in their impressionable youth. End of the road? Time to emigrate? Maybe.

There's a lot of anger out there among the expanding unemployed graduate population as competition rockets and opportunities remain beyond the reach of the average young person. Employers have a greater pool of candidates to choose from, and as a consequence the demand for higher levels of experience is growing. And just who has the required experience, you may ask? First - those who have been working for years and have recently lost their jobs. Perhaps not a huge percentage (unemployment stands at 7.8% in the UK at the moment, but considering it was 5.5% at the beginning of 2007 the increase has significantly affected the job market); second, those who are fortunate enough to be able to fund themselves through periods of internships and work experience where you can be expected to be paid very little, for months or even years.

A skewed and unjust trend. What about all the others, with perfectly good degrees and a desire to work but being of a more tender age or humble beginning? Aren't these the inequalities our Labour government strive to stamp out, not exacerabate?

But there is the third option of candidate. Oh yes! They are the wily underdogs of the job market, the cheeky charming coyotes who started from the dusty bottom of the employment ladder and defiantly hauled themselves up. This is the person I aspire to be - the one who made their own way, fought for their place in the world and proved their right to it. To quote some cheesy BritPop (courtesy of The Feeling) - "it's better that you come from nothing, than nothing comes from you." Just because the world isn't on your side, doesn't mean you can't change its mind.

I'm getting stuck in, folks, like a woolly mammoth in a tar pit. And I recommend my fellow "Lost" peers do the same - get your ninja faces on guys, because you're not lost; just temporarily misplaced down the back of a banker's couch.

Memory of the day (March 26 2010)

Camping on Namhae Island in late summer 2009, with Matt and the Gwangju Crew.

Lots of soju, sunsets, and some naked meercats...

Memory of the day (March 25 2010)

Yale class - Yonsei Junior English Camp, in the snowy mountains of Wonju Korea - Jan 2010.

Another New Start

It's ironic that when you are really, truly enjoying your life, you don't reflect on it as much as when those nasty, frustrating or sad little things happen. So it's been that a contented little Scottish girl roaming the big wide world with a camera and the desire to be a decent writer did not, in actuality, write very much at all.

Suwon rocked my socks, for a very wonderful year. Now it's London's turn to rock 'em even more.

Many many more photos to come, and maybe even some decent stories...

One Blink, One Third

Being thrown headfirst into a different culture was a cathartic and bizarre experience, with all the prettiness and shock and excitement and anxiety and shiny-shiny twinkling lights all squished up and rolled out together like one mighty long existential kimbap.

Before I’d blinked, a month had passed. Then two. Then four.

I realised quite suddenly one morning, waking up a little clammy and lethargic in the Korean heat, that I was really quite thrilled to be alive. I was thrilled to see the kindergartens tugging at my sleeve every morning, even on the days that Social Studies stole Bunny the teddy bear and hid him under a pile of books (and then told me that he’d died), or when I looked down to behold several 5 year old boys from my Cafeteria class lying on the floor giggling exhuberantly as they looked up my skirt.

I was thrilled to jump on a bus or train every few weekends and go on an adventure into an unknown district to converse with an as yet nameless stranger and take photos of mysterious fluid imaginings that would always take me by surprise and never be quite what I was expecting.

Swimming in the Pacific, staring astounded at a temple complex teetering on the edge of an ocean cliff, touching the hand of a hareubang and drinking too much soju under the bright lights of Seoul on a Saturday night… crying at the lady selling baby bunnies on the subway, and the time I saw a woman skin an eel alive and chuck the squirming dying pink body into a bowl of a hundred others just like it; chatting up boys on a night out in Itaewon, getting spanked by a naked lady halfway through a body scrub at the jjimjilbang, or the time I stripped off in the little hours of the morning in Busan and ran into the sea, only to have a giant wave soak me up to my shoulders then have to sit in a cab for 20 minutes dripping and covered in sand while we headed back to the hostel. All in all, some decent memories made.

And the best bit was knowing that I was ONLY four months through, with just as much to come and more… and being oh so very ecstatic about that.

Autumn next...

May.

• Soju on the pavilion. Not illegal to drink in public here. Score.

• Seoul City is mobbed. They love their neon lights and blinky signs. Epileptic’s nightmare.

• There’s a big yellow thing in the sky. I’m from the Tundra and therefore can’t be certain of its motives.

• Kimchi is orgasmic.

• The best part of Korean culture must be the jjimjilbang. The worse is selling bunnies in plastic bags on the street, and skinning fish alive.

• Haejangguk will cure any hangover.

• Only in Korea would you find a group of teenage boys sitting in the local park practicing their origami.

• I am not mae-guk. I am yon-guk. Now quit staring.