Canada and Beyond

Just dragged my carcass out of bed to get a bit of fresh air as there are six people in our tiny room and it’s all a bit smelly and unpleasant (I, of course, always smell like a rose garden in full bloom, but other people can be a bit wiffy). Richard has been diving and is now slobbing in bed, so thought I’d give him a break from my coughing and wheezing for a bit.

Day before yesterday we went whalewatching. It was v windy so spent the entire three hour high-speed boat trip feeling like my face was being pummelled by hundreds of tiny fists. Plus I had to wear bright yellow padded jump-suit which made me look like a strange cross between an astronaut and a banana. Saw the back end of various whales as they disappeared under the water, which was nice. There was also a microphone under the boat so we could hear them nattering to eachother as they moved along. In the evening, we had genuine British fish and chips and a couple of pints.

Yesterday I just pottered around job-hunting, then had a couple of pints in the bar downstairs with R. In fact I had three pints and didn’t get up today until 4pm. I haven’t had a hangover in months. There’s a loony woman in ther bed above me who must be in her sixties and seems surprised that she keeps getting escorted out of every country she visits. Next she’s going to be a shepherd to “real sheep!” in one of the Scottish islands. Other roomie (apart from R) is a hippie stoner guy with massive hair who keeps trying to chat me up even though he’s seen me do nothing since I’ve been here but lie in bed coughing and spluttering , so he must be really desperate.

My fringe is just starting to recover from the trauma of last week’s fringe/eyebrow disaster. I’ve been looking pretty bad lately so decided to treat myself to having my fringe cut and eyebrows threaded before I left Vancouver. Went into a shop and a mad Iranian woman cut all my fringe off, then passed me on to another Iranian woman to have my eyebrows threaded. This took about half an hour and was 90% tweezing; she only got the thread out occasionally to remove various bits of hair she seemed to think were a problem at the top of my forhead. She tweezed crazily until my eyebrows were a completely different shape and almost exactly resembled her own rather dramatic jet-black pair. At one point I felt her surrepticiously pencil a bit in, so she’d clearly removed all traces of brow I may have once had in that area. I don’t have alot of luck with my brows. Before I went to NY in 2001 someone tweezed my eyebrows clean off practically and I had to draw them in for the next two months. So anyway, the upshot is that instead of looking foxy with Liz Hurley-esque eyebrows, I now have the brows of a middle-aged Iranian woman.

Job-hunting’s a no go so it’s back to the original plan which is to stay here a couple more weeks then go home for a bit and hopefully spend September onwards on the Isles of Scilly, saving up for my next trip – January and half of February in New Zealand and Fiji. Woohoo!

The back end of a whale!

Tags: Victoria

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2005 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Victoria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.