So... I'm back. And I'll be posting most days from now on, at least for the next month or so, and then as often as I can after that. This is because at the end of May I'm doing a roadtrip across various bits of the continent, then moving to Vienna, and then I'm moving to Toronto, and I'd rather like to document all of this. You can therefore expect photos, among other things!

( Here's what I've been doing since I last posted... )

I have been following my f-list even though I haven't been posting, so I have some idea what you're all up to, but come tell me your exciting news and anything I may have missed in the last 6 months!

Wow, I've had a busy weekend. I flew to England on Saturday morning, spent the afternoon helping my Mum clean up the kitchen in my house in London. My housemates from last year have all moved out and we're renting out the house for the summer to rich people (seriously, the rent's going to be something like £800 a week... insane!!) so they're trying to make the house nicer by cleaning up all the shit my former housemates left there... it was pretty disgusting. Anyways, the kitchen at least is looking nicer now... I can't wait to move in in September! So looking forward to living somewhere where I'm completely in charge of it, especially since it'll just be me and Trev. I'm turning into such a domesticated person, I keep planning what tea and coffee containers I'm going to buy and where I want to put candles!

Anyway, the purpose of flying to England was to bring my car back here, which I did on Sunday, all in one day. Me and Trev shared the driving, of course, but I was still knackered, and then had to get up for a Blockseminar on Monday morning. Normally on Monday I have class from 10-12, but this week it was 8-12... I just couldn't stay awake, it was pretty embarrassing. I had to do the old 'I'm a poor Erasmus student, I don't know what that word means' to get out of participating, when in fact I knew perfectly well what they were talking about, I just couldn't get my brain to function well enough to form an answer that would make any sense. So now the whole class thinks I can't speak German... I suppose it gets me out of having to say anything in future! Never mind.

I also had my audition tour today for my new job, and I passed it, so yay! I am now officially a Berlin Tour Guide, and if you come to Berlin you should come on my tour :) However, the audition was 7 hours walking around Berlin in 30 degree heat... ouch. I am sunburned. And exhausted. But at least I can sleep now!

I saw the Dali Lama! He geave a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate so I went to watch. It was good fun, he seems like a really sweet old man. He didn't really say anything controversial - nothing about the Olympics, just basically that there is no 'pro-Tibet' or 'anti-China' in his view, he sees it as 'pro-Justice' and 'anti-Violence'. There were 15,000 people there!

And then I went and had dinner with my band (*grin*) and a couple of other people. And realised that I still have a mega-crush on Danish Guy. Bugger. Really need to stop this....

I'd really like the sun to come out again, and I'd really like an ice cream, and I'd really like my room to tidy itself.

Where's a Hogwarts letter when you need one?!?

So I'm sat at Trev's, about to go out for food in Greenwich. I was at my parents' this morning, and now I'm in London, and next week I'm going back to my parents', and then coming back to London, and then going to Berlin... and with each of those I could have said 'going home to...' In fact, if I talk about Basingstoke, or the house I lived in last year and will live in next year here, I could say that to. So where is home? It's so confusing. I know that's something that's true for many students, because leaving your parents and going through the transition of uni is tough, but in my case that's compounded by the fact that I have to be in Berlin this year, and I've fallen in love, and my family is scattered across the globe (literally, if you count the New Zealanders...)

Meh. I like to know where I stand and right now I don't.

I realised that all I've talked about for aaages is uni, so I thought I'd write something about other, possibly more interesting things that I've got going on atm:

• I'm going back to London on Saturday and staying for a whole month with Trev (hooray!) Going to try and get a job too, because if I can get temp work doing telesales in German, I can earn loads : - like, a grand in 3 weeks, which would be pretty nice. Especially when I'm only paying rent in Berlin!


• I'm going into the studio in Hampshire on Wednesday to put down the 3 songs I've written since I last recorded - a pitiful number really, since I last recorded about a year ago, but it's better than nothing. So my myspace may actually get an update for once! It might actually be 4 songs by then if the one I half wrote the other night gets finished in the next two days - but I'll be keyboard-less in London so I won't be writing anything there. Oh well. I plan to look for a band, anyway, to get some gigs in at the end of the month. I hope that actually works out, it would be really fun!


• The Danish guy I did my last presentation with is really, really cute. Which is a sign I need to go back to London and spend time with Trev, I'm obviously suffering from boy-withdrawal!! He wants to play guitar for me when I try and put together a band here in April though, which would be cool because he's a pretty good guitarist.


• I plan on spending lots of time cooking in London. I've really got into it recently, and especially if I'm cooking for two people rather than just me, it's fun to try out new and interesting things :) So I might put up photos if I make anything that actually looks edible (I have a tendency to go for taste before appearance... which I suppose is actually no bad thing, but still!)

OK, enough of the lists, that's about it on the interesting things front. Apart from the fact that I've discovered I can charm people at parties here by telling them I live opposite the russian disco (which is true). Seems to make them suddenly think I'm waaaaay cooler than I actually am... heh.

I've had this weird feeling all day. I've been trying to work it out, and there's all sorts of things I could blame it on, but I think it might be that I feel really... well, homeless, except that is a bit of a stupid way of putting it. Because in Berlin, I have a flat, but it's not 'home' because I'm only here until September, so whilst I can make it homely, there's too many things to remind me that it's not home. And my parents house.. well, is exactly that. Because it's not somewhere that feels like mine. I feel like a guest when I'm there. Weirdly, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I can't shut myself away and play the piano when I'm there, because my piano is in a communal room that can't be closed off. I guess that equals me not feeling entirely at home there, because the thing about my old house was that I could shut myself away, write a song or play for hours, and just completely and utterly play away whatever was the problem. I can't do that here, and I can't do that at my parents'. So it's my parent's house, not my home.

The closest thing I have is the house in London, but right now I don't live there, I don't have a room there, and I feel very much like an intruder if I let myself in unannounced, so that's not home either. So what is? I want home to be where the people I love are, and to be somewhere permanent (and to have a room where I can shut myself away and play the piano and play out everything that's wrong/right/confused) but that can't happen, none of those things; the people I love are never going to be all in one place, meaning I have to choose between them; 'Permanent' won't happen til I leave uni - maybe won't happen til I buy my own place; really song-writing away my issues can't happen until those other two things are fulfilled, because otherwise I don't feel comfortable enough to really let my feelings come to the surface enough to recognise and write about them. I nearly reached that point last summer in London, but then the prospect of moving to Germany hung over my head again and I haven't written a whole song since August.

I think the feeling is homelessness, and the inability to do anything about that.

The exams are over, hurray! And I'm still in bed :) Oops... Well, considering I've been averaging about 5 hours sleep a night for the last few days, I think it's allowed. Trev is here this weekend, which is cool, and he got me a hot water bottle and a candle with hearts on and a tonne of chocolate for valentine's day! So yay :)

Exams were pretty good, surprisingly, apart from the fact that I turned up to the second one to find that the lecturer had just forgotten to make exam papers for all the erasmus/international students. I love the organisation at the Humboldt, yes I do! I also ran out of time to buy my semester ticket (basically my travel ticket for the next six months) last week, so I have to pay 20 euros extra now, oh well.

I'm going to go and have a nice relaxing bath now :)

Once when I was about 10 and at school, my teacher was talking to us all about how people have things they always do when they're tired, or bored, and she asked the class what we thought we did. I, not having an amazingly long attention span for things I don't find very interesting, was sat on the mat singing to myself under my breath, and I remember quite exactly that she turned to me and said: 'Well, I know what YOU do when you're bored, singing to yourself!'.

Ever since then, whenever I find myself singing without realising it, that moment replays in my mind. Weird, isn't it, how the most insignificant things can stick like that!