Writing, Writing, Writing

Howdy-hey,

I could say that it’s hard to believe, but I knew I’d be saying that nine weeks ago, so I won’t say it. Undeniably, there are only 10 days left, and those ten days are going to be over before my mind has a chance to adjust.

Adjusting is definitely something I’m looking forward to though. As much as I love almost everything that this place is, it’s so far removed from anything I’ve ever experienced before, and so far removed from the ordinary life of Geordan T Hankinson, that I’m looking forward to packing my bags of fresh Godly goodness to take home to try out. We’re being taught so much, teaching ourselves so much, and teaching each other so much, it hurts. The student body here overall doesn’t seem to take a lot of what’s going on too seriously, but there are enough of us trying to work stuff over that it hasn’t caused too much trouble. Learning tons and tons of stuff is so fun and I love all the discussions till two in the morning about nothing and everything, but we’re all pining for giving everything a run.

At the same time, we’ve done so much thinking and talking that my head still feels more than muddled and I could easily make use of another year with many of the people here to try and figure things out. At the same time (yes I did just open two sentences in a row with the same phrase), we’re never going to get it cause it’s far too huge. That’s a little vague, but hugeness is the underlying theme of all of this. My head has a horrendous stitch.

It appears that I’ll be meeting Cody in Rome on the 20th, and we’ll go from there. We’re each getting a 21 day Eurail pass which will last us until the UK. I’m really looking forward to going all over the place with Cody, but I’m also having a really hard time not going traveling with people from here. It won’t be such a big deal once I’m out and about, but some of the relationships I have here extend far deeper than what would usually happen within two months of knowing a group of people. This isn’t a usual experience, and if leaving this village in the clouds will be exciting for one reason, it’s going to freaking suck as far as leaving friends behind. It’s the usual deal, but it still smells. A lot of my really good friends here are either from around the lower mainland or Calgary, so it’s not the end of the world.

Last time I posted I forgot to mention the gypsy camps a group of us went to. The camp was more or less a really run down town just over an hour away filled with transient gypsies. We went twice, once almost two weeks ago and once last Sunday to play games, sing songs, dance, and do our best (with the help of a translator) to explain what we were doing, who we stood for, the usual deal. It was a boatload of work, a lot of fun, and I got really dirty, but it was cool. There wasn’t much time for photographic exploration and such, but my camera had a few good shots between the lot of us throwing it around.

We’re going to Athens on Saturday which is going to be a retarded amount of fun, if not very factual – which has been one of the bigger letdowns of the course. I’ve really missed a lot of the history that was promised in the course outline, and though we get a rough rundown of the places we’re visiting when we visit them, it’s never too terribly in depth.
That’s about all I have off the top of my head at the moment, I’ll probably have one more post before I head back to Rome. I’ll have been to Rome three times in under a year! Fancy that.

I know I’m luckier than I know - This is all one of the more fantastic things that’s happened to me in my lifetime.

See ya later