I've had mostly a very nice time this summer, I am really a very lucky guy. I had the time and money to go on three holidays, to Malta, Holland and France, on top of my trip to Budapest in Easter and my upcoming adventure in India at Christmas.
In very few words;
Malta is lovely, sunny, friendly and full of ornate and beautiful catholic churches. There is so much to see on this tiny island, and we never even got to the ancient (really ancient; before the pyramids.) at Ggantija and Tarxien. We tried but Ggantija wasn't open on a Sunday. I'll have to head back sometime. Maybe when I'm middle aged like most of the other thousands of tourists.
Holland is always fun and we were blessed with perfect weather for a week. I went with my brother and a good friend and our bikes. We played lots of ping-pong and saw an art museum in Utrecht, walked around Amsterdam, had some heinekens in nice bars, went to a pre-season friendly at ajax, smoked a few spliffs and met some cool Finns and Americans.
France was very lovely, staying with my girlfriends family and seeing their many friends and her very cute guadaloupien cousins. Listening to French and occasionally trying to speak it kept my mind very active too. I do appreciate that nice language. Another decade of this every summer and I'll be fluent! Well, hopefully before that. I might be swayed to moving there with my lady at some point...
Budapest seems long ago now, a long weekend in a really wonderful city. It's got amazing old buildings everywhere, a massive palace come art museum, great views over the danube to the enormous parliament building. Nice food too and cheap accomodation in a cool hostel (the maverick hostel, if you're thinking of going), where we got tasty home-made liqueur and met a friendly German. On top of all this is the profusion of fantastic spas, some many hundreds of years old. Rudas is the best I think, although I've not visited the many small ones around, it is really remarkable, so old and solid and beautiful.
Also I went to bestival, which wasn't too great, but I was volunteering, so at least I didn't pay for tickets. I enjoyed the world cup despite England and won a few squid on it too... And I got a car! She's called Valerie Mabel Yersinia, and she's a lovely green skoda fabia. It's so nice to drive and so liberating...
Much other funness happened over the summer, but I also took an exam. I got 60% in it, so that was pretty cool. I didn't think I'd do that well, and I should have prepared more, although in the three hours I had enough to write that I couldn't finish in time. Anyway, 60 is OK. If I get a good mark in the project (more about that soon) and courseworks then 60 at the end of this year may well be enough... but of course I can do better than that, if I do my job of learning much better this year.
Fortunately my modules appear to be much more interesting. One of the example questions for the exam in Infectious Diseases and Their Control is "Discuss the global importance of infectious diseases". That is just perfect for me, I was thinking of possibly doing a masters in something like that... And this year we have a whole half of a module devoted to virology (viruses and all that), which I really want to get more into. I'm gonna post on here the work I did on a poster about virology last year; it was about the only piece of work I was quite proud of, and hopefully someone might find it interesting. Hopefully I didn't lose it on the memory stick that's escaped my pocket with my keys...
This is a model of a Sattelite Tobbaco Mosaic Virus virion.
