Trying to Find a Hobby That Doesn't Make Me Poor or Fat.

Never in my life have I ever been cash strapped. It put it down to luck. Lucky that I had parents who could indulge my childhood whims, lucky that I grasped the concept of saving quite early and managed to put quite a bit away during high school, lucky I got hit by that car on Blue Mountain Road(thank you ICBC) and lucky that I was able to save during my sentence in Northern China. All of those little pools of cash acted as my launch pads and got me from place to place until I ended up here. In London. Where money get's hurled into a vacuous black hole before you even get to wave a tearful goodbye. 

I cant actually blame it all on London. I was doing alright in my moldy little basement suite, eating nuts and seeds and walking twenty feet to work every morning. Then I wanted to move in with my boyfriend and he had slightly  higher expectations of our living conditions. Ha. Now not only do we eat proper food three times a day and sleep in a bedroom where you can't squish the walls, but I have to use public transit everyday. All of those things are expensive.

Also, we both like to travel. My idea of traveling is to stay in the cheapest hostel, only do things that are free/cheap and eat from market stalls. Maybe you'll get diarrhea but maybe you'll still feel satisfied knowing you have saved enough on your trip for the train ride home from the airport. My lover does not like to do any of those things. The things he likes to do are much nicer and and also cost more money.

What I am saying here people, is that being in a relationship has played it's part in making me poor.  I am not blaming Tony at all. Actually the opposite. I blame myself for nesting all over the place. Maybe it's my inner Italian mama, but I get this strange sense of satisfaction from giving him a meal consisting of all the food groups in proper portions. I love the IKEA show room we have assembled together in our flat. I love indulging him in organic bath products and seeing how excited he gets over the shower nozzles when we stay in a nice hotel. Some of you may ask what the hell is wrong with me and I don't really know. Maybe I'm in love? 

<3 Tony <3

Well, screw you love. Stop stealing my money.

So as it happens, I don't actually want to screw love, and as it also happens, we are moving across the world in 44 days and we have to do life all over again when we get there. This requires a supple amount of start up money. So we are now on cash lock down. No unnecessary spending is allowed. Our food budget is slashed and our entertainment budget is nill (Canada Day is the only exception). So to refer you back to the title of this post, I need a hobby. I have 44 days left here and that is a long time to be sat around twiddling my thumbs and there is only so many times I can clean the house before my windpipe starts to corrode from all of the household cleaners. I need a hobby which does not make me poor or fat. I am currently open to (serious) suggestions. Here is a list of things I greatly enjoy doing but make me poor/fat, so please do not suggest them:

Baking and decorating cakes: fat and poor

Watching "Four Weddings","One Born Every Minute", and "Come Dine with Me": fat (and broody)

Scrapbooking: very poor

Seeing awesome/amazing/life and perspective changing things in London: poor

Reading: It doesn't make me fat or poor but I already read loads.

Thank you in advance for your suggestions and for looking out for me because in the words of the guy who wrote "Fight Club": All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring. 

Please help.  

I Need It?

Getting ready and gearing up for the voyage to Asia-land, I am once more forced to be reminded of how few possessions I actually...possess. I have started taking inventory in my brain of things that must be sold, donated, given to others, trashed, burned, and forgotten. 

It seems only yesterday I left for Thailand with Jess. The contents of my bag included two tank tops, one pair of shorts, toothbrush, camera, Malaria pills, a bikini and a bunch of underwear. For the sake of measurement, I call this level zero (the bare essentials for life as a stinky, hairy travel rat). Then onto China where a bikini would not be choicest item to wear in -30 degrees, and seeing as how clothes were so cheap and sparkly, I couldn't help but amass a wardrobe full by the time I had  to leave. This is when the first round of my ownership awareness took place. EVERYTHING I owned was not going to fit in my little Thailand backpack, nor the cheapo Chinese suitcase I bought for the occasion. I had gone beyond level zero to at least a healthy level 5 (The stuff I brought with me, plus winter essentials and many pairs of jeans...mostly sequined with some sort of grammatically incorrect message sewn into the butt pockets). I have a bit of a shopping problem.

It's at times like this when I think back to my teenage years, my closet vomiting clothes on itself, a sea of t-shirts and jeans so deep that it disguises the colour of the carpet. I remember my mom tearing into my room like a wild bison, two horns prodding each pile of clothes, bringing them up to my nose so close I am afraid she will gore me. "DO YOU USE THIS?! DO YOU NEED THIS?! WHY DID YOU EVEN BUY THIS?!"

Thank you Mom. Unwittingly, these violent moments have bestowed me with one of your greatest seeds of wisdom, how to get rid of your shit.

"Do you need this?" is probably the most helpful phrase in history when it comes time to part with possessions. It didn't mean "I NEED this blazer, it goes with those grey pants I have." To me, it meant "I NEED  this winter coat. It's fucking cold and I will get pneumonia if I don't have this."Using need as a gauge, I was ruthless and I fit everything important inside my bag, with room to spare. If I could implement this philosophy into my eating habits, I'd be a rake.

Having done this once before, I am quite happy to part with a large trash bag full of clothes long forgotten, books, nicknacks...etc but what I am realizing as I go along and make this inventory list is that now I have a lot of memories in the form of stuff. A little elephant from Thailand, photos and notes from my kids in China, the little light that Tony bought me from IKEA, the wooden fish I got for the kitchen as our first house decoration. I was in the midst of trying to find a balance between being ruthless, sentimental and practical. I couldn't bring myself to cast away kilos and kilos of the stuff I want to treasure. "Need" was starting to take on a different meaning and it is no longer a fail safe method for packing a bag.What I NEEDED was a different approach.

I told all of this to someone recently and she replied "the things you own end up owning you." I know she meant it in a negative way, but I couldn't help but think "genius." We've got 6 weeks to go before we need to pack our bags, and it's going to be a pain in the ass, but every little thing we bring is going to count. It's going to travel with us and tell our story and then tell it to us again one day when we've forgotten. Our memories are going to own us and represent us, even it means many painstaking hours of folding everything mini sized and vacuum sealing our underwear to fit it all in the suitcase. And when the check-in clerk at the airport asks me if I packed my bag myself, I'm going to think of a really, very witty response.

Let's go Round Again...

For those of you who don't know or those who understandably can't keep track. I am a wandering Canadian. Born in the suburbs, raised by a lovely and large family, and had never gone further than the mall, which is barely 4km from my front door. I left home to do the standard backpacking experience in South East Asia, ended out with zero dollars but a definite taste for the new, exciting, and possible.

Determined not to go home, I ventured to China and found a teaching job in a little city called DaQing. Having no prior experience with anything Chinese except for eggs rolls, scary driving, night markets and Sushi (which I later found out is strictly a Japanese thing. There is no Asian samey-food grey area), I accepted the position at Joy School gladly, in the midst of a hot Siberian summer. I was excited to meet my students, make friends, make money, and take opportunities to get out of the city and do a bit of sightseeing.

I did do all of those things. My students were great. In fact, they worshiped me like the Caucasian Goddness of Joy. When I walked into the classroom they would seriously give me a STANDING OVATION. I did make friends. Chinese friends who taught me most of the Mandarin that I learned and showed me where I could buy toilet paper and Western friend who showed me were to get drunk and escape China for the night and buy cheese. I made money as my income was significantly higher than the cost of living . Infact, I managed to save,  pay off my Visa, get my nails and massage once a week, go out for meals almost everyday, and go on plenty of trips: Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Qingdao, and Inner Mongolia.

Though there were many too many amazing moments to count, the general day to dayness of living in a country that has their own set of laws, morals, cultural beliefs and language was getting to me and by the end of my almost two year contract I was burnt out. I couldn't take the spitting, the staring, the weekly bouts of food poisoning. The happy freedom in ignorance that I had when I first arrived was gone and I knew then that the right thing to do was leave.

I didn't want to go home. Home was the place where nothing ever happened and truth be told, I was beginning to get addicted to the feeling of a fresh start. I started thinking about places I could move on to. I didn't want to struggle with the language barrier anymore and I wanted to keep traveling. I started thinking on my Euro trip that I took when I first graduated, and how it didn't go exactly to plan and all of these reasons led me to London, with a quick stopover in Ireland with my friend Jess from Canada. I found a job as a Live-in Aupair for a lovely lady and her son. I lived with them for a year and in that time, I took every opportunity to do and see almost everything London has to offer. Bars, live music, art shows, trips to the sea, trips to the North, castles, plays, weekends abroad in Europe, markets, niche shops and streets. I met lots of interesting people and took part in some really random stuff I've never done before like flash mobs, cabarets, freaky nightclubs, free hug days, 10k runs, fundraising for the homeless by sleeping outdoors and entered myself into some slam poetry competitions (and won!).

I was totally and completely outside my box. In DaQing, I started learning about who I was in a quiet and reflective way. In London, I threw myself into every possible situation I could find because honestly, before then I didn't even know myself what I liked. Of course, being out doing something every night and weekend in London, two things started to happen, my money went down and I started to lose interest. I just didn't have the interest or energy to go and see a nude art show or some other random thing on the other side of the city. It was then that I started to feel the same way that I had in DaQing, burnt out. It scared me. If London, with all of it's novelties, newness and possibilities for exploration couldn't keep me, I wondered if I could ever be satisfied. I started to wonder if I had spoiled myself, given myself too much and it was still not enough. Why is everyone else so happy?

I'd been alone for the entire length of this journey. Even though I had friends, even though I had started out initially in a relationship which ended after South East Asia, none of them really knew me. I am very good at keeping my own secrets and keeping everyone from my family to my friends to my lover at an arms length. It is very hard for me to let others see me. I often read quotes from Christopher McCandless (AKA Alexander Supertramp,) the guy who went "Into the Wild." At the end of his life which he has lived isolated in the forest, when he is dying of dehydration and poisoning,  he finally admits to the world that to him "Happiness is best when shared." I don't know if it was his desperation  and fear of death that made him admit this, but I know he is right. At the time the words spoke to me.

August 13th would mark my second year in London, but I'll be gone by the 10th. I'm moving back to China with my boyfriend and the one and only love of my life, Tony. He has been offered a job in a college there (his bro and family also live there) and I am hoping to regain work as an ESL teacher in a kindergarten. We're being very grown up and trying to pay off debts and save money for a house. I never thought my fate would lead me back there but I know this time it will be different. Tony and I will be able to talk to each other about our experiences there, and rub each others tummies when we get food poisoning. I'm going to be more open with my family and friends (via Facebook and this blog) and take some uni courses to speed my way into becoming a teacher. We've got a long road ahead of us together and I am excited for what it will bring. We have started thinking about what we will leave behind and things to bring so that we can still live in a semi-familiar environment in China.

So there. My entire life in a nutshell up to this moment, where I am sitting at this laptop in my little house in London, being happy sharing the happy and drinking some Chinese tea. Next post will be shorter, I promise. x