this post shall be entitled: the ancient world of the mediterranean beckons.

about a month ago i was awarded a staff scholarship in which to travel to the mediterranean to:

a) re-inspire my own passion for the topics i teach in classical studies
b) look into field trip possiblities for my students in the future
c) create resources for my department

so eric and i have booked our journey that takes us in january:

from auckland to turkey (istanbul, anzac cove and troy)
from turkey to italy (rome, naples, pompeii, cumae)
from italy to greece (athens, delphi, thebes, corinth, olympia)
from greece to turkey and back to auckland

i am looking forward to:
a) travelling back to the land of aeneas & paris, romulus & claudius, socrates & exekias...
b) eating real greek food again
c) showing eric my favourite destination of all time (he's never been to the mediterranean)
d) being immersed in archaeological sites

so thanks pakuranga college for giving me a scholarship!

the good samaritan

my first sermon: sunday 29th august 2010

this post shall be entitled: a diary through the ages.

9 years old: kept a diary of places i visited in canada. mostly wrote about animals i saw and mini golf games i played. occasionally mentioned place names. always mentioned newly bought soft toys.

12 years old: kept a lockable diary (though i don't recall ever locking it, or having a key for that matter) that discussed my last year of intermediate school and a trip around the south island with family and friends. discovered that if i had run out of things to say, it was worthwhile to fill up the page with long descriptions about what happened on the tv show neighbours that night.

along with this - many letters received from my cousin in nelson - each one with a word count because apparantly i counted my words first and then encouraged her that at least as many words needed to be written in return.

13 - 17 years old: my high school years have been neatly recorded day by day explaining what subjects i did at school, boys i liked, and tv show anecdotes focussing particularly on lois and clark. mostly i theorise about boys. this seemed normal.

also recently discovered - hundreds of letter written by fellow classmates - each of which clearly indicated i had written a letter twice as long to them and they felt compelled to reply.

18 - 22 years old: university diaries upgraded to large books with no set amount of writing needed for each day. this meant i could ramble on for pages on one particular day, and skip a day if nothing was worth pondering. i did a lot of pondering it seems. a lot. i feel like if one day the world collapsed and my diaries were the only artefact of life as we know it - people would learn a lot about how indecisive and complex we really are.

emails became the 'in' thing and it seems i wanted to be 'in'. thousands of emails ranging in topic and length remind me that i had a knack for story-telling and capturing moments with exact detail.

23 - 26 years old: as i headed overseas i decided to not only continue my written diary format but to embark on my first ever 'blog' - yes, this one in fact. the diary writing went well and i have pages of excerpts about trips to greece and italy, how i lived in a little european town called leuven and how i met eric to name a few. but the blog option intrigued me. and i had a lot of followers once upon a time. a way to share my adventures in one hit - for the world to see and comment on.

26 years & counting: then i got married. and for some reason all diary entries - both written in books and typed online - have ended. it's quite easy to note why as i now have someone i share my adventures with on a daily basis. writing a diary was just a way to have a conversation with myself - to clear my head - and now i have a very patient husband who plays the role perfectly.

so. what came next? facebook. twitter. and soon another unknown technological step in recording life stories for people to see.