Visited the Tate Modern. It kind of blew my mind.

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Venus of the Rags (by Venere deglii stracci). Untitled (by Robert Morris). Quartered Meteor (by Lynda Beglis).

Small White Pebble Circles (by Richard Long). Whaam! (by Roy Lichtenstein)

Objects of Study/The archive of studio Shehrazade/Hashem el Madani/Studio Practices (by Akraz Zaatari). Seated Nude (by Pablo Picasso).

I’m pretty well known for having unexpectedly big nights out. I’m pretty sure it’s London’s fault, not mine. I don’t usually *plan* to have a big one, it just happens. Often. More than it should, probably. As a joke, my friend J attempted to make it a term. He even submitted it on urbandictionary.com

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Elly night: An unexpectedly big night when you’ve attempted to have a quiet one. Named after Elly of New Zealondon who can never have a quiet night, no matter how much she tries.

Example: “Dude, I totally had an Elly night last night. I was just walking home from work and didn’t make it back till 7:00am after some random person bought everyone on the street tequila shots. How do I get into these situations?! I don’t remember the rest. Are you missing a chicken? Oh man I’m hung over…”

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It didn’t make it through the review process (something which I’m slightly glad for!) but is a pretty accurate view of my nights out. I always start out with the best of intentions, of making the last tube home and having a fun but quiet night that won’t effect tomorrow. Needless to say that sometimes my best intentions don’t work out.

PS – Thanks, J. You make Elly nights much more fun. x

PPS – This isn’t me + J. This is me + my friend Lyle, on what turned out to be an Elly night. I started off drinking lemonade. Then there was an ice luge with skittle vodka + jager. I was powerless to stop it.

I’m not an art buff, and I don’t know much about art history, either. What I knew about Monet’s Water Lillies was that he painted many gorgeous oil paintings of a water lilly pond in his garden. I loved the idea of someone exploring the same subject over and over again, and these are meant to be amazing. I knew that in Paris the Musée de l’Orangerie has on display some of the larger murals of the series. I had planned to cross this off there, in Paris.

Instead I stumbled across one rather blindly at the Tate Modern here in London. My mind was quite blown, and I hadn’t quite realised how many of these there were. In the last thirty years of his life, Monet painted approximately 250 Water Lillies paintings. And they are on display in museums all over the place.

I was shocked to come across the one that I did, and I wasn’t quite sure I was seeing what I thought I was. The little placard on the side removed any ambiguity. I sat, and I admired for a good long while. Taking the time to look, and think. To wonder.

It was a pretty profound moment for me. Sometimes I put things on The List and hope that they will be great. That I’ll get what I want out of them, hope that they will in some way enrich my life, provide perspective, and growth. Make me a better person. A more interesting person. I wasn’t sure that seeing a painting would do that, except that it did. I can’t (and won’t try) to explain how, but it did.

Number 114 on The List, done.

In September every year there is The Mayor’s Thames Festival. It’s a giant outdoor arts festival that basically takes over Southbank – and more – down by the River Thames. I went with Morf, and oh it was a ridiculous amount of fun. There were all sorts of things going on, dances and comedy shows, boat races. There was a silly amount of food, and cute market stalls selling all sorts of crafty goodness. There were bands, and art installations and fireworks. It was brilliant. I had a marvelous time, and will no doubt go back again next year.

Fun times indeed!

I was having a down week. A week where I wasn’t sure what I was doing with myself, where I didn’t have a direction. It seemed that everything was falling apart and I didn’t know where to turn. There was the unnecessary return to high school drama, there was illness, there was insecurity and I just couldn’t pull myself out of it. I really couldn’t. I felt a bit pathetic, really.

So, I took a moment to think up a few things that rock right now, and they made the world seem a infinitely better place.

There is the late night deep and meaningfuls w/ my 2 BFFs, even though they are both a world + a ridiculous time zone away. Realising that I can opt out any time I want. Being introduced to ceroc and loving being twirled around and around again. There was Jack, and Frank for making my afternoons sweeter. There was the friends crowding down a long table in a dark pub, glasses raised in the air to celebrate one of their own finding employment. There was the walking about London in the dark, now that the city has taken on that crisp coolness that is fall. There is the friends that include you in their plans, and buy tickets on your behalf. Friends that sit down with you and listen to your (fairly frivolous) fears, and do so intently. And then pull on their romantic hat and tell you that the universe will take care of it, so not to worry. The flat mate who I sit down to dinner with most nights, who tried to explain the intricacies of tennis scoring, and who tries to make me watch X Factor. There’s the friend who gets horribly drunk with me, and will play my wingman even though she’s not in the game. And there is China Town’s roadside Steam Buns, and Peanut Butter Gelato from the Gelato place.

There are the guys who I run with, who push me to run further, but don’t admonish me when I lack the will power to keep going. There’s the boy sends me txts about shoe shopping and job hunting and all the other random things he’s up to. There’s people who will play hacky with me so I can get better, there’s the girl who is another one of the guys and was super glad to befriend me, there’s the sandwich place who knows my name and calls my order the ‘elly sandwich’, and there’s the satisfaction of a good run-around at netball, and the delight I get at the ‘swish’ of the net when it goes in from the outside.

That’s a pretty hefty list of things that amazing, and with that in mind, the week turned around. I was glad it did, so unbelievably glad.

What do you do to put yourself in a better frame of mind?

This is another post about the random encounters I’ve had while I’m single and loving London. I want to remember what now is like, and what the boys tasted like, and the mischief we got up to. I want to remember that carefree can be fun, and that single life is not as horrible or as miserable as I thought it might be a year + a half ago.

So here we are, another one for the Dating Files of 2011.

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I was in great spirits. It was day three of a four day weekend, the skies were unexpectedly blue and the wind was up. He was my kitesurfing instructor, my second private lesson. He was blonde and had a tan, and he showed up with his wetsuit pulled down to his hips (showing his very nice set of six). He had a birtish accent that made me swoon, and a wide grin. The kind of grin that makes you instinctively smile back, regardless of how you were feeling at that very moment. He was young, a student studying GeoPhysics, a kite surfing instructor for the summer.

He was good at what he did; gave clear instructions, corrected in a manner which was helpful and made sense. He laughed at my frustration and determination and cheered when things clicked, and cheered even louder when I got up on the board and managed to kitesurf down the beach that first time.

It was a great lesson, a brilliant afternoon of being in the water, of pushing yourself to figure out something new, trying a new sport with a cute boy. I know instructors are meant to make small talk, befriend the client. But instructors don’t go out of their way to tell you they are single, or after learning where you’re from, when they’ll next be in London, or suggest places that are great to meet for a drink. There was a silly amount of flirting and unnecessary touching. All sorts of innuendo.

There was body dragging together back to the shore to pick up the board, he stretched out my leg when I got cramp, and weighted me down by holding onto my hips + harness while I was still figuring out how to handle the power of the kite. I was sad when the lesson finally ended (it went on longer than it should have; “We should end on a high”, he’d say. “One more run”, I’d agree), but I did feel a bit guilty: my lesson was digging into his kitesurfing time. The light was fading, and the wind was variable.

There were a few open ended suggestions on the walk back to the club. Ones that were silenced by the implication that I was seeing someone back in London. I am, but not someone that would prevent me from seeing someone else. I used it as an easy out clause because I’m pretty sure that cute kitesurfing instructors aren’t the kind of boys that would mean dating differently. I felt guilty about fibbing like that, though. Easy out clause or not, I probably won’t use it as an excuse again.

Still, he was cute, and he definitely made my afternoon brilliant. That’s got to be worth a mention, right?

Before I went to Croatia I spent a weekend in Basel (Switzerland) with my friend Bunny, and his Grussi. It was amazing. We flew into Basel on the Friday afternoon (which is lucky, because EasyJet, that great airline of shortcuts for budgetary reasons oversold the flight. I took the very last seat), and the interesting thing about Basel airport, is that it sits on the border and serves both France and Switzerland! When you come up to the customs desk, there are signs all over the place. This way way for France, this way for switzerland. In French, and English, and Swiss German.

It was a weekend of eating, and oh! All the things we ate! I can’t even name most of them. But there was chocolate. And there was wine. And there was hot chocolates from cute little plastic tubes, and there was afternoon naps and playing rummy cub. There was listening to children chatter away, switching easily between languages. We wandered around a super cute market (where Bunny brought a horn, appropriate for his trip to Burning Man) and we walked down a river in the gorgeously hot sun (it was brilliant, there were many interesting things, like random graffiti under bridges that have alternate versions in art galleries, and a little geckos that warm themselves on the path, but scuttle when you appear which makes the path look like a wriggling mass).

There was a fork in this river, and it’s this point that the boundary was. We stood on the Switzerland side, and on the far bank was France, and on the other bank was Germany. It was pretty mind blowing, considering that in New Zealand we’re so very isolated. It was pretty amazing. What was less amazing was losing all but handful of photos because I’m super clever. Still, I’ll remember what I do from that weekend, and I’ll remember it fondly.

Have any of you been to Switzerland before?

It was 10am on Sunday morning and I was clearly affected by alcohol. I was in a pub called the Walkabout. A horrible, cheap + nasty Australian franchise, one of the few pubs that was open early on this Sunday morning. I was there, with about another two hundred All Black fans decked out in black to watch the All Blacks play France in the 2011 Rugby World Cup Final. And as I said at the beginning of the competition, I don’t know a lot about rugby. I still don’t really know the rules, I don’t understand the nuances or intricacies of the game. Anything other than the obvious is likely to be well over my head.

Despite this, I enjoyed the competition. I watched all the All Blacks games, and managed some of the others too. I made Morf drive me out to a pub in South Hampton so I could watch the NZ vs France Pool match. I watched as much of the NZ vs Japanese game as I could before rushing off the city to catch a flight. I was smug when I got to Stansted Airport and got a glance of the final score. Often I said I’d make it down to the pub, but really the best I could do in my hungover state was move from the bed to the couch. I watched the quarter finals against Argentina with a lounge full of people after the drunken madness that was my birthday.There were a few games I may have napped a bit through, but I’d open my eyes when the crowd cheered, and would cheer along.

But that Sunday? The Sunday of the Grand Final? I got up (possibly with some prodding by a Jimmy) and managed to make it down to the pub at half eight. A miracle considering the drunken adventures the night before had held. Still, I had Strawberry Cider in hand, and wasn’t too fussed.

We watched it on a big screen, getting told off by the kitchen lady. We cheered when the boys did the haka (right on you Weepu for leading!) and my Scottish friend ohlala’d over Ali Williams. We cheered when Tony Woodcock scored the first try. We commiserated when Weepu missed a penalty. And then the conversion. And then was taken off, replaced by Stephen Donald, number 4 on the list. We cheered when he scored, and gasped when France scored a try + conversion. One point, that’s what was in it. It was a very very tense game, watched behind fingers, biting lips, very nearly not being able to look but not being able to look away.

Except that then the full time whistle blew. And The All Blacks were still a point ahead. And for the first time since 1987, New Zealand had won the World Cup, and were the Rugby Champions.

I was estatic, there was loads of hugging, and cheering, and high fives. There was loads of singing, and general ridiculousness. We had more drinks, we laughed, there was relief.

I’m not sure how much longer we were at the pub for, but it was great long while. Walking back to the flat we stopped and high fived every oncoming pedestrian. We pushed each other around in abandoned shopping trolleys. We were happy, the day was fine, and I was intoxicated well before lunch on a Sunday.

I’m a million miles away from home, but it might as well have been across the road at that point. I felt patriotic, and happy. I can’t even imagine the madness as it was happening right then in Auckland. It must have been crazy.

So yes, I was there. I watched the New Zealand team win. A tiny little bit of history that I was super super glad to partake in.

Good job, boys. Well done!