teaching and learning

I have loads of experience in teaching English as a foreign language. In such a way I supported myself through various parts of university, albeit in a minimal subsistence way. I taught English to spoiled Russians in Moscow mansions, French business men and a mix of 20 something students in Cambridge. I always knew I wasn't meant to be an English teacher, I fell into the profession completely by accident…..but it was a means to an end and I got away with it well enough for long enough that people were willing to overlook my lack of certificates and qualifications.
But then one day I hit a block and realised that I couldnt do it anymore, so I started selling books to fund the rest of my doctorate. Even as that job has now come to and end, I think I made the right choice at the time.
In my years of teaching though, I did become proficient in the various theories and trends circulating in that industry. I learned to keep my TTT (teacher talk time) to a minimum, and to do loads of pair work. I learned what a supervisor wanted to see when they opened the door to my classroom: loads of students sitting in pairs, looking happy and speaking the target language. After a few years I became confident enough to walk into classrooms smiling and knowing what I had to do. Funnily though, none of this prepared me to be on the other side of the desk, in the students place.
So yesterday, as I sat down in my first class at the Spanish embassy I was surprised to find that I felt slightly nervous.
The thing is, I had decided about a month ago that the time had come to sort out the muddle of languages in my brain. I speak (sort of) 6 languages. I have studied over 10. I have attended school in 5. I am often a bit lost. The right words don't always come out at the right time, I know what I mean, but not everyone else does. So I decided to do something about it. I trotted around embassies, checked out the prices, and found myself in an advanced Spanish class at the Cervantes institute. Our class is small, there are only 5 of us, plus the teacher, which my former TEFL self tells me is ideal. Interestingly, not one student is English: the other 4 are south African, Portuguese, polish and Australian. English people are famously disinclined to learn languages other than there own, which appears to be the explanation. The teacher seems good. I found myself analysing the exercises as we went along, knowing well which skill every activity was meant to hone. I think it will be an interesting 12 weeks…

work

my new job is boring beyond all belief.
i have had many ridiculous jobs in the past, i have given out flyers outside the paris metro. i have taught english to spoiled brats in moscow mansions. i have had to take overly intoxicated canadian students to hospital to have their stomachs pumped, and i have sold a lot of books. but i have never sat a desk and tried to imagine ways to look busy. my collegues dont seem to mind this. they spend hours chatting, drinking coffee and reading the sports news on the internet. but this utter lack of productivity drives me mad, especially as we are not allowed to do anything productive if it is not company based. so although i have loads of time, i cant get out my thesis and start working on it, that would be "of task," but i can sit for 2 hours and discuss the football, and that is alright. in fact, it is encouraged, as it apparently shows i am a team player!!! i spend hours staring at the clocks (all of which are now showing the right time around the world, as i went around changing them my first week). i read the guardian, the economist, pagina 12, grandma internacional and the bbc several times a day. if you have a blog, i have read it i assure you! you might wonder about my job. the thing is, i do it, easily. but it doesnt take 8.5 hours a day. with concentration and organisation, i can do everything in 4, condeming myself to another 4.5 hours of nothingness. my collegues tell me i work too hard, but i prefer hard work to boredom. surely there has to be some way to improve this situation? helllllllllpppppppp.......

poland

Poland it had been exactly a decade since I last stuck my feet in Poland, and nearly two decades had passed since my first fleeting visit to Warsaw. Needless to say, some things have changed. Warsaw today is much more than I expected it to be, and an era apart from the drab grey city I remembered from earlier encounters. The architecture has changed rapidly, especially in the business-oriented parts of the centre. There are sparkling new glass and steel structures that look impressive. Our own office is in one of these buildings, and has a large balcony overlooking the entire centre. Yet this new design is completely uneven, there are big new glass buildings next to old socialist ones, next to hand built kebab shops. The new centre is hectic and lacks planning, but I am assured it is improving every year. The old core has taken on the aura of central European kitch, but surely part of this is inevitable in an "old town" that was entirely rebuild in the 1950s, based on 19th century paintings of how it had supposedly looked prior to the Nazi occupation. Like parts of Cracow and vaci utca in Budapest (and all of Prague for that matter) the kitch does not entirely detract from the charm. The old square is cute with nice cafes to sit and have a drink in. and we do. The polish staff in our office there prove to be incredibly friendly and helpful. they nearly even kill us with their hospitality. after a huge breakfast at the hotel, and a brief meeting in the office, we headed for "the best sushi restaurant in Poland." It is indeed amazing how sushi has taken over the cities of eastern europe. it is a ubiqitous as mcdonalds now in moscow, and the trend has clear spread to poland too. the sushi was indeed good, and i enjoyed myself immensely. This culinary fun was followed by a city tour given to us by one of the guys in the office there, and included a stop by the best ponci (Spelling? like a buluchka, but a polish varient) bakery in warsaw, and then, with my stomach still full, a trip to the best mexican restaurant in poland for an early dinner. by the time my burrito arrived though, i barely had the energy to take a bite, as much as i love mexican food, even in its polish transcultured appearence!

football season

it is european football time again.
it is strange how i measure time by football, especially since i would not even describe myself as a major football fan. i played only a little bit as a kid, but i was never especially good. i have little interest in the clubs games, and i support rangers only nominally as my family has supported them for generations and it just seems the inborn logical club to back. but for some reason i do watch the international games. as they happen rarely and always in the summer, over the past 2 decades they have also become my way of counting time. i remember always exactly where i was and what i was doing during every world cup or european championship over the past 20 years. one of my earliest memories is of meeting the entire saudi world cup team in the airport, right after they had been knowcked out of the tournament. i was young and ran over and asked the guys to sign my diary (this was before blogs, clearly) they were all very kind, some even drew little pictures in the book.
the last european cup coincided with one of the roughest times of the past few years. I was back in buda, and had just learned that i would not be able to stay in the country for another year. i watched all the games with my friends at liszt ferenc ter, shouting at the screens in the open air cafes. there were always loads of us there, watching. marci and ferenc as our hungarians, marko and jelena in their croatian tshirts, oliver from estonia whose team wasnt even playing, and dogan and bilge from istambul. they were my friends, my circle, and i knew my whole world was about to come to an end. sure enough, we have never all been in the same room together since those days of football. the last game (portugal-greece) i watched in new exile in paris, on my friends couch. i called back to the buda guys, longing to be with them, and hating france for having been dumped there so randomly.
as this cup moves into the semi-finals i cant help but remember those dark days 4 years ago. the first match i watched in a dodgy bar in holloway, munching a veggie kebab (only in england could you buy such a thing!) with a pole, an azeri and a russian from latvia. part way through the game i looked around and realised that i have somehow managed to reconstruct my life here. it is not the same, but i have friends here none the less.
amazingly, dogan and bilge arrived just in time for the start of the tournament. i hadnt seen them since 2004, and it was a delight to see them again, just as the turkish team was advancing in a most surprising and unpredictable way. it is good to reunite, especially over football.

holland

i have actually spent quite a lot of time in this country over the years. added all up i am sure it would be a fairly substantial number of months. but i dont ever really "get" holland. being here feels normal, i know my way around the major cities, i know the food and I have a surrogate home to stay in. Yet i could never imagine living here. i think it is just far too clean, that is surely the big difference between here and england. holland is clean and orderly, and the people are friendly and polite, but (like in england) you never seem to really get to know them, they are somehow always a step removed, and distant.
my days here are always the same, they are spent chatting with people who have known me since birth, eating, and watching roland garros. For some strange twist of timing, i happen to always be here while the great competition is taking place, and as the people i stay with are major tennis fans, who always spend some time watching the matches, especially when Rafael Nadal is playing. Despite several years of exposure, I barely understand the complex scoring system and need it explain to me yet again, every year. i dont know exactly why i am so slow on this matter, but i have given up worrying about it.
then, after tennis, i go for a walk along the canals and marvel at the incredible planning that must go into building these houses on the narrowest of land bridges, and on mini islands separated from the road by draw bridges and moats. the gardens are pretty and immaculate. i appreciate them as an outsider who doesnt understand about such matters can, with learned understanding. i throw bread to the cute ducks on their water nest and observe their peculiar method of communication. the canal in the backyard is patrolled by an authoritarian goose who quickly informs me that i have stepped to close to the nest, and i am obliged to take a step backwards. the after saying hello to the cats, i go back inside to play wordoku.

gatwick

I have never liked Gatwick airport. I just don’t see how it could be convenient for anyone. It is far from the centre, and unlike Luton, has the pretension of being a real international airport. The shopping is rubbish, and the ticket to get there ridiculously overpriced. I have also always thought it smelled. And yet, despite my efforts to avoid the place, I still unfortunately end up from time to time cooling my heels in the building, watching the people stagger about, dazed from jet lag, discussing their trip that has just come to an end, or the one that is just about to begin. I yawn and wait for my plane. It boards from gate 1, and the waiting room must be 45 degrees, stuffed as it is with English louts waiting for the wild adventures they imagine they are off to, and no ventilation system. The flight must be 85 percent male, and almost exclusively between the ages of 20 and 30. Such are the folk would board flights to Amsterdam!!

close encounters

I saw him the moment he entered the shop, it was like a flashback to the 1990s: black leather jacket, black leather trousers, black sunglasses, shaved head, no neck and a HUGE Orthodox gold cross dangling around his middle. I took one look and fled to a remote corner of the fiction section. He apparently headed downstairs, but did not find what he was looking for and approached the guys at the till down there. Apparently, even when he was still several metres away, one colleague told the other to call me. Sure enough, the phone rang on my floor and the duty manager asked me to come down to speak “to a Russian.” But the fellow was not Russian, he was from Vukovar, one of the saddest places I have ever been. During the war, he had joined a certain well-known Serbian paramilitary group, he fought in the krajina for the land he imagined to be his, and he killed lots of people (which he explained to me by air gesturing the act of using a machine gun, complete with sound effects, while my astounded colleagues watched on, from a safe distance). After the war, he went into the foreign legion, and then ended up doing “security” in Moscow. Whatever that means. I am not sure at which point he became a nut case. I suppose some people are just born bonkers, but I doubt this guy was. Rather, events ran their course and took their toll over time. He claimed to have been born in 1975, making him 16 when the war started. I imagined him as a semi-educated provincial who was suddenly given a gun and cause, but never any real background to go with it.
He wanted books on what he pronounced as “brutsele” which after several attempts and gestures I eventually understood was a Serbian rendering of “Bruce Lee,” this guy’s proclaimed hero (after the certain ex-paramilitary leader).
What was weird is that he insists his former leader is still alive today and directing a legion group. He claimed to have seen him, since the time when his brains were allegedly splattered over the carpet of a Belgrade lobby. I found this incredible to believe…I would say impossible even, except that I have learned never to use that word when applied to certain parts of the planet. He showed me some other pictures though, and they were gruesome enough.
As he left the shop, the entire building seemed to give a sigh of relief, myself included. There are things from my past I think I would prefer forgetting, and association with guys with gold chains and tattoos of big cats is certainly up there.

eurovision and more

so russia finally won eurovision, after coming close for several years in a row and watching several neighbouring countries win.
i cnant say i am a huge eurovision fan, although i attended in 2003 (or was it 2002?) in Estonia. but i will be curious to see how the russian authorities manage to arrange such an event, since the recent chelsea- man u football match revealed certain drawbacks to hosting events in moscow: there are very few hotel rooms in general, and those that exist tend to be in luxury business hotels aimed at guys with expense accounts, not tourists. furthermore, russian hotels tend to dramatically raise prices when they know many foreigners will be in town. and then the visa issue....
i might even be about next year for moscows eurovision moment.
sadly, my time working in the bookshop is coming to an end, after over a year and a half of working with endless amounts of fiction, i am moving on. i will be very sad to leave my collegues, many of whom are very cool, and sad as well to leave the books...but economics has forced me to look for better paid ways to spend my time. on my return from south america i sent my CV around, and got offers from the Guardian and from the russian media. i am going with the latter, as it pays better. more on that soon.

books

I recently gave in my notice at the bookshop. It has been a great 1.5 years but I need more money to pay off my student debt, so I had to start looking elsewhere.
And was lucky enough to be offered a job working for a Russian news agency, so we shall see where that will lead me.
But I will really miss my collegues at the book shop, as well as the books. One of the great parts of the job has been the constant exposure to new fiction, and realising just how much stuff is out there. I recently read Travesuras de la nina mala by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whom I have always detested. But we got his most recent book in English in the shop, and it looked interesting, so I decided to try to get over my prejudice and read it. I tracked it down in Spanish in Buenos Aires, and then oddly got given a French copy in paris….and I confess that I was completely mesmerized from the start. It is, ultimately, a twisted love story….the dynamics of the two main characters are troubling and uncomfortable. You know early on that there will be no happy ending here. The female main character is a deracinated modern madame bovary, incapable of supporting the bourgeois life proposed to her by the only man who truly loves her. But it is not only the perverse characters that drew me in. the novel sweeps through the second half of the 20th century, from peru in the 50s to paris in its early 60s heyday, to London in the late 60s and 70s to Tokyo in the 80s and Madrid in 90s. conservatism, Sartre, post structuralism, anti Vietnam protests in Trafalgar square, AIDS, high tech globalization- it is literally all there too, but only ever as an intriguing background.
So having got so wrapped up in the work, I decided to give Vargas Llosa’s writing’s another go, thinking my earlier prejudice was perhaps the remains of a more activist youth…..but no. on an Iberia flight to Madrid recently, I picked up an article he wrote in El Pais on Argentina. And he is, as I always thought, a twat. The article made me annoyed. It trashes the current argentine intellectual scene with the ressentiment of someone with a serious complex. Vargas Llosa has always annoyed me for his very right wing views, intolerance, and his self satisfied views towards his position. A brief scanning of recent articles in le Monde and el Pais confirmed I still find him as annoying as 10 years ago when I was studying the latin American Boom.
And yet I loved his last book. My friend Cesare pointed out you don’t have to like a writer to like his work, and he gave the excellent example of celine, an excellent writer, yet an appalling anti- semite and human. At work, my collegue james pointed out that surely SOME right-wingers are capable of producing quality literature, and correctly noted the way in which the European left has long monopolized the field. It is an interesting question….but ultimately what I look for is good fiction, and Travesuras de la nina mala more than provided me with that, to Vargas Llosa’s full credit.

paris

Spring is pan-european family errand time. The timing (april-june) and destinations (paris, Brussels, various small Dutch towns) are always the same, as are the missions. But this predictability does not make for boring excursions, rather there is something pleasant in the annual ritual. And so, I find myself sitting with yaelle, waiting for solenne by the assemble nationale, her latest place of employment. it is a ritual, every time i am in paris we have a reunion, the three of us. we have been doing it for over a decade, how time flies!
and next stop: gibert jeune....

london

I always find London a let down, where ever I am arriving from. Perhaps it is the weather, which is always rubbish. Or maybe the incredible inefficiency. Or the ridiculous prices. London has been my unavoidable transport hub for three decades, yet I cringe every time my plane begins its descent into heathrow, wishing every time that we were landing somewhere else. Get my oyster card topped up (111pounds, and that is with a 35percent student discount) and head for work, wishing I hadn’t boarded the plane in rio.

rio

I cant imagine a city with a more beautiful setting than rio de Janeiro. It has pristine beaches which are exceptionally well maintained by squads of beach cleaners. The hills and water add to give it exceptional views, combined with the lush vegetation found in the tropics. It is a laid back city, where shirts qualify as semi-formal is they have sleeves. People walk all around the city in beach wear and flip flops are the official shoes, coming in every colour and pattern combination imaginable. The life style is chilled as well: sonia tells me she plays beach volleyball for 1-2 hours every morning before work. I ask her at what time exactly she starts her job, and she responds “oh when I feel like it.” All day long, any day of the week, there are people out on the beach. They don’t just lie there sunning themselves though, as cariocas like their exercise. The beaches are filled with surfers, standard beach volleyball, and especially its brazilian variant- a kind of volleyball where you can use any part of the body to get the ball over the net, except your arms. On Sundays, they close the streets along Copacabana and ipanema, turning them into a huge, endless track for joggers, rollerbladers and pedestrians like myself. The air is soft with humidity, and even when it rains, it feels pleasant. I can imagine the lifestyle must be addictive, and if you have lived here it would be hard adjusting to anywhere else.

a death in rio

well i had imagined writing more here about the beauties of rio, and i will, but now.
yesterday one of our group members died.
horacio made the announcement right after lunch: ruth died, in her sleep, age 92.
understandably, many were upset. but i thought, what a way to go! she was a spunky woman with a tremendous zest for life, and she died after a great holiday, peacefully in her sleep, at a hotel on copacobana, after a night of drinking and samba dancing. if i die at that age and in that way, i will consider myself very very lucky.

montevideo

I am not sure I would want to spend the rest of my life in Montevideo, it is a small and provincial variant on Buenos aires. But I certainly would not mind having a flat there. The city is located in a sort of peninsula, so the coastline is long and lined with beautiful flats, most of which have a view overlooking the water. The blocks of flats seemed nice, many having enormous balconies over looking the beach. The beach is completely clean and people swim in it during the summer. Today there were some guys out playing beach volleyball or jogging, but the swimming season has now passed. Then we went through some leafy neighbourhoods with huge houses protected by large gates with fancy security systems. Isabel assured us that this was more for fashion than crime prevention. Crime is low in Uruguay, but some have the idea that having a fashionable high tech gate looks cool.
In the afternoon we headed to the bodegas carrau winery/ estancia. Like argentina and chile, Uruguay is a wine producing country and the people are proud of their local wine, and thus insistent we try it (with good reason). The owner gave us a tour of the property, and we got to go into the cellars….pablo and I ran around like nuts trying to take The Perfect Picture in dim light, holding our hands as still as possible, for as long as possible. In the end our photos came out almost identical, except for the slight difference in perspective pablos extra height gives him. After the tour came the huge meal and wine tasting. There was so much food none of us ate dinner that evening. It was the usual southern cone fare: meat appetizers, followed by meat served with meat. There was pork, chicken and beef, as well as some pate stuff I couldn’t figure out. When I confessed to being the southern cone’s one and only vegetarian, a huge salad and quiche were produced, only a corner of which I could eat. The quantities of wine were equally generous, enough so that at one point the 88 farmer in our group got up and did a tango with an Uruguayan woman young enough to be his granddaughter. Even my father did a little dance for us. “we aren’t exactly rich, but we live well.” Isabel assured us, and I believed her.

bookshops of BA

In chile I had been shocked at the incredible prices of books- 15 euros for a trashy fiction paperback! Pablo had claimed it was due to 1. Chiles isolation 2. Chile being a very small market 3. Chile not having any publishers of note and needing to import everything 4. The government applying VAT to books, unlike in other countries, such as England where books are exempt. Needless to say, I bought no books in chile, although I would have like to have. Argentina is a different case altogether. The books go for about 5 pounds or less each, and the selection is excellent. Even more interesting are the bookshops themselves. On corrientes, my father and I wandered through endless rows of new and used bookshops, but that was nothing compared to el ateneo, a huge bookshop housed in an old theatre! It immediately went to the top of my world bookshop list. The collections were good, both of literature and music, but the setting was the best part. The stage had been converted into a café, and what had been the seats into rows of bookshelves. My father drank coffee and I wandered about in delight. We both noted that the top 2 bestsellers were peron-related: number one was on the last days of evita (how many times can people want to read the same thing over and over again???) and number 2 was about the peronist party. Clearly this country has some political oddities, but agh, the fiction section……

the world according to taxi drivers

In addition to all the wonders of Buenos aires I have already mentioned, I have to contribute a special entry to the city’s taxi drivers. Since my father is not so good walking great distances and gets tired, we have taken a fair amount of cabs. We don’t normally do this, but the taxis here are VERY cheap (a 25 minute drive across town is about 4 pounds), you get to see the city a you drive, and the taxi drivers are the most opinionated on the planet. Everyone seems to want to enlighten and update us on the state of things in the city. Today, for example, we took three taxis. The first featured a lecture on the accomplishments and shortcomings of evita, contrasted against the current government of cristina Fernandez. The driver informed us that the current government are not REAL peronists, but just filled with peronist sounding hot air. (the taxi driver was a real peronist, and nostalgic for the good old days, which were apparently about the time he was born). The lecture included a 10 minute explanation on the peronist doctrine, as it should be.
Lecture two started with a discussion of ethnicity as the driver discussed his Italian versus his Spanish grandparents. From that point he migrated on to the beauties of lunfardo, the odd mix of Spanish and Italian spoken by people in Buenos aires. This led to a hilarious imitation of how Mexicans speak, and from there on to literature (as we were heading to a bookshop).
Lecture three was on the rich and how they got to be that way. This was inspired by our passing some very nice flats in recoleta on our way to Palermo Viejo. We established that these luxurious pads were not owned by foreigners, as my father had enquired, but by wealthy argentines with major inheritances of “landed money.” Somehow, this all led back to evita, as seems to happen regularly here.
If I had more time here I think I would be tempted to write a book: the history of argentina, as told by its taxi drivers. It is a truly insightful experience.

mi buenos aires querido

This must be one of the best cities in the world. A friend of mine claims on his web page that he has lived in montreal, London, cape town and Sydney, and thanks god every day that he was born argentine. I can see why. Both the country and its capital are phenomenal. There are many aspects I could elaborate on here: the architecture with the amazing circa 1900 buildings, or the shopping malls which spurn international marks in favour of their own local brands (cause they are actually better), the diverse neighbourhoods with their sidewalk cafes and boutiques, the people who are both friendly and gorgeous, the flat which have the most amazing balconies imaginable, recoleta with its slightly ridiculous professional dog walkers, the restaurants serving big chunks of steak, and the book shops housed in abandoned theatres with shelves spilling over with latin American classics.
I think I should move here. I wonder how I would justify that to my supervisor….

the boat 2

I am something of a personage on the boat. Everyone knows my name and says hello as I pass, crew and passengers alike. Such notoriety was not difficult to achieve- I am the youngest person on board by several decades. Most people are in their 70s and even 80s. I have met several people pushing 90. But if I have learned one thing on this ship it is that life doesn’t have to end at 40 or 50 or any other specified age. There are people out there doing exciting things all their lives. And some of them have truly amazing stories to tell. This morning I had breakfast with a 85 year old who had interesting stories about travelling through Uzbekistan in the 70s. another travelled all around germany as a teenager right after the war, just to find out what it was like! I have eaten several times with an 88 year farmer from Oregon who swears like a trooper and is a democratic party activist. I have got shopping advice from Carmen, my 60+ year old Spanish friend (her Spanish passport was torn up in the days of franco, and her british husband keeps threatening to tear up her british one if the credit card bills keep mounting, but I don’t think this threat is too effective as I caught her buying amber yesterday!) so I have met many interesting characters and I will look at old people in a different way from now on….at least on boat trips.

The Falkland Islands

The Falklands War is one of my earliest memories. Actually, I don’t remember it too well, I have more just the memory of something happening down there than I do of specific events. But the national memory of war doesn’t fade so easily as does a child’s and the events are still remembered in certain circles today. I know people who fought. My family has friends who fought, and we know people who died there. My parents didn’t agree with the war, as they didn’t in general with any of Thatcher’s policies.
Visiting the Falklands, it is hard not think what a tremendous waste the whole thing was. Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges likened the war to two bald men fighting over a comb, and he was right. More soldiers died in the conflict that there were inhabitants of the islands in those days. And the United Kingdom certainly does not need these islands. Unless oil is found (as it is rumoured to have been), there is nothing here other than rock. Not even trees grow here. The islands have great white beaches, but they are mined and blocked off by barbed wire. Plus, the water temperature rarely goes over five degrees. Snow can occur at any month of the year. The wind never seems to stop. Even more than Ushuaia, it is the end of the earth.
And it is a surreal place. The inhabitants are more English than the queen. There are Union Jacks everywhere, and it seems the place froze in the 1950s. the stores were amazing. My father and I wandered into a grocery store to find the saddest “fresh” vegetables ever. Everything is flown in from the UK, thus for 3 pounds you can get a handful of sad carrots. For 4 pounds you can get mouldy cauliflower and for several more pounds, and apple. Little is grown locally as the soil is much too shallow. People live off frozen produce. Close to 80 percent of the islands population are employed by the government. The houses seem to come in 3 models. There is a good reason for this: they are sent down from England in pre-prepared boxes, IKEA style, with instructions on how to assemble them. Apparently not many models are available in such a format.
The guide who showed us around was a pleasant change from the pompous argentines in Ushuaia, who sought to convince us their city was something other than a forgotten backwater. “we don’t have much here in Stanley, so we will make sure you see everything” he stated as we passed the water tanks and the petrol station (part of the tour!) At the post office my father and I tried to post some post cards. My father asked how long they would take to get to Europe. “awhile” was the answer: the Falklands only has post 2 a week, so they wouldn’t even be processed until next Tuesday! the people were nice, in an inbred way. I would not want to join them down there though.

South

The body of water that separates the Horn and Antarctic is one of the toughest passages in the world, but I can now say I have done it. I even have a certificate testifying to the fact, in the unlikely event I should ever need to prove it.
The bottom of the world seems completely disconnected from the rest. From Moscow or Caracas you can still feel part of a worldwide connected community. Here you feel everyone else has left you and gone off to do something better and left you stranded in the ice. I had prepared for the cold, it is not like I don’t have experience living in cold climates. But something about the wind here added a chill I wasn’t prepared for, so I shivered even under my layers of wool and fur. And I watched penguins and sea lions as the latter attempted to make lunch of the former. “that’s the thing,” said the guide “everyone thinks sea lions are nice and cute until you watch one rip the head off a penguin, then people get horrified.” I suppose no one likes to see the realities of nature brought home. And penguins are cute. We looked at them in their little houses, and watched as late chicks tried to remove the last remaining brown feathers off their tuxedo like fronts so that they would be able to swim away and join their kin on their great migrations.