Mark's Travels

10 years of travel blogging from 35+ countries around the world

Stuff back from Exeter and the smell from New Zealand 21st August 2003 in Hannover, Germany


I got all of my things back from Exeter today. It"s been 16 months since I"ve seen them. Among them were relics from when I was in New Zealand, Australia and my time in England. It brought back so many happy memories. This might sound funny but my clothes smelt like mildew which is what it smelt like when I first went to New Zealand and houses were really damp. It"s an odd smell to bring back such happy memories.

I had found notes from when I first worked at Eclipse. I remember being so proud I had that job that I didn"t care where I wore my uniform after work. I remember the first few nights when I would go home with notes of what I had learnt at work and read them as I ate my dinner at the communal table in the hostel I was living at.

It was a really cool time back then. I had the best tech job I had ever had making the most amount of money I ever had plus I was living in a hostel with a wicked social life. I missed having the comforts of home like a private room and a pc and all that but I had an amazing social life and a job that I enjoyed (for a time).

Among the items I got today were a beach blanket from when I was in Australia, a chain from a friend in New Zealand, loads of random paperwork, like my old work contract, a 150 quid phone bill from BT, photos galore, backups of my computer from when I was 16 and again from when I was in England. The disc"s had all the music I made, all the 2d images, 3d movies, documents I wrote, web sites I made, album covers I made, cool things I had found on the web, just so many things that made me feel good inside. These are the things I created that made up who I was at certain points in my life. It was interesting to look back.

There were photos from when I was 14 all the way to when I left England, I can"t believe how much I changed. There were photos of my friends that I never scanned in and put on my site, loads of odd documents from different times reminding me of what I had been doing at that point in my life. I reflect on my life as if it began when I moved to Hannover last April. I hadn"t forgotten everything prior but it wasn"t as vivid a memory as it is now.

England was an amazing point in my life. I had a lot of highs and a lot of lows. I learnt so much from my experiences there. One of the most important was "here for a good time, not a long time", which is the only thing that gets me over the fact that my visa for the UK is going to expire in a few weeks. I admit that I might be living in the past right now but today was like having Christmas, my birthday and a reunion with old friends all rolled into one.


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