You'll find me about 11,000 miles away.

I received an email recently from a friend of mine called Mark. The subject was a phenomenon called Tit Monday. "That's right my friend – summer is coming :) It’s around 20C today and ‘after months of burrowing, breasts are rising to the surface like moles at dusk’". Every guy, especially one that works in a city in Britain is probably very aware of this day. One random day, suddenly everything changes and you start to notice that the warmer weather makes females look sexier. Another boring trip to work, only made better that the sun is shining a bit more at 8am. This makes you feel happier. You feel like looking around at your fellow passengers. Something is different. Something looks different. Something... It's Tit Monday! " For Tit Monday is that special day in the year when, for the first time, the temperature rises above that magical point which causes girls getting dressed in the morning to decide to show a bit of skin. After months of du...

Recently, I went out on a date.  It started off well enough. We went for a coffee and walked about then decided to go to this pub place to have dinner. Not too trashy and not too posh for a first date. She said that she didn't really drink alcohol. So I went to the bar, ordered food, and got a coke and a Peroni. I came back with the drinks and a table number stand and put them on the table. Just to make conversation , she asked me about the number 42 (we were table number 42) and the differences in Spanish (her mother tongue) of how you say 42. I put the glass to my mouth to sup my beer which was a bit too full up, but she asked about 42s makeup or something, and it required me to point at the number. So without drinking I put my beer down right in front of me.  It was held in my left hand and moved my right hand to do the pointing. As I did so, I knocked the edge of the glass, but it didn't tip, as it was braced by left hand still holding it. Phew. Disaster averted. But ...

I woke up this morning, had some breakfast, had a shower and sighed to myself as I was watching the start of the weather on TV that "ahhhh, it's still only Thursday. I wish it was the weekend so I could enjoy the sun and heat." As I was putting my shows on, still watching the weather (it was now near the end and they were showing the forecast for the next 2 days, labelled as TOMORROW and SUNDAY. "Hmmm, that's strange, they missed a day out..." and continued tying my shoes, still not fully woken up. I finished tying my shoes, got up and it suddenly dawned on that maybe it was Friday, not Thursday. I checked my phone's calendar. Friday. "No way". I wasn't convinced. I checked the date on my watch. Friday 4th February. Instead of just feeling happy, I felt concerned that I had lost a day somewhere. Still not 100% convinced, I walked out of the house, counting the days back in my head. I got to 3rd of Feburary and an irrational thought exploded...

Chinglish isn't just restricted to China. A programme on TV that looked interesting and maybe Snoop Dogg or Xzibit would write a rap song about. It turned out to be a film about a Chinese guy called Ho, who was pretty nasty to people.

I've not been updating for a while due to Christmas and holidays but this is the second of three. New Years Eve is (for me) traditionally about not really organising anything until the last minute. But this year, being in Australia and one of the first countries to celebrate the dawn of a New Year and being in Sydney, I wanted to see the world famous fireworks and celebrations in Sydney Habour. Most other people I spoke to were doing other things, like going to parties, go out for dinner or to watch the fireworks but from some place seculuded, with 100 times less people than I had chosen to mingle with. I'll explain. I went to a place called Kirribilli, pretty much in front of the bridge, on the right side of bridge's bay. A prime spot , and being free, made it even more alluring. Tickets to sit in the gardens near to Sydney Opera House were selling for $200, and other places near to the bridge were also charging for tickets. Mine was ticketless, basically the first there...

My first opportunity to celebrate a festival in Australia turned out to be an entirely American festival. And I was lucky enough to experience two of them! I'm talking about Thanksgiving. One official Thanksgiving celebration, with lots of traditional Thanksgiving food like turkey and yams. The other was a Mexican Thanksgiving party, which was in fact a celebartion of my housemate's anniversary of moving in to his house, and it just happened to fall around Thanksgiving. And Mexico is viewed as an antonym of the USA I guess. And it probably created a good cover story for drinking beer and tequila for 15 hours and playing loud Mexican music. Mexican Thanksgiving solely involved Mexican foods and drinks and games. This meant 3 different types of tequila ( one with the traditional scorpion preserved in the bottom ), Corona, nachos, burritos, a piñata, sombreros, wearing shirts with just the top button fastened, saying "essay" a lot, putting Riche Valen's La Bamba o...

Celebrating Christmas in other countries isn't a first for me, for example I once celebrated Christmas in China a few years ago. Celebrating Christmas in China felt strange, but not incredibly alien. Hardly anyone where I was living celebrated it, but at least it was cold, I had to have lots of extra blankets on my bed, I had to wear more clothes and Chinese New Year was relatively close to Christmas, so there were festivites and ample decorations. It's an even strange experience here in Australia though. Not a horrible, uncomfortable strange. Mainly because it's quite warm and sunny. Christmases have become synonymous with bitterly cold weather, grey semi frozen slush (commonly referred to as snow in parts of the UK...although this year from what I've been told it will be quite a white Christmas), warm houses, boilers breaking, breath condensation at all times of the day, almost permanent darkness, being mystified why the Tube is so hot in summer and yet so cold...