Your Personality is Very Rare (INTP)

Your personality type is goofy, imaginative, relaxed, and brilliant. Only about 4% of all people have your personality, including 2% of all women and 6% of all men You are Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving.

How Rare Is Your Personality?

Ink on my fingers

I finished reading the Lollipop shoes and loved it even more than I thought I would. It was darker than some of her other books and I liked the way that magic was presented in the story. Next, I have picked a book off the shelf that N gave me for Christmas. It is called 'Monsoon rains and Icicle drops', and is the true story of a woman who travels the world after she loses her fiance. I am nearly finished and before the book is done I have decided that summer 2008 will herald my first trip to India, Tibet or Nepal. I am secretly rooting for Tibet, but it all depends on what I can afford.

I spoke to K and N last night in Warsaw and me and K talked while I looked on amazon for contemporary Hungarian writers. I have found a few and ordered a load of books for me to read over the next few weeks before I leave. If anyone knows of any good Hungarian authors that I should be reading, please leave a comment. I liked watching Polish films, listening to the radio and finding out from K what was happening in Polish politics and I would like to get to know about contemporary Hungarian culture too. In the meantime I am just reading and reading, anything and everything.

Alone in a crowd

I love being around people, I come from a big noisy family. This weekend there were 12 of us spread over two houses and that means time spent with people is all the time. I am used to being on my own these days, I like the silence and I never get lonely. Noise and company make me go the other way and each day that I was away I had to get a few minutes a day when there was silence and I was alone.

When it comes to M, J and H, one of the things that bonded us was living together in a variety of combinations on and off for years during University and afterwards. But that was all a long time ago and while we remember those days fondly, things are different for all of us now. Living alone makes me happy, but it also makes me selfish. Sometimes, being in a situation where there is lots to do and lots to talk about can be amazing. For me, that was the real holiday this weekend, one that took me out of my own head and pushed me back into the real world.

Wilderness Tips

I am 31 years old and I should know better. I should know better than to wear Converse all stars and imagine that I am as cool as the sulky girls with hair over one eye. I should know better than to eat so much food that I feel sick, hand on my round stomach while I sit with my new forest based housemates moaning about how we can never say no. I should know better than to think that I can function on 5 hours sleep a night. I should know better, but I did all these things anyway, and now I am suffering on this humid, Yorkshire Monday afternoon.

This weekend, I felt like I really was away. We went to a holiday village that is in the middle of Sherwood Forest and spent the weekend watching squirrels and moorhens, swans, and ducks. We barbecued and went for bike rides, we walked and then sat and watched DVDs together, and through it all, we ate and ate and ate. There were new people and people that I already knew. It was relaxed and it was full of laughter and it was just what I needed. There were lots of conversations that have given me food for thought, more about that another time.

Something wicked this way comes

Everyone has books that they love and books that they read over and over again. One of the authors that I adore is Joanne Harris, based in deepest Yorkshire and with a tendancy to set her stories in France, she has the gift of a true story teller. She weaves the characters in and out of each place, at the same time making the reader desperate to know where they will end up.

I have all of her books and I have read most of them several times. Reading a story you have already discovered is like sinking into a hot bath or putting on fluffy pyjamas. My absolute favourite is Blackberry Wine, but I like the others too. Now there is a sequel to Chocolate, perhaps her most famous book, and it arrived yesterday in an amazon package. It is called 'The Lollipop Shoes', and I am already a bit obsessed.

The cover is the deepest purple and shows a girl in a red coat walking in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.The book is heavy and the cover totally smooth, it smells new and has the regal look of a hradback. I have read 100 pages already and am sitting here wondering if I could nip home and get it, read until my next class. In reading, as in all things, I am compulsive, I won't stop until I get to the end. The book only arrived yesterday and it was supposed to be read during my time away this weekend. To be honest, I am not sure that it will last that long.

Chinese Supermarket

This weekend for Ns birthday she decided that she wanted a traditional Chinese meal cooking for her. As my sister in law is Chinese and my brother lived there for years, I enlisted their help to make things authentic. The first part of being able to do this was to go to Chinatown in Leeds to get proper ingredients. We parked in a car park that is in the middle of about four different supermarkets and set off to the biggest and shiniest one first.

Once inside we gazed in wonder at the 30 different types of noodles, freshly made dumplings and jar upon jar of sauces. Powders, meat, fish, and every concievable implement that one could need or want in Chinese cooking. It made me realise that what I was viewing as exotic was what my brother was viewing as familiar. In the same way as I feel safe when I smell pierogi, or see the Palace of Culture, he feels safe when he sees the gold and red decorations that herald good luck.

On Saturday night I made pork and ginger dumplings, we ate coriander and spinach, fish balls, bean curd and tofu, all done in a traditional chinese hot pot. We all sat around and poked the pot with out chopsticks while eating so much that we felt full beyond measure. Who needs to travel when you have different cultures on your doorstep?

Weather with you

Sometimes I think that this really should be a weather blog, as I am aware that I can become obsessed by the sky outside. Today there are masses of grey-white clouds and they seem to be moving really fast across the sky. I truly believe that the weather affects us and children in ways that we can't really understand. I remember living in Warsaw and every headache or bad mood was greeted with heads nodding sagely whilst telling me that the air pressure was falling or rising.

I am tired and I just want it to be Friday, just want to be in my car. I am watching the grey clouds move fast when I should be working and getting stuff done, at the very least I should be looking over my Hungarian vowels and trying to learn the sounds again. No, still looking at the clouds float past fast. Anyone else in a grey mood today?