Life: 2005 in photos (of me)

Well, it would be hard to say that it was the best year ever, but it certainly comes close and other contenders are hard to think of. I spent over half the year in Bristol, for some time I worked on two Masters degrees simultaneously, I completed one (just found out that it was accepted and a degree is forthcoming), managed straight As in the other, saw Geshe Michael Roach and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, dated a lovely Spanish law student, visited two new countries (Spain and Ireland), and traveled around England and a even bit of Wales. So here are some pics:

2005 began, briefly, in Helena Montana. But I soon flew out of that barren wasteland to arrive back in lovely Bristol, England, population 500,000 (photos by my French friend Vincent Fevrier).

After a grueling month of academic insanity (tests and papers for the first term are all due at the end of January), getting out of Bristol for some relaxation was certainly in order.

This is my friend from Shanghai China, Jiaming, and me in Dartmouth, England. The house I stayed in was an international postgraduate students’ house, managed by an Anglican Church charity. A group called the “Friends of Hodgkin House” would regularly arrange trips so that we foreigners would get a chance to see bits of Bristol and England.

March was another exhausting academic month, so when the break in April came up, I was all too happy that my parents and sister would be coming to Bristol to visit. The first pic is with my sister, Eve, and my rock-star father on the Clifton Suspension Bridge overlooking Bristol. Next is the family on a beach on the west coast of Ireland, and third is me on the coast of Spain in Barcelona. For vacation we spent a couple days in England, a week in Barcelona and then five days driving around southwestern Ireland.

Then it was back to Bristol to wrap up the second term in late April and May. Here I am with Ana (lovely Spanish girlfriend) at a pub in Bristol. Her best friend, Lourdes, had been at Hodgkin House since November, and Ana came to visit in late April and early May. I knew Lourdes had studied law in Spain and when, while teaching her some table-tennis, I noticed Ana’s charm, persistance, and powers of persuasion (i.e. bossyness) I suggested that she should be the one studying law. She flashed her lovely smile and replied that that was just what she was doing.

Then in June, when I should have been undertaking massive research for my dissertation, I instead continued to travel and live it up with friends in Bristol. The pic on the left is from the top of the Clifton Downs, a park area overlooking much of Bristol and the Avon river gorge. In it is Robert (from Romania), Soorjya (India), me, Ana and Lourdes (Spain), S.J. (Singapore), and a guy from France who’s name slips my mind. The picture on the right is from a day trip to Glastonbury I took with my classmate Heather and her two daughters.

July was an extremely exciting month: more Ana, more hanging out with friends from Hodgkin House, and more traveling. Ana returned to study English for most of June and July; this picture is of us at a Greek night club in Bristol called Yamas. The next picture has me with Soorjya, Sumita (also from India) and her Bulgarian coworker at the Bristol Harbour Festival. Finally is the picture with Suzanne and Achintya as we got off the boat on Aran Island. The three of us went on a ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ to Galway and the surrounding area to see Geshe Michael Roach, an accomplished American Buddhist and author of The Diamond Cutter, which we had been studying for several months.

Then in August my friend Soorjya and I finally made good some of our lavish travel plans (setting aside Austria, Germany, and Sweden) in a crazy 24 hour tour of London. Behind us in the first picture is London’s Tower Bridge, and in the second is Winsor Castle. We saw SO MUCH of London, beginning with a boat ride and tour down the Thames, then the Tower of London, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Sri Swaminarayan Hindu Temple, and all this before sunset. We capped off the day wandering around downtown, enjoying fish and chips (my first in England), and surveying the nightclub scene, where on Monday nights the bouncers are replaced by hustlers endlessly trying to convince you to come in.

Just a week after our London trip I returned to Montana to prepare for studies in the MA, Philosophy program at UM. It was a bit overly ambitious (some would say insane) to think I could write a dissertation (which I had barely worked on all summer) while attending full time studies for yet another MA. I became pretty miserable pretty fast. Then, early in September I received an email from a student of Geshe Michael Roach informing me that through a series of happy coincidences, I would get in to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s smaller teachings which were to precede his larger, public talk in Tucson Arizona. So I dropped everything and went! 🙂 In the photo are some mementos and my journal, along with a DVD set of the teachings.

Hehe… this is me in my Halloween outfit. Pretty scary. A few years ago I went as Jesus, but in the course of the night I ended up running into about four other Jesus’s. This year, luckily, I was the only Catholic Priest in the house.

And a party at my house in December, with housemate Lance and co-philosopher Beth, framed with Ali T on the right and his roommate Jeff on the left.

Good times…. good times. OH… I almost forgot, one more. Inspired by Patia’s lovely Southpark self-portrait, I went off and made my own. (see hers for a link to make your own)