Pontoon.

The majority of UK students that do a year abroad at university turn 21 while they're out there: you start university at 18, and in your third year, which you start aged 20, at some point over the year will become the point where you reach pontoon - 21.

This was the boat I found myself in towards the end of March, nearing the end of my eighth month in Italy. How do you celebrate your 21st birthday? How do you celebrate it in a foreign country? I couldn't have a big party for my friends because most of them were back home. I had a couple of really close friends in Verona, but it doesn't make much of a party with a mere handful of people.

A solution was reached in that I was to have lots of little birthday parties: breakfasts, dinners, movie nights etc. It's like getting lots of little presents instead of one big one. That said, it is always nice to have a big present, and I did get one. My parents came out to see me and asked what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to go to Venice: they'd never been and I could think of no better place to spend my 21st birthday than the canals of arguably the most incredible city in the whole of Italy.

So we went. And it rained. Incessantly. Still, Venice is Venice and it was beautiful despite all that. We got to Piazza San Marco and I accounced that I wanted to jump (not that I lacked jumping pictures in Venice). When I made my announcement, I didn't realise that I'd still be trying to fulfil my wish fifteen minutes later.

The light was terrible and every time we'd take a photo the flash would go, but not at the same moment as the previous attempt. We had hundreds of pictures by the end, but none of them had me airborne. I was actually accumulating quite a crowd because people thought I was either famous, or it was a peculiar flashmob.

Anyway, if you don't try, you don't succeed, and we got there in the end:

Happy Birthday to Yah!

Venice, Italy, 2010

Jumping Pros

By now you will be seeing a common theme. I am in Venice and I am enjoying the art of the jumping photo with my friends. It really was a good day. We called it a Super-Happy-Fun day, but that's probably not something I should admit to...

Anyway, this post appears directly after the previous one chronologically: that's not unusual in this blog, but I mean directly after. It's still in the five minute jumping marathon that we'd staged by the disused well. At this point I'd like to say that none of us were beginners - we were all experienced jumpers and advocats of the art of the jumping photo.

Because we were all pros we liked to go beyond the standard jumping picture and take it to a new level. I don't mean we jumped off higher things because that would have been kinda dangerous, but we tried to think outside the box and get a little creative.

This paid off with the Evolution of Jumping (see yesterday) and we tried again with something a little more posed. Well that's the theory, I can't actually remember what the pose was supposed to be. It might have been a kind of Santa and his reindeer or just one of those happy accidents.

Anyway however it happened, we got ourselves another corker of a jumping picture.

Origins of Symmetry

Venice, Italy, 2009

The Evolution of Jumping

I wasn't kidding when I said the day we went to Venice was truly snap-happy. We decided to have a breather from our intensive sightseeing and we stopped for a nutella-filled crepe. I personally didn't have one as I got distracted by the man making glass earrings in the shop opposite. All I can say is that I still have my fishy earrings, the crepe is long gone.

Anyway, I appreciated the break and we stopped in a small piazza. There were no free benches, so we sat on the steps to an old well. Once the eating had finished, we decided that we would take some more jumping pictures. I don't know why because my feet were so tired and we still had a fair distance to cover.

Whatever the reason was for deciding to jump, it was good enough to galvanise four of us into action. We did a lot of jumping. We didn't have an audience, so we just took good sweet time and jumped for a good five minutes (I felt that the next morning, I can tell you!).

Inamongst all the standard jumping pictures was the one you will find at the bottom of the post. I haven't touched it - it came out just as you see it: my friends, may I present the Evolution of Jumping. There's not much more I can say about it, so just sit back, relax and enjoy it.

What Would Darwin Say?

Venice, Italy, 2009

The Tourist

When I was studying in Verona, I was with two friends from my university; down the road in Padova we had another two friends. We met up as often as we could so that we could catch-up, reminisce and eat lots of Italian food. We went to Padova in October and the visit was returned a little while later. As a Christmas hurrah, we decided that we were going to go to Venice.

I had never been to Venice before, but I fell in love with it instantly. It was early December and we expected the city to be busy. It wasn't. Hardly at all. It was a beautifully sunny day and we did all the touristy things - the gondola ride, St Mark's Square, the Rialto Bridge, the getting lost...

We all had our cameras out and were snapping away here there and everywhere. The others had all been before, but Venice is constantly changing - whenever you go it's different: the water levels, the quality of light, the amount of people... There are always new things to capture.

Including jumping pictures.

At this point I just want to explain something. One of the reasons we were so snap-happy was because we were super excited for Christmas and had all purchased some sort of Christmassy headgear to help celebrate the day. This made us subjects for other tourists throughout the day and was generally entertaining. The other tourists didn't seem to realise that Christmas was coming, the only decorations the watery city had provided was UFO-like saucers that flashed blue and looked generally a bit tacky. Still, no worries, we had plenty of Christmas cheer ourselves.

So when we made it to Piazza San Marco, we were ready to have a Christmas jump in Venice. What a combination!

Duck boards really do make a great jumping platform...

Venice, Italy, 2009

Unintentional Headshots

What is the best way to ruin a nice photo? These days it isn't as infuriating as those in the pre-historic era before the invention of digital cameras, but when someone walks into your photo and suddenly the beautifully framed picture of St Mark's in Venice is ruined because a party of five has just barged in front of your camera lens so they can read all the information about the Campanile.

This can be so irritating, and it happened to me so many times I started to do it to other people. 'How vindictive!' say you; 'Not so!' say I. If you search on the world wide interweb for people who barge into other people's photos you may well find pictures of me: putting my thumbs up, doing the odd cheese-filled grin, doing a Usain Bolt-style pose, maybe even just looking grumpy.

These were mild, however, compared to the unsurprising aspiration I had of giving someone else one of my jumping pictures. Whenever I'd see flocks of tourists I'd wait until they pulled out their cameras and jump for about half a minute to ensure someone caught me airborne.

Mmm... clever.

I know what you're thinking and just before you roll your eyes and dismiss me as a reckless youth, I want to explain my desire to inflict my jumping on other people.

First of all, life is unpredictable. Deal with it.
Secondly, I would much rather have someone jumping in my photo than someone's large forehead.
Thirdly, it is very rare that photographs are all printed, displayed and remembered forever. I have thousands of photographs, but the ones I remember are the quirky ones. When you subject your friends and families to your very samey holiday snaps it's right that you show them the picture of the funny girl who was jumping by the Brandenburg Gate.

This brings my very nicely to my next offering...

Surprise!

St Andrews Castle, 2009

My friend may have taken 100 photos of the castle in her time there at university. This is the only one I remember.