you'd see it with your own two eyes

We had this sleepover a few weekends ago. And went crazy with the glowsticks. Thought I'd whip out the holga and take some pro blurry bulb night shots with a long exposure. But, like an idiot, I went crazy with the flash instead and forgot to turn on bulb.Gah.
Here bist the results -

This super ball of glowsticks we made, watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall (in LOVE with Russell Brand - just like every other girl on the planet). Just above Mil's knee is a tiny picture of the ball from afar - I wander what photo that was exposed with?

And Mil again with glowstick glasses. But her eyes were closed because the flash was super strong, and every photo I took I had to warn the girls and they'd all closed their eyes before I took it so they wouldn't see blue dots everywhere. We learnt from painful experience.

That's me being a power ranger. Tots advertising Coca Cola inadvertently. I sooooo wish I'd turned on bulb, all these photos would be so much better with it on...

Yes, I do realise that there's a hand coming out of Sarah's face. And this is my fail photo where i accidently quadruple exposed several major ones and had to redo each of them.
Oh the pains of having a traditional camera. But it's generally worth it.
Look for the word 'LoL' in the photo.

Felicia's sexy butt. It looks like it has colourful eyes and ...even eyebrows!!
LOL felicia. Hope you don't mind me putting this photo up :)

The uber ball again. So I realise I have two photos of it, and I tried in vain to delete this one, but for some reason blogger completely failed me.

Megan, looking so angelic in this red light. Even though red light isn't really angelic... oh well!
She's so gangsta.

the freak show

So the last few photos tots have a border as opposed to the old ones. Got it processed at a new place down from Michael's (the old one) MUCH cheaper, but probs didn't do it as well as Michael's does considering the short amount of time it was done in, etc.
Took a whole HEAP of photos of swimming sports (below) that couldn't get developed because I attempted to use stupid 35mm film and I didn't know how to manually rewind it in my cam. sigh. But these are the 120mm ones that worked. Why do you care?

WOW. I write everything in a horribly boring monotone.

Why? And how on earth do the famous bloggers do it? I suppose its about the originality of your blog... take garance doré for example (not that she's unorginal - completely unique in fact)- but how does she do it? Is it about writing personal life moments - then considering my life is less exciting than a goldfish in a tank it wouldn't quite work. hum.

So swimming sports has never really been about swimming... come to think of it I can't imagine why anyone would go there to swim. It's more like a massive fancy dress pool party where 1800 people are invited, and only the crazy of those actually show up. It's pretty good too... can't wait til next year (as a year 12) you actually get to get in! woot. Sad, no?

That's Grace and Darren (bro), and his girlfriend Des at the freak show that is swimming sports. Which btw was yonks ago - near the start of term 1, I'm just disorganised with my film processing.

Followed by Alex (a.k.a Smithy) dressed up as a crazy renegade punk fairy that had the hair of Gene Simmons in his KISS days and Cyndi Lauper punk era stockings (fluoro yellow and black if I remember right) and this mass tutu with (WAY WAY) oversized sunnies on.
Quite a sight.

The people who actually bothered to go swimming (this was supposed to be mid air but.. woops) sad lack of camera skills by me. tehe.
Probs mostly made up of junior/middle school kiddos. Miss those days.

Peter - totally unfocused - somehow I managed to get Kat's head instead of his - in my super blue heart-shaped sunnies. How cool? :) Random gangstas in the background.

My muchacha Lauren - dressed up as a bee - who actually had a whole hive with her, but ... I dunno what happened to them... So I looked up 'muchacho' on urban dictionary and apparently it means young mexican male, but then muchacha means female. I'm using muchacha then for Lauren, but she's not mexican... or Spanish... or Eucadorian she's just Lauren. But I like the word and I'm gonna use it regardless of the meaning :)

We dressed up as the warriors from Braveheart - as you may have figured by the face paint - but we kinda didn't have the whole kilt business going. Most of us hadn't actually seen Braveheart... so it was kinda 'let's be gladiator looking things with blue and white face paint' .. pretty cool eh? :D Good times.
Here's Cass and Sarah and Lachie in battle... I couldn't think of a name for the battle though...
Suggestions?
BTW: 'Freak show' is meant in the best possible way. I don't mean it as an insult to anyone who took part (I did too) and this additional note is NOT sarcastic, so is that not sarcastic, etc. (God, that chain could go on forever).

fresh air

These were taken back in the day - when holidays actually meant holidays - well not really cos I should've been studying ahead for maths ... oh well. We were all holding maccas bags and trying to find a picnic spot in ... parliament gardens? Such a beautiful place and such contrasting food. From the left there's Sarah, Megan, Fel and Cass. I was obviously taking the photo - Mil was working at the time...I think.
The gardens were really beautiful. Stupid maccas gave me a measly amount of chicken and didn't have the dip I like (ranch) or any other for that matter in stock. So I was hungry.

This was the picnic spot we found - can't remember what I double exposed us with. I think there's tree tops (we were sitting under a really pretty tree) and then us with the buildings of the city in the background... somehow.
First day back was round the corner so this was our last adventure for the hols... oh except ice skating. :) That was cool. Excuse the pun.

in the end

summing up my great adventures...

Kandy (the first and longest part of the trip) where i was bored out of my brains, and turned to fruitless card stacking with mostly failure.

Colombo and our fairly long stay at aunty Anto's four-storey house - this is the view of other people's roofs from above... also spent new year's here with fireworks on the beach... pretty über!

the train ride around Singapore (on the way back from Sri Lanka) it's weird how the image is - blurry and all - is how i felt, everytime i sat down on those trains i fell asleep with jetlag. this was on the ride back from sentosa park thingo - absolute failure of a park, especially when your on your last dollars...

and a curious random picture from Queensland (which i went to with school) a few weeks after the great Sri Lanka adventure. i dunno what went through my head when i decided to take a picture on a rollercoaster... but here it is

the mighty jungle

much of our trip was spent in Kandy... where i think this shot was taken, though that tree in the far distance kinda looks like a gum tree - the same gum trees i ran away from in Australia!

seriously though, i hate to be so un-patriotic but one thing that really annoys me about lovely Australia is the gum trees, they're just so dull and grey and drop nuts everywhere... urgh

small and not-so-good picture of one tinsy section of Peredenia university - it was so spacious and massive and beautiful!! And green and wet and tropical...

taken at some weird-named national park - absolutely hated that place cos' there were leeches everywhere! i spent the entire walk through jumping up and down, the only time i paused was to take this picture... so disgusting though i felt like they might be crawling up the side of my tights on the way back and at the nearest stop i had to hop off and check.

anyway, this picture is quite significant cos it shows the other side of the country as it's immense beauty is cancelled out by the treacherous war that prevails. quite pissed off that there were a lot of places would've loved to go to (i.e. Trincomalee beach) but couldn't cos bombs had been going off there and twas too dangerous.

double-exposed fiddling - me in the trees by the looks of it, not my best angle eh?

Darren with a buffalo carcass for a head - we found this while randomly stopped in midst of Udawalawe national park (we were staying in a bungalow there) probably wasn't very hygienic to touch... not like a relic in a museum or anything. also picture probs would've worked better if there wasn't a hand there holding it up!

random rest stop on the way to Colombo or Kandy (dunno which one we travelled between the two so often!) and the transport there is so annoying, the roads are complete with potholes, dogs, cats, cows, buses going too fast and beeping loudly, you name it - and there's no 'right' side of the road - everyone just goes where they please, it's hell. what would take about an hour or two in Aus to travel would take 5hours there.

i don't quite know where the building is from in the back of this picture... or the trees for that matter, just mucking around with double exposure again ..

this one's pretty cool, we were along side this lake at the national park and i took a photo of it then turned the camera upside down and took the same photo, surprised it turned out so symmetrical though! it was an exquisite lake too - quite grey with dead trees rising out of it here and there.

on the road as part of our daily safari adventures, one of the best parts of sri lanka - we always got to stand up in the back of this massive jeep and get chased by elephants. if you can see, there's one just behind that 4wd there, actually i think it's 2 - a mum and it's kiddo.

and this elephant wasn't particularly nice and totally tried to kill us ... it flung mud at us and yelled a bit, but our tracker guy held out his hand and said something in sinhalese loudly and the elephant just turned it's back and walked off. that was just weird, i suppose it's something to do with asserting authority..

postcards from heaven

favourite part of the trip (apart from water skiing) was the beach, clearly...





the view from this skinny rickety four-storey cafe/motel jig we stayed at on the beach - literally two metres from the water.

this was the balcony of the same place, Shane on the left darren (the brother) on the right and dad's legs in the background. lol. . Darren, pretending to be the brother of Shane got us discounted prices for everything (Shane knew the owners well). we had two rooms just round the corner...

this is the view from the other side of the balcony, pretty, no?

and the weirdo (in a good way) rastafarian guys who charged too much but took us on this awesome snorkelling trip (on that boat) to the other side of that jutting out island bit you see in the distance. sadly the corals were mostly dead though because of the warm currents el nina or something... i don't really know.

Darren, the figurehead of another boat that took us on this adventure across this lake to a crazy island where a book was based, i read the book but totally can't remember the name... it was fun being on the bow though..

Count Demoney's island, apparently you can book out the place for a thousand bucks a week, you have to wade out a bit to get there and i think it fits a fair few people. we didn't stay there though, nevertheless it's a pretty cool concept.

that's me in a blur on the snorkelling boat, i think Darren wanted me to be to be placidly looking out to sea or something, but the boat rocked. i suppose blurry doesn't really suit me.

i reckon this is the most awesome picture of the lot (cos of the vignette retro effect). anywho, that's darren and i at this tucked away beach somewhere down the south coast. we ate from this italian lady with long white hair who had a property there, and charged us too much for not such great pasta. i made a temple (as you can see) instead of a sand castle cos i was staying with the theme of the country. darren attacked it with sand bombs cos his wasn't as cool.

in the family

meet the family i suppose...

that's Amanda and Darren on the way to ... can't even remember, fun journey though - we were completely hysterical for the most part.

on the way out from colombo where we stayed with my aunt Anto (who is actually in australia with us now) and Amanda; they are out front of this über four story building that was their house. it was right next to this army air base so if you went to the top of it you could see the planes flying out a few metres above you.

dad standing serenely at the door to the Kandy house. round the corner was a milk bar or 'kadday' as they call it there where there's these really nice chocolate finger biscuit packs. they were really yum and cost only 10 cents! so i went through 'bout five packets that day.

my uncle Russell and aunt Chandrani at the house in kandy (front view), upstairs is where these two live with their three sons (my cousins), and downstairs was where my nana lived and my other uncle Alcon along with the servants.

uncle Tresil and aunt Sarojini at their house on the way to Peradeniya university. The uni is absolutely beautiful (which i tried to capture but failed due to lack of light) anywho that's in a different post.

there was also a pic of me and my bro and my uncle Emmerson (who i adore!), but it's way dark and has absolutely no photographical merit. sigh.

intro

exactly a year later i find the time and energy to develop and scan the photos i took from sri lanka. (all courtesy of my best buddy HOLGA from the land of Lomo).

anywho they're completely raw and untouched and here for your merriment.

chow!