Yesterday it was Sunday

Yesterday it was Sunday, that’s why my last day off was not long ago and I remember it quite well. I always try to do my best to make my holidays really exciting, because we have only few days in a week for relaxation and rest.

Yesterday my friends and I agreed to meet at my place. First we watched a very interesting TV show «What? Where? When?». Then we went took a videocassette and watched an outstanding movie ««The Independence Day». This is a story about strangers from the other planets that were trying to conquer the whole Earth and about the struggle against them. The movie is full of visual effects and computer graphics that takes your breath and makes you admire the modern technologies in the cinema. I wish our studios and directors made such movies. «The Independence Day» can be added to the genius pieces of modern art – that is my opinion.

Having watched tthe film, we decided that it was a time to go outside. The first place we went to was the sports ground. Though it was rather cold, we put on warm clothes and had fun. Almost all day long we pplayed soccer and basketball.

As for me, I like weekends and holidays, as the majority of other people. And I like telling about my holidays. It’s dull to listen about the ordinary working day, how do you think? Every working day looks like another, but every weekend is different from the other. During the weekend we have an opportunity of enjoying the life and having rest.

Well, I guess there exists a great number of different ways of spending summer holidays. But each person has his own preferences, so everyone likes the only way.

I think that there are two ways of spending your holidays – active and passive. The passive way means staying in the sun, for example, and enjoying ddoing nothing J, and the active – quite opposite: going boating or hiking, trying yourself in different kinds of water sports.

I think I can describe myself as a home-sitting person – I’d usually prefer staying at home near the TV set in an armchair than going on a cruise, or hiking, or whatever. But, after I tried jet-ski and windsurfing this summer I have changed my point of view at the holidays. To enjoy the speed of jetski is mmuch more exciting rather than to take a sunbath!

Well, maybe the conclusion would be is that since time passes a person may be bored of each time the same type of holidays, as it happend to me this summer. But holidays are great in all their metamorphoses!! J

Traveling.

Here is a story of a man who had an terrible holiday: The first thing that went wrong was that the country we were going to decided to have a war a few days before we were going there. So that was the end of that. But the plane we were going on was stopping off at Rome. So rather than not having a holiday at all, we thought we_d go to Italy. Very nice. See the sights. Go to the beaches and get fat with pasta. We were at the airport waiting for the plane and a friend of mine who lived near the airport had come to see us off. So we were having a few drinks in the bar and joking with this friend of mine, Peter, saying _Poor old you in cold rainy England. This time tomorrow we_ll be in Italy on the beach._ And I went down to ssee if the flight had been called and discovered it had gone. It was a terribly stupid mistake. We hadn_t checked the time of departure. I was sure it was going 9 something but it was going at 19 something which of course is 7 o_clock. So we were actually there in the bar when it went without us. We were determined to have our holiday. The irony was that Peter was now going back to his comfortable home and we were stuck in the cold and the rain at 10 o_clock at night. You see, it was a charter flight so we couldn_t book another one. We lost our money and all the other flights were booked up. Well, we got a train to the South Coast and caught the midnight boat across the Channel, froze to death all night, it was a terrible crossing with people being sick everywhere. And eventually we got to I think it was Dieppe and then a train to Paris. We got to Paris very early in the morning and I thought we_d be all right. You see, we now had to hitch hike because a lot of our money had gone on tthe boat and the train, but I thought _Well, it_s very early in the morning, we_ll get a good place to start hitching and we_ll soon be well on our way._ We got to the start of the motorway and I just couldn_t believe it. I_ve never seen so many people trying to hitch a lift in all my life. Well, it was then it suddenly dawned on me. It was August the first wasn_t it? and on August the first in France the whole population goes on holiday and there were hundreds of people, stopping the traffic, banging on drivers_ windows trying to persuade them to stop and give them a lift. It was chaos, disastrous. Well, we got moving eventually. A lorry driver gave us a lift. And then things started to get better, as we got further south and it got warmer, you know, and we thought _At last, the holiday_s beginning._ Well, we camped that night and we then set off again the next day. We got some lifts, and met a great chap who owned a vineyard. He took us back to his farm and we tasted all this wine -Burgundy, my favorite – and

we had a great time. Now the holiday really was starting. Well, he took us back to the motorway, and there we were by the side of the road, the sun was shining, we were a bit merry, sang a few songs – you know, life was great. And we got another lift from . well he was a maniac, complete maniac. He seemed nice enough, but within a few minutes he was driving at about a hundred miles an hhour, overtaking on the inside on the motorway, with his stereo at full volume, one hand on the wheel and well the other hand on various parts of Susan_s body. What! So what did you do? I don_t know why I_m laughing I_ve never been so frightened in all my life. We were absolutely -helpless. Susan tried to say that she had to go to the toilet, but he wouldn_t stop then she pretended to be sick in his car, aand he stopped in seconds. He had this really flash expensive car, and as soon as he stopped we just jumped out and ran. The worst thing was this tremendous drop from feeling so good to thinking that we were ggoing to get killed. We eventually got down to the south of France and began to have a good time, and then down to Italy. We ran out of money, of course, but apart from that, it was good. I_ve never had such a tiring holiday. When we got back, I was exhausted. At the end of the holiday, I needed a holiday! And this is a story of an old woman. She has traveled all over the world in her tiny van. It_s a nice way of having holiday. Now at this moment, somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, Olive Gibbs is probably chugging along the road, in the early morning in her tiny camping van. The ttravel bug came to Mrs. Gibbs rather late in life. About 14 years ago, to help her get over the death of her husband she went on an overland bus trip to Katmandu. This fired her with the enthusiasm to travel more, but as she couldn_t afford to go on extensive organized tours, she bought a camper and took to the road alone. Now at the age of 72, she_s clocked up about 75,000 miles on trips that have taken hher to America, Australia and South Africa. Ann Catchpole met her at her home on the Sussex coast just before she was setting out on her current venture another wander around America, Canada and Mexico, that_ll take about a year, and she_d been very busy that afternoon packing up the van, mainly, as she told Ann, with stocks of food. Of all the meals that I have during the day, my breakfast is the one that I like. It_s not that I have a large breakfast but I do like my toast and marmalade. I_ve got quite a few pounds of marmalade in my van at the moment, I should think I have about 10 pounds, and when that run out and if I_m down in California by then I shall make some marmalade. I take English things like Marmite which not many other countries of the world seem to appreciate. I_m also taking crisp breads to the United States because I don_t care for their bread very much. And I take biscuits because I don_t care for their biscuits very much. But otherwise I can buy everything I need in the United States. But I don_t like wasting my ttime shopping, so I carry as much as I can and visit a supermarket only when I_m forced to. Well, I know vaguely which way I_m going to go, but I do change my direction if there_s something I hear about which I think I would like to see, or I don_t like the road I_ll go a completely different way. And at the beginning of the day I don_t know quite where I_m going to sleep at night. I wait until I feel tired or I wait until I see somewhere that attracts me and then I stop. The first thing I do, and I do this deliberately, I make myself a cup of tea, and I sit outside my van because I think it, it pleases the Americans to see an English lady having afternoon tea. But as soon as I really . as soon as I arrive, especially in the United States or Canada, the men all want to talk to me about places they_ve been to when they were in the army during the war over here. Other people want to know and tell me about where their ancestors came from, and nearly always I have bbeen to the places, or at least know something about them, because I do travel quite a bit in my own country as well as going abroad. In fact when I_m trying to unpack at the end of a day_s journey and get a meal in the evening, life becomes very difficult because people gather round and want to know all about me and it_s almost dark before I can get on with my unpacking and getting a meal ready. But I do try to get my cup of tea in first. In Zimbabwe, at that time called Rhodesia, and I was actually camping in Zimbabwe by the Zimbabwe ruins. And during the night someone went by with a torch. It woke me up, and I just thought it was somebody going to a toilet, and I took no notice. But when I woke up in the morning I found that a lot of my papers had been taken, and the wallet in which I kept them. And of course I didn_t realize at the time what was going on. It must have been the noise of the door closing which woke me up. I suppose I_m very foolish but

often I don_t lock myself in my van at night. Sometimes I do if I feel at all nervous or if I_m in a camp site on my own, then I do lock myself in. Each country has something special about it. But I think the beauty of South Africa is something that I shall never forget. I used to stand sometimes when I was there and say to myself, _Just look and look as much as you can in ccase you don_t come this way again.