I said 'Goodbye' before i Pierced off...

I have just left Leeds and with it many of the friends that i had made there. Along with the International friends that i hung with for most of the time i was there i also did make quite a few British chums, which is great as this was a primary reason for visiting the country. In the last three days before i left i went to a Christian dinner and question session with Helen the med student who i met at the Hypnodog show in the first week; i had coffee with Steph who studies French and Spanish, who i met at Salsa and Swing dance lessons; I hung out with French/American Ben who i have been playing a massive amount of Table tennis with and Abbey who often watches us play and i stayed with Taryn, a Bahai girl, at her place for two nights where we watched a couple of films, and had dinner and breakfast together. It's never easy saying goodbye to people that you've hung out with a great deal - but i think i'm getting much better at it. Possibly because for the last two years i have been making new friends and then seeing them off after every six months, and possibly because i have now visited those friends and know that it is not just possible, but highly likely that i will see them again.

We've all seen movies where someone starts somewhere new and makes a dramatic change to themselves and i've experienced it personally. Last year one of my best mates at Newcastle was an American called Casper. Or so i thought, he just invented that name up on the plane when he came out - his real name was Louie. I was slightly miffed that i had had the wool pulled over my eyes, but more than this i was very impressed - what a cool idea! So i thought i would try something in a similar fashion when i was in Leeds. I wasn't brave enough to attempt a name change, or speak with a lisp, or pretend i had a limp - instead i got an eyebrow piercing which i have just taken out. This was spurred by my own opinion of people who had piercings like this - i generally thought of them as being cool, rebelish, tough and young. Now if i just got a piercing in Australia, these connotations would certainly not be attached to me if people had already known me, so i would need to start somewhere afresh with it. So did the experiment work? Did i feel like i was being treated differently because of a slab of metal in my brow? The short answer is no. And whats more, ontop of this, i didn't feel any different or even feel the connotations that i had attached to this kind of piercing. Perhaps once or twice when i was around others who had piercings, i would feel a sort of kinship, like we were in on something together - but for the most part i didn't feel any different whatsoever.
It is also very hard to tell if people viewed me differently as there is no control to compare it too - and if i did feel like i was being viewed differently, was this because of the piercing, or my Australianness, or beard -which have also only occured since i've left the country.
I didn't think that it would affect peoples' views of me in a significant way - but on a superficial level i thought it would play a part - but perhaps because piercings of this sort are more prevallent in English society it isn't as noticible. I am fortunate enough to have two instances which back up these suppositions. On my Contiki trip Caitlin told me that she liked my hair and that it was what made me unique. In a similar artery (why don't people say that?) the teacher of the give it a go session on body language was saying that a good way of remembering peoples' names was to focus on something physical about them, she then said, referring to me 'I would remember you as the man with the beard'. So perhaps i have so many unique qualities to my appearance that a sliver of stainless steal is rendered erroneous. Or perhaps piercings of this sort do not really play a major part in how people define who you are. In my own age group i would readily believe this, but in other more older age groups i wouldn't have thought it would be the case. My relatives that i've met here for example, haven't really battered an eye lid at it. On my Grandfathers side this could be because there is already a son in law who has tattoo's up and down his arms, paints his nails, wears make up and he and his wife (Great Aunt Alison's daughter) have skulls on their chunky wedding rings. Perhaps... On my Grandma's side, my great Aunt Betty is quite conservative, and she did ask me if the pearcing had any significance, but appart from that it was not spoken of and we got on fantastically. Although one of the little cousins asked what it was, how it got there and whether that made me a robot. So perhaps in his eyes i was a little bit different.
I took it out because everynow and then it would get all puffed up, and this made me feel much worse than it ever made me feel good when it was all hunky dorey. It was a worthwhile experience, and I think i've found that my own opinions have changed more than those around me.