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My world's on fire, how bout yours?
08:58am, Tuesday 17 Sep 2002
Song of the Day: Smash Mouth - All Star
I went to a party on the weekend for my friend Toby who is going overseas today.
His big plan has been to quit his job, sell most of his stuff and move to Europe for six months, probably settling in London and working a while.
Wow.
This has long been one of my own personal dreams that while I feel happy for him and excited for him, I can't help but feel more than a bit jealous :) It takes a lot of guts to do something like that, and you gotta respect him for it.
It seems like a lot of people who haven't travelled don't really understand the fascination. I often hear the argument that it takes so long to get there and back that its not worth it. Bill Bryson provides a pretty good explanation of wanderlust in his book "Neither Here Nor There":
When I told friends in London that I was going to travel around Europe and write a book about it, they said "Oh, you must speak a lot of languages."
"Why, no," I would reply with a certain pride, "only English," and they would look at me as if I were foolish or crazy. But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
I get great pleasure from watching foreign TV and trying to imagine what on earth is going on. On my first evening in Oslo, I watched a science program in which two men in a studio stood at a lab table discussing a variety of sleek, rodentlike animals that were crawling over the surface and occasionally up the host's jacket. "And you have sex with all these creatures, do you?" the host was saying.
"Certainly," replied the guest. "You have to be careful with the porcupines, of course, and the lemmings can get very neurotic and hurl themselves off cliffs if they feel you don't love them as you once did, but basically these animals make very affectionate companions, and the sex is simply out of this world".
"Well, I think that's wonderful. Next week we'll be looking at how you can make hallucinogenic drugs with simple household chemicals from your own medicene cabinet, but now it's time for the screen to go blank for a minute and then for the lights to come up suddenly on the host of the day looking as if he was just about to pick his nose. See you next week."
With TV shows like that, how could you possibly want to stay home!? :)
Anyway, so Toby is off at 9am this morning, on route to London with a brief stopover in Bali. (He says he had no choice in the matter, I reserve the right to withhold sympathy in the event of DVT.) I wish him luck, wish I was going and hope that the plane arrives safely.
As for me, I got my ancestry visa back a couple of weeks ago.. and now its just a case of money (and a desire to leave my comfort zone). I still don't know 100% if I want to go or not, but I will be keeping a very close eye on Toby's progress!
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