Six months overseas. It really is difficult to explain exactly what that time feels like, even though I've tried to discuss it with others. In one sense, when I look back and see the (952) pictures and places I've been, 6 months seems like a very long time filled with great adventures. Yet, when I think about in terms of how far I feel from home and from that day that I stepped into that stuffy cargohold of an Air Transat flight in June, it's a lot different and a very quick ride.

It definetly hasn't been long enough for me to feel quite 'at home' anywhere, but that's the tradeoff that you get with globetrotting at will. Here's the kitchen and living room at my current home, right smack downtown in Warsaw. I seem pretty content in that pic, probably because it's pretty nice compared to that lonely Pamplona picnic bench. Over the past 6 mont

hs places that I've slept have included, among other things: parking lots, airport check-in lineups, sleeper cars in trains,
non-sleeper cars in trains, cabannero's, blow-up matteresses, buses, bunk beds, hammocks, couches, park benches, picnic benches, the divi
der between the driver and passenger seat in a car, random floors, and on top of a freezer in the kitchen at Smugglers' Inn.

I realized there's a similar photo from my second month of travels, while in Spain. Feel free to compare the two. My hair, my tan, my lack of focus on what's burning in the pan. And the meal in the second pic looks gruesome
One constant theme for the past few months has been changing plans. If I had a polish nickel for everytime I uttered "we need to re-assess our plans", then I might even have enough for a Canadian dollar. Right now the very near future will see me spending a very Polish Christmas with family and friends in Katowice where, I've been warned, I'm going to be told to eat at least 39 different courses over a period of 8 hours. If I don't finish what's on my plate I'm to be deported and never allowed back into the country.
After Polish facestuffing I'll meet up with Paul and his fam in Rome for a very exciting New Year's. I'm so happy to be coming back to that city that I might just explode in my chair right now. The amount of visible and stimulating history in Rome just makes it so cool, for lack of a better word. I'll have a one day stop over in Milan as well, where I'll have a chance to wander and maybe catch an opera or something similarily haute-couture.
But then! Then there's January and onwards to look forward to, only right now I have to decide
what it is that I'm looking forward to. Come March I'm going wrap it all up and meet with the Szoltysek clan in Austria for some skiing, but what does that leave until then. A few more months in Poland? A job in London? A trip to see if they'll let me ride kangaroos in the Oz? That would mean that I'd need to change the name of this blog. Ooooh changes! The only constant in life