Bold Blogger...

I have been a very bad blogger…. I broke the two main rules of blogging:

1. I told a lie

2. I left my blog unupdated for a long, long time…

How can I expect that anyone reads this anymore… well I don’t… but I’m hoping that someone still is ;-)

So… the lie! How did it happen? Well first of all, it was only a white lie, there were elements of it that were true but I was lean on the truth. In my last post, I said I was in Calcutta thinking about what to do next. This was only partially true… I was sitting on an aeroplane, having just flown from Guwahati in the northeast. My flight stopped in Calcutta on its way to Mumbai. Also, I wasn’t thinking about what to do next, I knew full well that I was staying one night in Mumbai and then flying from there back to Dublin through Abu Dhabi.

My plane left Mumbai on the 21st of June, the expiry date on my visa and the last day I was going to be legit in India. Ten days beforehand, I had been searching the web looking for ways to get into Bangladesh… For shits and giggles, I went on a mission to see how cheaply I could get a flight back to Dublin for. When I found a flight for 280 Euros I began to get mild shivers down my back at the prospect of coming home. I had my credit card in my pocket. I took it out and placed it in front of the computer. I clicked ‘book’. I entered my details and I thought to myself: “Do I want to press the confirm button”… I felt good about it! I did it!

As soon as it was done, I got very, very exited about the prospect of coming home. I was a bit weary from being away… I had lived out of a rucksack for the guts of a year and the prospect of Bangladesh or Nepal wasn’t getting me as worked up as it should have been. I didn’t want to go somewhere and not be in a mood to take full advantage of it; I wouldn’t have been doing either country justice.

Also, my bank account had finally come down to zero. Don’t ask me how I had enough money to last that long abroad without going into debt, but somehow I did. I had previously thought that I was well ready to use up my overdraft facility and to max out my three credit cards, but I decided in the end, that that would have been very difficult once I got settled down.

So I came back to Ireland, where for the past six months I have been doing … nothing! Nothing at all! I shared a room in Temple Bar to keep down my costs, collected the dole which kept me fed and watered, did a shift or two a week as a waiter to sponsor the occasional piss-up and dug into my overdraft facility and credit cards. I've had a very relaxing, very enjoyable six months.

I was originally supposed to head down to Melbourne for a year but I found something better to do… I’ll update on what that was in the next post… Suffice to say that it’s what I’ve always wanted to do!

I’m off to Africa on Sunday… Will explain more in my next post (they’ll be coming fast from now on...)!

Your man packing his bags in Dublin…