Dawdling in Doha with these Dubliners
We met on Easter Island
Dancing Spirit Sisters… after 9 long years
Only I would find an African wedding to attend in Copenhagen
My adoptive Danish family <3
Three hoes from Hoboken in the Lower East Side
I sleep like a rock. My bed swallows me up, refusing to spit me out. Reverie grips me and the Sandman sits on my eyelids. I struggle every day to get out of bed and go to work. A 7:00 am wakeup call in Canada is a whole lot different to the one I heard every morning in Mumbai. Yet I do what I must. I need the money, and I need the chaos that comes with a routine.
Yes, I’m home.
And I want to say this. I hope you’re okay with that. Recently, I changed the About Me section for my blog, feeling like I can no longer call myself a travel blogger. Really, it was other people who had given me this label, but after my experience in India, I no longer relate to this term. I am a traveler and a writer, but I am really not a travel blogger. There are far too many gifted and talented people out there who are travel-blogging and doing it for a living, and I just can’t find space for myself in that suitcase.
So this is what you will be getting from me if you like reading my blog: stories, mostly about travel, but at their core, they will be stories. After my genius pre-scheduled posts that I had prepared for my trip through India and Nepal ran out, I had the idea that I would be blogging from the comfort of my friends’ homes. Only once or twice did I accomplish that. When I was sitting across from my friends, coffee or rum or shisha in hand, blogging was the farthest thing from my mind. It was too important for me to live in the moment and be with them to trouble myself with being a really good travel blogger, as some people are, and create high quality content.
I went to Qatar, England, Wales, Denmark and the USA, staying in 6 different homes of friends. Can you really blame me for not bothering to blog?
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“What were you doing in Qatar?” the immigrations officer asked me at Heathrow.
“I was visiting friends.”
As soon as I said this, I knew how strange and suspicious these words sounded.
“How do you know these friends?”
Then the words tumbled out, and the more I spoke, the stranger the story sounded. “Uh… they are from Dublin. And they used to live in Winnipeg, in Canada, where I’m from. I met them there. They just got jobs in Qatar so I went to visit them.”
“Okay…” he peered at me with a raised eyebrow. “And what are you doing in England?”
I spoke slowly, hearing my own echo. “Visiting friends.”
“You don’t have any friends in Canada?”
I thought he was joking and came back with, “Nope, not really,” but he continued to frown, looking at my passport and stamped it, deadpan expression lingering on his face. Imagine if I had told him the friend I was staying with in England was a lady I met on Easter Island, and then I was later spending time in Wales with a friend I met when I volunteered in England 9 years ago, and that I was then visiting a Danish friend in Copenhagen who I met while I lived in Mexico, and then I was going to Aalborg to visit a Danish family who are distantly connected to me and only through marriage but who I have adopted as my own family.
What would he say at this big, long run-on sentence?
Truth be told, I didn’t care, because it was the truth.
As I hopped from place to place on my way home, I got an interesting snapshot of myself, a reflection of the people I’ve kept in my life, the people I count important. I saw how I fit together like a jigsaw, how each of these people matter deeply, inexplicably. I reflected on how I went through a couple of odd years where my “best friends” dropped like flies, where I thought I had no friends at all. But then there I was, being collected at the airport, given couches or beds to sleep on, food to eat, a hot shower and a fresh towel, and the best part of all was the heavenly company – people I can just be with. Soulmates.
They say friends are the family you choose for yourself, and in my case, I am the luckiest girl in the world to have this family. These people are the loves of my life, and I just hope they know that.
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Hi again! Remember me? I am just getting into the swing of things back here in Canada. I have a butt load of pictures to share and (obviously) stories too. I have another writing project that has taken priority, but I will continue to blog. Also, please say hello: like my Facebook page, and follow me on twitter and Instagram.
