One month to go… (25Aug -30 days)

All right, I admit it I screwed up on the dates – sorry but today is actually 1 month to go for my trip…
The travel agent screwed up my ticket – I thought I would be paying 5,100 CHF for this flight and suddenly she realized she forgot to add Africa (hello, I am going there for New Year’s with mommy and bro) and that’s another 800CHF. Anyway – still cheaper than getting one single flight on X-Mas to South Africa – there are so many South Africans returning home for the holiday season from everywhere around the world. Good news: I am back in Geneva on the 9th of Jan and back to work on the 12th… Let’s see if I can make that happen. Let’s see if after a 106 days of travel I can actually connect to the world I’ve know the past 5 years...

Can’t wait! But haven’t realized the implication of being far (really far) away from everything for so long. Friends will move on, fall in love, split, get promoted, change work location, graduate, get pregnant and so on… And I will be moving West, all west against the Earth’s rotation, trying to catch up on the Sun wherever I go. How many things will change while I am away, I wonder. Will people miss me, will I miss them, will they forget, change, evolve, move on? Who knows? Who can predict anything anyway. I’ll try and keep in touch. By all means. This blog being the first medium, I feel so excited I want to make this thing work. I am not imagining a large group of friends logging in every day to check what Kostas wrote – on the contrary – I expect a few good close friends to check up on me from time to time – and write a few comments on what they think. How beautiful would that be…

Habit is something that’s difficult to overcome but this trip is just about that – to see if I can actually make it alone (for most of the time) during my trip. Someone told me you might travel alone but never be lonely – can’t wait to meet people, ask them things, go on discovering places with them. It takes a bit of courage – at least for me – to move out of my comfort zone and I’ve realized that this trip is exactly that, a “safe” (well let’s see about that) way to do this.

Let’s see – sitting at my desk looking out towards Geneva and the Mont Blanc, this place seems so familiar, so close to me but still, can’t wait to see something new… Soon.

PS: Check out the trip facts on the right... 1.7 times around the Earth!?!