One year to date (minus five days)

So after one year of absence (5 days short of a year actually!) I’ve decided to become active again on this blog. Since my three die hard readers have asked for further writing (probably to be polite, but still, thanks you guys!) I’ve decided to write a little story.

There are a number of reasons why I’m writing this now. First of all, I find this period in my life worthy of writing about. In my case this basically means that I find this part worthy of remembering, since I’m more and more finding out that I use this blog for remembering past events. My parents often asked me why I didn’t write much while I was in New Zealand. This is basically due to the fact that I don’t necessarily want to remember everything in detail about that period, in comparison to for instance the vodka train trip, which I still reminisce about every now and then. Seriously, if there is one thing I would recommend to everybody is to do a (primitive-ish) train trip through a country or area that is far away from your comfort zone. I can really go on forever about the trip and why one should do this and even though I would happily do so, that works better on request.

The second reason is that in my opinion things like facebook status-updates or ‘tweets’ just don’t cut it. Even though I get why they are so popular (and yes I do have a facebook and twitter account), they are called mini-blogs for a reason. Agreed, they can be useful new media tools, but for me it is hard to comprehend that a person like Lance Armstrong avoids press conferences but in the meantime ‘announces’ the purchase of a new pair of socks. For me this falls under the ‘WGAS’ category (again, explanation on request). So instead of posting ‘Daniel thinks his experience in Croatia so far beats NZ’ I decided to again post here.

Anyways, as I mentioned, I now live and work (and unfortunately am still studying) in Dubrovnik, Croatia. I started working for Elite Travel last month and so far I’m not regretting moving here. Even though payment is only a fraction of what I could earn back home, there are many reasons for doing what I do. First of all I noticed that a year is pretty much the maximum I can cope with being in the Netherlands without being too annoyed about people. This sounds majorly pessimistic and of course it is just that. However, that is all I will say about it since I did exactly what people over there would tell/ask me when they would have known about my little annoyances (question being; ‘well, why don’t you kindly f*ck off then?’). Obviously this is also not the main reason for going to Croatia. I don’t get to choose my dream job and I first need an opportunity, which I got here (which I am grateful for, given the recession and the fact that all people around me are losing jobs instead of gaining). For me, the timing seemed perfect. I am about to graduate and I am not sure about if, where and which master degree I want to do, plus I can practice my Croatian language skills (or better; lack of them). Hmm, it just crossed my mind that it would be a good test for me to write a blog post in Croatian around this time next year… Will be interesting to see if I’ll manage…

This doesn’t (necessarily) mean that I won’t post back here fore another year, but for now I will leave it at this. I just read back what I’ve just written and I realize that (again) it is not that interesting for other readers but myself. However I’m confident that after a certain period of time posts like this will be a good read for me personally. Let’s find out if I’m right about that…