Ah, Polska.... A brief but enlightening encounter with a fascinating, once mighty, country. Poland is a thriving and exciting place to be, but always history abounds..... [View Full Entry]

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Come to Belarus! Part of the axis of evil? The Last Dictatorship in Europe?? The Only Surviving Remnant of the Soviet Union???" "Where?" Indeed, when I first heard that to reach Europe from Russia, I would have to get a transit visa through a country called Belarus, quickly I decided that A; Because I had never heard of the place, it would make more sense to divert north from Moscow to St Petersburg and come out by the Baltic sea, and explore Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania instead, countries which had at least, had something enough to [View Full Entry]

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Last days in the Baltics. It would be easy to say I have a grasp on this area of the world, but like many of these old cultures, it is hard to understand the mind set of the people without living amongst them for some time. However, during my 2 or so weeks of travelling around this, very Eastern, part of Europe, I feel glad to have come here, and happy with my time, and the people who I have met along the way. Before making my next trip Belarus, I looked around Vilnius and felt somewhere entirely different to either [View Full Entry]

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Hi. My blogging, well. I guess irratic isn't quite the word but non-existent for the last couple of months, it has been. I have just recently cleared the border of Russia and am now back in the EU after over 2 years of being in the Asian part fo the world, and well its intersting to be back. Certainly blogging was the least of my concerns whilst I was in Russia, and almost impossible in Mongolia, and China and Estonia, well, I was just lazy. But rest assured that they are in the post and that for the time being I'm [View Full Entry]

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Brothers from different Mothers When I crossed over the border into Mongolia, by train a month or so previeously, I realised that I had in fact never really crossed a border before. Taking planes, illiminates the ability to actually see border crossings and how close together most countries live. It makes you realise that in the UK we have been lucky in the past to never really have borders and no doubt it has saved out bacon on numnerous occaisions. In these fragile relationships, always held together or pushed apart by geography, politics and cultural difference, it is interse [View Full Entry]

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"Byegaaj!" At first I didn’t understand what she was trying to say to me and I smiled and handed her my ticket again. Then, with a look of distain, the large, lips ticked provodnitsa pointed down at my bag and I realised that she was demanding my luggage. This rotund lady, dressed like a pilot from the 70’s in a blue, winged uniform was to be the first of many to set me off on journeys on the largest leg of my journey to get home. I began to feel rather overwhelmed by this seemingly humourless lady, the big, dirty train, [View Full Entry]

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I've been pretending to myself that I will write up all of the great times and memories that I had on my travels for almost a year now and starting to realise that it was perhaps too much of a grand task to imagine that I might have the motivation and drive to want to spend hours, days or even weeks, typing away in the hope that I might capture all of these moments before they slowly disappeared. So, as for Mongolia, The Land of the Blue Sky, without doubt the most beautiful, untouched, epic and haunting of places I have [View Full Entry]

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Parting isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to say why I came to Japan in the first place. I knew that I would struggle with cultural differences, language barriers, parting with old friends, and most obviously loneliness. When I decided that I wanted to move away from my cozy life, great job, fantastic friends and girlfriend at the time, you could say that I was leaving it all behind. In fact in the 2 years that have past since I said goodbye to the familiar shores of Blighty, I have been asked numerous times why I came to Japan, and [View Full Entry]

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Moving swifly on. It was time to reunite the mcgrath family in a new setting and solidify the bonds once again. Having burned his way over X amount of miles from London to Mongolia in not much more than a glorified banger, the brother Tom was planning to make a suprising vist to me in Japan after a brief detour to China. Arriving looking a little worse for wear and certainly different to how I remembered him ( and him possibly to me ) I greeted my brother at Kobe port, having just spent 2 days on a ferry from Shanghai. [View Full Entry]

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That was it then. 2 years. One island. What now? I had finished, what will no doubt prove to be one of the greatest chpters in my life and was pondering what to do next. Having packed for weeks, getting drunk at 8 leaving parties, saying tearful goodbyes to my students, colleagues and fellow island people, I was just about ready to have short controlled heart attack and collapse in the heat and exhaustion of the final prepartations of the ending my 2 years on my island, Words cannot ever describe my experience over here and perhaps many would not care [View Full Entry]

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