St Petersburg is busy. Very busy. Nevsky Prospect, the main road, is like London's Oxford Circus, just bigger and faster. There are building works everywhere, cars, people, all busily running from A to B. Then there's the magnificence of the city: awesome buildings, churches, galleries, monuments, theatres, parks. It's breath-takingly beautiful, but it's easy to get overwhelmed, overawed, overrun. But it's easy to escape the hustle & bustle of Nevinsky Prospect and drift into the side streets. I am more interested in everyday Russian life - the old Babushkas selling produce from their gar [View Full Entry]

---

---

The 'trouble' with travelling is that so much happens all the time, far too much for the purposes of a blog and limited internet access. It's near-impossible to keep a record of everything, all the many impressions, visions, moods that shift and alter and deepen constantly. I am now in St Petersburg, in Russia, in what could be described as the most exclusive Internet Cafe in the world: in the Hermitage, which houses a vast amount of wonderful art from allover the world and from every time span. So much so that you would have to walk 25 km to see [View Full Entry]

---

---

Sometimes things just don't work out as they are supposed to - they work out better instead. After spending a day and a night in beautiful Krakow, Poland - one of the most vibrant, exciting and aesthetically pleasing cities I have ever visited (forget Prague, forget Vienna), full of baroque and renaissance buildings, towers, statues, parks, performance artists, cafes and interesting people, I took a train last night (was it only last night?) to Warszawa, to take a train to St Petersburg at around midnight. Even though I had a seat reservation, I didn't make it to my seat, as the [View Full Entry]

---

---

We're now back in Prague for one last night before I leave for Poland tomorrow morning, and Russia the day after. Once again we have landed in a huge old apartment way up in the sky without a lift, but this time it's in a very hip area, and there is a very cool bookshop/internet cafe right beneath it, and it even has a decent keyboard which doesn't need decoding! It's strange how quickly the body and mind adapt to travel and 'homelessness'. Rooms become homes, safe havens, retreats, even if only transient ones. Every day I notice how much of [View Full Entry]

---

---

We are now in Trutnov, East Bohemia, in the Krkonose - Giant Mountains -, my mother´s birthplace. We arrived here on Saturday afternoon after a pleasant three-hour train ride from Prague on a very old-fashioned, but incredibly charming train. The journey took us past harvested fields and meadows, and nearing the mountains, through large pine forests and hilly fields, very remote and beautiful. In our excitement at seeing the first signs for Trutnov, Mum and I got out of the train one stop ahead of the central station. We should have known something was up when all we could see were [View Full Entry]

---

---

CZech keyboards... this is going to be very arduous to write, as I am in an internet cafe in Prague and have just about, after thirty minutes of desperate fiddling about, managed to work out how to type in my password for this blog. So bear with me as I try to decipher the rest of the code.... It is strange, but I feel like I have been away from home for five weeks, not five days. So much has happened in the last few days. I left London on Monday morning with the Eurostar to Brussels, and then took another [View Full Entry]

---

---

Yesterday afternoon, I have officially become homeless. Or rather, the road has become my home. Now, that all the preparation is behind me, and I've said my goodbyes, it all feels very exciting indeed. Life has suddenly become so simple, and I feel an immense sense of freedom and relief and accomplishment: I started to live my dream. I am on the journey. Goodbye paperwork, ties, responsibilities: welcome experience and adventure. I spent a hectic Friday night with my good friend Sheilagh, packing my rucksack until 11 pm - and we did a great job at minimizing. We managed to keep [View Full Entry]

---

---

I've been losing my zen-like detachment increasingly over the last week. With only a day left here, emotions and stress levels are running high, and part of me just wants to crawl underneath a table and hide. I moved out of my flat today, i.e. all of my belongings left and now live in a storage place, but I'm still here, with a computer and an air mattress, and that's pretty much it! I'm getting to the stage where I can't take much more of this letting go and farewell process, it's really exhausting emotionally. Once again I'm reminded of Inanna's [View Full Entry]

---

---

I'm always reminded of the above saying by the Dalai Lama when things get really busy in my life. I'm surprised how calm and un-stressed I feel a few days before departure, with moving out of my flat still ahead of me. Yes, I'm insanely busy, but I refuse to rush around - and a lot of that is down to keeping up my yoga & meditation practice religiously, together with plenty of sleep, good food and general self-care. There may be a storm blowing all around me, my flat looks like a bomb has dropped in it, but I remain [View Full Entry]

---

---

Yesterday was a monumental day. Much to the relief of everyone around me, I finally bought a rucksack. After some more procrastinating and needless anxiety, I decided that enough was enough, and bravely marched into a shop and made my choice within ten minutes. (Mind you, the only reason I actually managed to commit to the purchase was the reassurance of the sales clerk that I could bring the item back at any point and get a full refund). It feels like I have passed the final pre-departure hurdle, in particular as I received my visas yesterday, and I am getting [View Full Entry]

---

---