Am I a globetroot?

---

After a year of studying humanities at university, it seems like it is time to once again grab my bag and leave home.

This time my journey takes me Southwest to La Peninsula, where I will study a semester in Madrid. I will be gone for seven months and two and a half of them will be on the road. I wont leave until the end of June, but I wish to give a little acount for the feeling of once again travelling abroad and what travelling means to me.

But first let me say a few words about the year I had, after leaving my beautiful Ljubljana.

I went home to start university five days after I returned to Ljubljana from my trip around the Balkans and felt pretty strange in having left the magic of travelling and the wonders of the Balkans within such short a time. But I got through the first semester and my many cultural shocks of being home. The worst part was that as I arrived home with all my great tales of the foreign, my two best friends left on each their bildungs-journey. And now when they are coming home, I will leave. I suppose this might be what is called bad planning.

As my second semester in Uni comes to an end, I will once again criss-cross Europe, this time the Western Mediterranean and hopefully I will come to love La Peninsula just as much as I love the Balkans.

As the headline says, I have come to wonder over whether I am a globetroot. I suppose that the answer will be no. It seems to me that the term globetroot is assimilated with round the world bagpacking and living on nothing but ones own high spirits. As much as I fancy such a trip myself and see it as the ultimate adventour on which to embark, I find that it is not to be a future project of mine.

What I like the most about travelling is to live somewhere for a longer period, to get an everyday life and have friends and a local community. I enjoy to travel to places in order to meet friends or as part of a larger group of international people. Something which might be called cultural exchange. Therefore, I am not a globetroot, I do not fancy having tramped around the Amazone and then continued by climbing mountains in Indochina. I prefer to stay in one region, in one place at the time and to become aquinted with the culture and norms of that place. Therefore, perhaps I am a cultural exchanger!

Anna

---

Photos

ships at Elsignor
Taken at Elsingor-harbour in the cold february

tower of kronborg castle
Taken at Kronborg