Back home again and missing them

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After 54 days travelling back home again. Getting used to normal life. This kind of trip has been made by people you meet. I remember still a lot of people I did not write about in the blog :

- Like the dutch businessman in Thailand I met , living in Changmai, coming 15 years ago for 3 months to Thailand and stayed. Has a wholesale organisation for restaurants in the North of Thailand. Helped a dutch company out 12 years ago who thought to be able to change lifestyle in Thailand. Thais eat outside and hardly at home. This company wanted to change that. Built chickenfarms and processing factories for easy to prepare food for in house. It failed. But they were selling a lot to the dutch wholesaler, who exported the products to...... the Netherlands.

- Like the waiter in Georgetown, Malaysia, who worked for 9 months in the Netherlands, 26 years ago and still remembered the good time he had in Amsterdam as waiter. Learning how to bike, seeing the tulips, and thinking the boy with his finger in the gap in the dam to safe the country was for real.

-Like the young vietnamese engineer who was helping me to get rid of the vietnamese guy without ticket who tried to hide in my compartment in the train Hanoi- Danang

-Like the Malaysian couple in the train Kuala Lumpur-Singapore who were talking about a visit to the Netherlands as if done short time ago I found out it had been already 50 years ago.Now they were saving for a visit to UK where teir daughter and grandson were living but finding no tickets cheap enough for their budget. I told them recently Air Asia started a connection with London. That could be the one they were looking for to match the budget.

-Like the German in the Soho bar in Georgetown. Speaking english but nobody to find who was interested in his nonsense

- Like the italian father and daughter from Milano I met in Guilin. He kept saying to his daughter Why don t we real travel what we are doing is sightseeing in one or two places and shopping in Hongkong.
Daugther s answer. Because I like the shopping part.

-Like the artstudents Lucy and To I met in Beijing. Just finished their study and now had to compete with hundreds of thousands other chinese finished artstudents by making all the same kind of paintings.

- Like the guide in Xian who went back with me in her own time to find out which agent forgot to bring my trainticket for the next day.

-Like the australian construction worker I met in the train Bangkok-Butterworth. Had been working in London for 2 years in construction until last october and had earned quite some money until he lost his job last october, started to look all over Europe for new work, did not find any and was on his way back to Sydney.

and many others who had all their stories and willing to share them . Back home and missing them.
Back home and seeing my new born grandson. A bit small still but cute and with lots of black hair.

It has been a long trip seeing countries, meeting people, seeing cities and villages, coming one day proceeding next day.

New travels are in the planning if health and budget allows. Most probably the next one will be summer 2010, of course a few smaller trips in between. The travel I m thinking about is seeing the Mediterranian starting somewhere at the spanish coast, along the coast to France , seeing the islands Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, up Italy via the Adriatic sea side to Venice, Triest, the new republics in old Yugoslavia, Albania, Greeche , Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel,Egypt and perhaps further.
I ll let you know.

Coming weeks I ll try to attach some pictures to the stories I wrote last months.

Thanks for the e mails and comments I got from many people I know and people I don t know.

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Comments

[Anouska]

Hello again
Hello Bert, It has been a trip very interesting and now Martin wants to do the trip also. Good to have you back in Holland. Bye bye and we'll see each other at the Lindenburg. Anouska Vos-Dirksz

[Anouska]

Greetings to Dita's!!!