Vesna’s voyages

I remember the first time I moved to a new country. I don’t mean to visit or sightsee, but to actually get an apartment, a job and settle down, kind of.

I was 23, a west coast girl living in New York City. It had taken me seven strenuous months to find a decent job somewhat related to my field – magazine journalism. Don’t steer away yet, I’m not part of the media and never was. I found myself working long hours in a rustic building in Chelsea as a traffic assistant for an ad agency. Don’t get me wrong, with clients like DKNY and Ralph Lauren to name a few, it all seemed quite glamorous. But, my life was winding away with 60 hour work-weeks and it was becoming an industrial-era monotonous ritual of a job peppered with food and sleep. Nothing much else. After a few months of this, I wondered if my degree from a prestigious college had played a trick on me and this was the life I was supposed to accept for the next thirty-plus years.

So I found the TEFL program on the web and quickly applied and got a quick response. I don’t know if being fired from this job was one of my biggest blessings ever, but it certainly made the decision to accept Spain’s allure a whole lot easier. I made a conscious decision before I stepped on that flight – well the second one after I missed the first – that I would make this a four-year learning experience. Just until the current evil administration steps out of the white house, I would be prancing around Europe and wherever else I happened to land, thus expanding my horizons like no university ever could.

Thus begun my around the world adventure,beginning with two capitol European cities for a year each and then travelling around Europe, the South Pacific and Asia stopping just long enough to acquire more funds to move on.

As I’m writing this it has been officially one month over four years and I’m still loose in the world, even further afield than I ever could have expected. The travel bug has got her seething venemous stinger deep in me and wont let go – A bit like that bug on my first overnight sleeper bus in India – and I continue on this trip, or pot, in Slovenian.

So far I have learned Spanish, French, Slovenian, Thai, Hindi and kiwi slang to various degrees. I practice yoga on a daily basis (a remnant from India), eat lots of olive oil drenched salads from my Mediteranean experience and can cook a mean pasta or rice dish on a miniature gas burner from spending so much time in a tent. These are skills I could have never acquired while remaining in a shared flat in Brooklyn.

But now I have to decide where to go and what to do next. Over six months in Asia and I’m ready for a little, just a little familiarity. I’m spending the summer in a small city in the North of Thailand and then…well, I don’t know yet. The constant surprise that comes with travelling can be both a thrill and a source of anxiety. á donde voy ahora, á donde…I ask myself continually.