Another ending, another beginning

The rain was still falling when our plane touched down at Coolangatta Airport. The grass stands still when you're watching, but as soon as you turn your back..... Cloudy, humid, hot-ish and green - nothing like the place we left two and a half months ago - yet exactly the same as it was 12 months and a thousand life-times ago when we first left for Tanzania.

For the first 48 hours I was excited by the flat roads, wide array of food choices, fast moving orderly traffic and comfortable sofas and beds. But that very quickly turned to boredom with the predictability of too many aspects of daily life, anxiety at the pressures and complexity of the social web that we are tangled up in, and loneliness on behalf everyone living here at being anonymous to even the closest neighbours despite having been in and out this particular house for nearly 10 years. Feeling attached to a local community is certainly one of the aspects of life that add depth and meaning.

I find myself now in front of a TV show about independent share traders - people who devote their lives to making money for themselves. While I refrain from passing judgement on how people choose to live their lives it does throw chains on your heart to listen to the wealthy laugh with glee as they get richer. But then one minute later there is an ad for an inspiring documentary or an uplifting story. The rollercoaster ride continues.

So now as our feet are carrying us forwards (as usual), with our hearts a bit behind us in Sinon, my head is skipping forward to the next adventure.....

Xin-Jiang, China - also known as the Uyghur Autonomous region and Chinese Turkestan (in days gone by). It's more Central Asian than Chinese - no Mandarin, only Uyghur - a Turkic language like the other Central Asian 'stans. June to October is the ideal time to visit, so it'll either be this year or the next and I've already started to teach myself Uyghur. It's written in Roman, cyrillic and Arabic alphabets. Learning the cyrillic alphabet while commuting in London will finally come in handy, although it was cut short after an odd conversation with a stern Russian professor on a park bench in a lonely leafless park in the backstreets of London.

But in the meantime there a jobs to start, houses to find, savings to save, subjects to study and of course lots and lots of grass to cut.