Antonia Bernardin

I have returned!

Let me answer the top three travelling questions:

1. How was it? (how do you summarise 3 months?) It was great thank you, I’m exhausted but it was worth it!
2. What was your favourite place? Oh, there’s too many to choose from. I really liked Paris, oo and Budapest is amazing! Myanmar was the coolest, though, as there aren’t too many tourist over there yet, then again, Laos is so beautiful. I dunno, it’s so hard to pick!
3. Where to next? (just rub salt in that wound, cheers mate) There’s loads I’d love to go back to actually. Plus, you know, the rest of the world! I’ve only seen a little bit of it!

There you go; if you ever do a long trip, prepare three bog standard answers to these three questions. That’s it, that’s all most people will ask you.  It’s the travelling equivalent of :
‘how are you?’
‘I’m fine, how are you?’
‘fine, thanks’

Only people the people who love you deeply will care enough to sit and look through your pictures. However, that’s only because they love you and have to listen to you. Be prepared for the post- travel limbo you will enter; where you have nothing else to talk about because that’s all you’ve been doing, plus, you don’t want to talk about anything else if you’re being selfishly honest. The people around you only have things to say about the things they were doing and they’re not in any of your stories from your trip, so the conversation gets one sided very quickly.

Also, people don’t want to hear about an ‘adventure of a lifetime’ in which they couldn’t/ wouldn’t want to participate in. Travelling is expensive and sometimes a huge leap of faith; if someone cannot imagine taking that risk or cannot ever afford something so utterly frivolous, there will always be an awkward jealousy happening. It’s no one’s fault, no one is better than the other but sometimes, even those that love you, aren’t always great at having something like that pushed in their faces.

At least that has been my experience, perhaps I am hideously wrong?

Thus, I shall bore you with more travel stuff in another post (I know, I know, I can feel you all trembling with anticipation).

Speaking of what you must expect in future blogs,
I intend to keep you updated on my reading habits, as it might shame me into making my way through the three bookcases full that stare at me every night.

To catch you up:

What I read on my travels

• Goldenhand- Garth Nix
• We need to talk about Kevin- Lionel Shriver
• Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself- Harriet Ann Jacobs
• Mansfield park- Jane Austen
• The picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde
• The ice beneath her- Camilla Grebe
• Lady Midnight- Cassandra Clare
• Lord of shadows- Cassandra Clare
• American Gods- Neil Gaiman
• Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
• The martian- Andy Weir
• And the mountains echoed- Khaled Hosseini
• Carve the mark- Veronica Roth

(I know, my tastes wander quite a bit but if it’s a book, I’ll read it)

Thanks for reading,

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I will be eternally grateful and happy to return the favour!