I’m back, all as planned. I’m extremely sad that these seven months are over, but at the same time I’m happy. I’m happy if I think about all the memories, all the people I’ve met and all the smiles I’ve seen. Yes, how many smiles have seen in the past months? Probably more than in the rest of my entire life. Smiles of travellers, of people on holiday, of people without apparently a problem in life, but most of all of local people. Yes, because SE Asia is a land of smiles. Sincere, genuine and beautiful smiles. Smiles that in Europe or other western countries we would never be able to give to a stranger or someone we just met.

Now I go back, but it won’t be long that I’ll be on the road again. This lifestyle is addictive (especially if you manage to keep doing your job, make money and so to don’t feel useless). Usually to describe it a use the example of an ECG graph detecting emotions.

During the a regular Monday to Friday working life in a office (the one generally called “reality”) the graph goes more or less steady along the week and spikes up over the weekend – where most of emotions are probably given by alcohol anyway.

Travelling instead the graph is full of spikes up and down. A continuos rollercoaster of emotions, everyday. Obviously emotions are not always good, it’s not just happiness. On the contrary, a lot of shits happen all the time, but that still moves the graph, that makes you feel you’re actually living your life.

At the end of this period I don’t feel a better person, my temper is still shit, I didn’t become much more patient and as I ironically wrote few days ago I haven’t found myself (i was not looking tbh), but I feel that I became more aware – wiser is a big word – and most of all I feel younger.

What am I going to do now? Keep freelancing based in London and going back to my old life for a while.

Before leaving for my trip I had planned things pretty well. So now that I got back everything worked out pretty smoothly.

At the time my old uni friend Mauro was considering quitting his full-time job and get a part-time one to pursue a personal project on the side. I was obviously about to quit my job to go travelling, so I proposed him to replace (I was working part-time for that company). He accepted, the company accepted. Or better the company was in an expansion phase, so they wanted someone full-time to replace me. So I stuck another deal, Mauro would work 3 days in the office and I would do the other 2 days remotely from Asia. It worked. 

Then I was of course leaving my room as well, which was conveniently close to the office…so “Mauro, do you want my room as well?”
He got the room too, life package. I actually gave him my bike as well, but Mauro is not a sport person. I had no girl at the time, otherwise I would have give her to Mauro hahah.

The best thing of leaving the room to Mauro was that I actually left everything in there:
“These in the bookshelf are my books…you can read them if you want, don’t see why you should move them. Then these clothes hanging in the wardrobe…they don’t take much space, do they? The bags on top of the wardrobe, they’re not a problem right? Then my working position, desk, chair, screen, all yours to use it.” I basically didn’t have to pack!

Then I also planned the moment I would come back. I found out that my Australian flatmate Nikki had her Visa expiring in the end of March, just when I was planning to come back…

She left the day before I got back. She said goodbye to Mauro, they had emotional moments, they hugged each other, said the last words, promised to meet again somewhere at some point in the future, then she walked off and shut the door…Mauro waited for 10 minutes in case she would have forgotten anything and after that, walked swiftly on his toes, like a thief, to the end of the corridor with his bags already done and moved to Nikki’s room. Moving done. My room was ready for me.

So now Mauro and I are flatmates for the first time ever. Not sure how it’s going to work out, but I must say that together we’re not very productive. We both work from home most of the days, have huge, never ending meals, watch Netflix in the living room commentating every single thing and we both really like to go out. Let’s say that as coming back from such a long trip is really not too bad…