La Dolce Vita.

What an art of living the Italians have mastered. We had such an enjoyable time in Italy, eating and drinking our way from Milan to Rome. I think I must have spent every afternoon for 2 weeks drinking a glass of wine on a terrasse, eating a gelato for dinner, a two course lunch, and -- at times -- even enjoying a room with a view.

This picture was taken from our balcony in Sienna, on the eve of St. Catherine of Sienna's day. Each of Sienna's 17 boroughs mark the occasion with a procession, and the next day they gather in the square where the annual horse race is held.

When we first arrived in Sienna, another Tuscan hill town which has declined in influence since its height in the Renaissance period, we were a little Tuscan-hill-towned-out. But accidentally spilling onto this procession literally re-ignited our love of Tuscany.

We had seen lots of crowds in Italy already -- the 2 hour queue at the Uffizi in Florence, the millions of tourists blocking any genuine experience of Venice on Good Friday, spending more time letting tourists pass rather than hiking the Cinque Terre on Easter Monday, 80 000 people per day at the Vatican museum -- but this time the queue of people were NOT the tourists, and we, the tourists, got to be the ones to blissfully watch from outside the mass of people.

La Dolce Vita? Sometimes it's watching, rather than participating.

Domestification.

People seem to imagine I lead this glamorous life of nomadic globe-trotting, never knowing what corner of the world I shall find myself in next. This statement is true in all but the term glamourous – there is a fine line between excitement and fear, and glamour generally refers to that which differs from the norm of one’s existence. Anything done consistently begins to feel like a chore, and current activities that excite me include things that are associated with longer stays in a place: buying spices, decorating apartments, hanging art, buying crafts that don’t fit into a suitcase, reading the globe & mail, and having enough plates and cutlery to throw a dinner party for more than one guest.

On Saturday night Leanne and Guillaume threw a house-warming party to celebrate their arrival in their new home. Leanne is a dear friend of mine who was my flatmate when I lived in Istanbul in 2003, and has been one of only a handful of people I know around the world who could really sympathise with the lifestyle of living out of a suitcase for the last six years. We came to Cape Town 5 days ago and have been staying with Leanne and Guillaume, buying things for the house, eating breakfast on the veranda, watching BBC on digital satelite television, cooking with appropriate utensils, reading books in the garden under a tree, and letting the experience of Cape Town slowly trickle into our lives rather than actively pursuing it. At the house-warming party, people kept asking us where we’d been in Cape Town, and mostly we could only name some restaurants, bars, a hairdresser, and some shops we’d been to, plus one spontaneous detour up Table Mountain to watch the sunset while we were dropping off some friends at their hotel.

Travel is hundreds of decisions being made hourly – are we hungry? Thirsty? When should we book a tour of Kruger National Park? Rodden Island? Which towns to stop along the Garden Route? What day should we leave Cape Town? Constantly sizing up the potential worthiness of a place and re-aligning our priorities based on this blind assessment. Pressure to see it all while still giving ourselves enough time to ourselves in order to make it enjoyable – balancing this equation is a full time job.

-So, what do you do?
-I’m a municipal planner. I’ve been in Ghana for the last six months working as a community development planner. Basically, I’ve been working in international development.
-And when do you go home?

Home. Where do I even start? Are strangers allowed to ask such deep and exposing questions? WHEN is difficult enough to answer, but HOME? Ouch. When living out of a suitcase, one clings to anything familiar. Leanne and Guillaume are familiar, and home seems to be more of an essence than a place. Being domestic in their beautiful new home in this beautiful city is more glamourous to me than the backpacking I’ll be doing next week.

-I figure around the end of April I’ll have some time to start looking for my next means of employment, and that will dictate where my home will be. Either that, or I’ll just go to Vancouver to see my family and let my health recover for a few months. Get my teeth cleaned, see some doctors, and the like.
-Ooh. What a glamourous life you lead!

Re-entry.

Water. Glasses and glasses of cold ice water. I drink one glass, it’s not enough. I need more. I drink two more glasses and feel the cold water going down my throat and into my arms, legs, and stomach. Romantic images of water cascading down ice, bubbles from the impact, an unquenchable thirst.

I wake up, open my eyes and try to figure out where I am. I’m in a sleeping bag, on an air mattress, in a room with *hard wood floors and *soft sunshine pouring in from floor to ceiling *windows. The sunlight isn’t hot blinding yellow, the windows aren’t tiny with bars across them, the floors are wood, not concrete. In the corner are a suitcase, two backpacks, and an army bag I recognize.

I’m at Stefan and Amy’s house in London.

Stefan is a dear old friend of mine from archaeology who I always visit when I'm in the UK, and he and his fiance Amy came to visit me in Ghana just before I left for South Africa. Anyone who meets in Ghana becomes instantly close as you will see eachother at your worsts -- not having running water to flush the toilets after all three of us were suffering from e.coli, visits to a Ghanaian hospital that lacked proper toilet facilities to cope with our e.coli infections, being attacked in Accra their first 5 minutes in Ghana -- so people naturally form close bonds when meeting under development conditions. Stefy and Amy picked me on Saturday from heathrow after I had been in transit since Thursday, but I still found it easy to galvanise enough energy to sample some the variety of alcohols available in this great country of pubs.

I don’t actually remember going to bed last night, but I did manage to make it to my bed, even putting on my pjs before falling asleep. What time is it? What time did I go to bed? I notice my finger nails are yellow and remember going to a curry house for dinner. The curry was delicious, and I managed to finish Amy’s plate too. We didn’t mean to drink very much yesterday. I think we started at 4pm at the English pub where we drank beer and they served garlic mayo with their chips. Mmmm, chips!

A thought occurs to me: how is my head going to feel when I sit up? I continue to tally up the total alcohol consumption of our evening. We drank 2 rounds at the pub, came home and Amy made white Russians with soy milk. We had bought *soy milk at a store to make *pancakes, and I’d never had a white Russian before so we thought we’d capitalise on the soy milk and make those as well. Amy and I drank a bottle of red wine, and I think that’s when we went for curry, where we drank more beer, and back to the house for – Tequila! Tequila is my death. Then on to the white wine while we watched Shaun of the Dead.

I sit up and try to size up how I feel. I…think…I’m…fine? How can this be? I never drink more than two drinks in a day or I’m shattered the next morning. But wait – I’m not in Africa anymore!

Other signs that I’m not in Africa anymore come from the kitchen where Stefan and Amy have a *selection of teas. In fact, there are choices everywhere. There’s curry, and actual stores rather than vendors on the sides of roads, and varying temperatures in tap water, and there *is tap water, and electricity, and hair dryers. These are all things I also enjoyed in South Africa, but, most importantly, England is cold. So I can accidentally drink irresponsibly again, and wake the next morning without the pounding reminder of the debauchery of the night before.

Welcome back to the temperate world!