The suitcase was put away today, the contents having found their way to the spin cycle. I’m still not out of the traveller mindset completely, with many things scattered across my bedroom awaiting proper organisation of some sort. Jet lag appears to have waited for a day, finally catching up yesterday and delivering a right thumping to my ability to stay awake at work. So much has happened over the last 10 weeks at work; while it’s not totally unfamiliar, it’s certainly something of a reset from the comfortable groove I had found myself in before I left for London. I’m re-learning all those little shortcuts that you invariably pick up over time. A couple of faces have gone in the (relatively) short time I was away, which is a little sad. The sun is still up when I leave work, which is awesome, but feels somehow wrong. ...

I’m home, at last. Boy, does it feel good. I think I’ll just lay out on this bed right here and sleeeeeeeeeeeeeep. See ya in the AM.

Perhaps it was the cold, or my friends having left, or maybe it was just one of those days, but it seems like the previous post was an age ago, none of its words entirely relevant anymore… As my train came down on Saturday night from the heights of Milan, I made my first attempt at broken Italian small-talk with the lady in the same cabin as me. She’d talked for most of the journey to another passenger in the cabin, but now that it was just us, for the next hour, I couldn’t well bury my head in my book and ignore everything else. She spoke not a word of English, and I only spoke some phrasebook sentences, concoctions of words that work on paper but never quite roll off your tongue the same way when speaking. Still, I managed to extract that she was from Milan, on vacation and heading to Cannes for a week, explaining that I myself was from Australia, had seen much of Italy over the previous week and from Nice I would be heading to Barcelona. And then the train turned, and the sea appeared out the window. ...

Today, I left Venice and the people I was travelling with for the last week - a fun week. Rome was pleasantly historic, much along the lines of everything I expected it to be. Florence was beautiful, and Pisa pleasant, a sleepy seaside town that just so happened to have one of the iconic monuments of the world. Venice, while living up to nearly every stereotype about it you can imagine, was filled to the brim with tourists; it hardly feels like there’s anything else in the city - I’m at a loss to imagine who actually lives there that isn’t there to serve the tourism industry. Milan is probably the most instantly “modern” city I’ve seen in Italy, and it pleases me in a little way to find ‘modern’ buildings aren’t the exclusive preserve of the American or Asian cities. ...

Ciao from Florence! So I wanted to write a “Last Day in London” post, but things got so hectic that I barely had enough time to check that I had money in my account & leave. The post would have started with something along the lines of The chill of winter is setting in, and the grey ceiling of clouds has all but settled in. I am out of here. ...