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. ...

Snap review of Diwali in Southhall: ohohoh so much fun. Must find way to be in India on Diwali next year.