Log> Slowed down

It's not worth doing anything until you're in a hurry.

Following my motto, I've been putting off important stuff to do back home until the last minute. Excellent. I don't like being in a hurry, but there is something electrifying about 'having to do' things. But it has been very good to just slow down. Not do anything.

The Battlelore tour starts in a week. I still need one jab, a few flights booked - and may create a website for an idea I had for keeping tabs on my travel.

I've been reading up quite a bit on the places I'll be going to (except for the ones I'll be going to first, for some reason), and just when I ran out of recommendations and leads from friends to check out, I met an old acquaintance in a Helsinki kebab shop, who had just spent 2 years in Singapore working and traveling the better part of SE Asia - cue Michele.

Just now I got to the last post of his actual trip: arrival by train to Lappeenranta, a small town close to Russia. I'm writing this in Lappeenranta at my dad's place, and this is where I grew up. And fittingly, the first paragraph of his post echoes an old premonition: all travel is meaningless if one has no place to return to.

And what would that place be for me? London was a home for some years, but I can't imagine it to extend a warm welcome after a year or two away. Helsinki I've never actually lived in but it feels welcoming, and there are a lot of ties there. Any of these smaller Finnish cities are a slow stranglehold, even Lappeenranta, although the ties here are very strong - that, partially, makes the thought of returning here that bit repulsive. Yet somehow even returning to Helsinki feels like a concession. I may still need to find a place to return to, though that will not happen in the next week.

At the same time I've unpacked practically everything I brought with me here, at my dad's mansion. Alone the books I've gathered somewhere else and shipped back here now fill four meters of shelf space. Damn them books. I know I'll need to get rid of some of them, eventually, when it'll be clear I'll die before I can finish them all. Til then, not worth doing anything until I'm in a hurry.