72. NEXT INSTALMENT

Write, Click, Recover.

What a ride:   Time for a recap before my next big adventure.

From the pits in Nepal where I spent two months, cold and miserable, lean, hungry, angry, alone.  To traipsing around Morocco, Turkey, England and Italy, huge smile plastered across my face. To the absurd disbelief that I'd miraculously landed a several months gig working as a jewellery designer in Venice.  Yes, Venice. That One.  Mysterious. Inscrutable. Ancient.  My New Home.  Sigh. 

There is no where else anywhere on earth I would rather be than here, right now.

If you had asked me what I wanted most in my life at this juncture ... it would be this. Io sono eccitato. I have enrolled at the language school, Institute di Venezia.  I have an apartment near a canal.  I have the world at my muddy feet.

I will be working with and living under the generosity of two wonderful people - Giorgio and Sylvia, whom I met by a series of serendipitous events over the past few months.  If I could try to imagine anything more wonderful for this stage of my life ... I'd fail.

I have no idea what the next months will unveil ... but five months ago, in Nepal, I wrote the same thing and a world of adventures are between then and now.  I am alive, happy, putting on weight, and my fingers are bruised from all my wood touchings.

I think all this would make a great film - Write, Click, Recover!  What do you think? Anyone know any producers out there?

I am currently in Sydney preparing for this next stage. Stay tuned. And keep up with me with comments, support, laughter and love.  Bling, bling, anyone home?

So a catchup:  I arrive 1st September in Venice. My apartment is all set to receive me!  Sylvia and Giorgio are excited about my coming and said they don't know why I am bothering to go to language school because judging by my emails to them, my Italian is excellent.  The secret is that I have used Google translate!  So I start at the Institute di Venezia on 6th September.  Five days a week, and a cultural activity every day to facilitate the process.

I'm also learning at home with a fantastic free program I downloaded from the internet, with advanced upgrade for a fee,  called BYKI. I'm learning repetitively like a child learns a language and somehow it's sticking in my long term memory.   Instead of learning one to ten and Monday to Saturday in order, so you have to mumble through until you get the word you want, everything is jumbled, and then in the middle the program throws in a rogue word like il scarafaggio.   So far it's my favourite word. It means cockroach.  Hope there aren't too many in Venice!