I reflect on on my absence from my personal blog while in Colombo for work, recalling a previous visit twenty years ago / In questa riflessione, nata durante un viaggio di lavoro a Colombo, ripenso alla mia lunga assenza dal blog e al ricordo di una mia precedente visita di vent'anni fa.
Your journey
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeipAazOGZo&w=560&h=315]
Ha Noi. One month. I look from the window of my office at the 12th floor of the Vietnam Academy for Social Sciences. Hi see high rising buildings that are being built all around the town. I hear the beat of the town, the ten of thousands of motorbikes and the car of this town which has about 2ml inhabitants. The sky has been gray most of the time. It is winter time and as […]
We came back from Italy. Just one week outside Finland. We came back and the snow was gone. Roads are now clean. The park nearby our falt is now cleared and soon it will become green again. Olga can play in the sand and run. She has to wear less clothes and this makes things easier for her. I like this time of the year in this country. Everything is like weaking up after a […]
“If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know who you are”. This is an old saying that I suppose has been coined by travellers long time ago. The need to keep a link with one own place, to feel roots and identity is in human nature. For some more than others, but it is there. I am thinking about this while in Bangkok, waiting for the taxi to pick us up and […]
So we left Cambodia. In these four years I have often thought about an article I red while I was in the preparation course with DED in Berlin in the summer of 2001. The article was written by an Italian doctor who had worked in Battambang at the hospital of Emergency, an Italian NGO. He wrote about his feeling while sitting at the departure hall of Phnom Penh airport: relief. Relief after the hard work […]
It is nice to be back in Cambodia. Heavy monsoon clouds have greeted us here in Kampong Thom. Warm rain is falling this afternoon, trees are shaking with the wind and the fields have become finally green now that farmers are planting the new rice. At the exit from Pochentong airport yesterday evening the dump warm air filled me its tropical-Asia-flavour. I kind feel at home as here is where we have the house and […]
An Italian journalist who lived for more than twenty years in Asia once wrote that traveling and living abroad makes you tired, it makes you older. After three and half years in Cambodia I start to believe that this is true. I feel a bit tired, though I am not sure I feel older yet. Signs of this tiredness are more evident after a trip to another country, having the opportunity to observe another way […]
It may be true: life becomes more serious the more we grow older. Work commitments make us have more responsibilities and have less time to enjoy time for ourselves or with our friends. Moreover distance may come in between and we live more apart from friend and family. I myself live far away from family and friends and though I have made new friends living far away, I miss the friends back home and the […]