Over the past few years, I’ve become more conscious of a gulf between me and most of my other friends. Here in Hong Kong, travel tastes always correlate with proximity: Taiwan, Japan and Thailand are always more popular than Europe, Arabia or the Americas. My family (both close members and those of more tenuous relation) are no exception; every few months I hear of another family member jetting off to Chiang Mai or Taipei or Seoul or a dozen other places in Japan that people seem to never get enough of. Among my acquaintances, those who head farther afield are usually starry-eyed youths with a lot of time and money on their hands, or retirees with even more time and money on their hands (and a Facebook feed to nourish).
To some extent I get it: these places are familiar, fun and welcoming, which is what you want when you’re a full-time worker with not much time to plan for trips. Having been in the Hong Kong workforce for some years now, I am aware of just how tempting those places might seem: when one goes on holiday, one just wants to relax and unwind their high-strung brain. With our twelve or so precious days of leave, there is simply no time to intricately plan for new experiences in far-flung lands, not when the mere act of travel already provides much exhaustion. But I still think it would be nice for people to stop talking about how much they’d like to visit places other than Japan, pack up their stuff, and actually go somewhere else for once. And it was in this spirit that I suggested the trip you shall read about in the next ten weeks.
Having successfully convinced my family to potter around Europe with me, the next problem was choosing places to visit. The original plan was to do a tour in southern Europe — Istanbul, a run up to Bulgaria, then a drop back down to Athens, a grand tour of three epic cultures. This was scuppered somewhat by the revelation that the Sofia-Thessaloniki train is not running for some reason (these Europeans with their territorial disputes, you’d never catch my sort in anything like this); so gradually my mind turned to a second, safer option, and that is the itinerary I shall unfold in the following blogs. At some point our plans also included the Italian city of Turin; I felt that ten days of staring at the Mediterranean would lose its appeal after a while, and anyway I’d heard lovely things about Piedmont. However, the unavailability of a certain family member (whom I am loath to name because he reads my blog from time to time) scuppered these plans as well; but as it turned out, the four places we visited on this trip were MORE than enough.
So I hope you join me over the next ten weeks as I try to convey, with an exhausting level of detail and rubbish philosophising, just how packed with fun our little trip was. There were quite a few people who warned me that family trips would be a pain in the arse to plan and execute, but I certainly wish that this little glimpse into our family dynamics can demonstrate the other side of the coin as well. See you next Friday, and I hope you like what you see!
