I don't want to have to say I want you...

DEFINITION of surreal: having travelled around Europe for the last three months, seeing sights that are famous the world over and others that you don’t see in the younger countries, I’m now back in Brisbane.
Don’t get me wrong: I love Brisbane. My family lives there (with the exception of a brother in Sydney for work), and every time I come back I know there’s a bed, great friends and a cold beer or 36 waiting for me.
What is strange though is coming back to things that are so familiar. Just about everywhere you go in Europe is something different: travel for a few hundred kilometres in any direction on the continent and chances are you’ll end up in a different country with a different culture. Travel the same distance in parts of Australia and you’ll be lucky to find anything.
One thing that did strike me about Australia and Europe is that our wonders are mostly natural. Where in Europe things like the Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge and any of Antonio Gaudi’s works in Barcelona are justifiably famous, with the exception of the Alps I couldn’t think of one natural wonder that would make me come back. Compare that to the variety of natural wonders scattered around Australia: the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, the Tasmanian wilderness and the Daintree rainforest, with the Sydney Opera House the only truly famous Australian building.
Back to coming back home, and mentally your head is in about thirty different places, not least because of that bloody jetlag. There’s always a sense of what if after a trip like this: what if I’d got my working holiday visa straight off, what if I’d stayed longer in London, what if I could pick up signals from girls in pubs and clubs. They have a tendency to haunt you, not least the first-mentioned. You have such a blast over in Europe, meeting more people than you can poke the proverbial stick at, and at the end of it you go back home with only e-mails and phone calls to keep you in touch. If you stayed Europe to work, you never know what could happen…
But these are all what ifs, a past that cannot be changed, decisions that cannot be undone, paths that generally close off once you pick a different one. My path is one that will take me up to Port Douglas shortly, and from there? Who knows.
Should be fun though.

In my head this week: Split Enz Message To My Girl.
One of the many songs about a boy who's scared of telling a girl that he really is rather fond of her. The version sung by Neil Finn on the ENZSO (Split Enz Symphony Orchestra) album is absolutely brilliant - so brilliant it's copped a flogging on the iPod in the last week or so.