back home...

it's strange to wake up at home after 5 weeks around, although i will be sleeping in rome tonight, and changing this frequently keeps me alive...maybe i should have planned to be here a couple of days, i don't know...because now i have so much to do and so little time...
anyway, my way back home was nice. from vilnius, lithuania i took a bus to gdansk, poland. i stayed in sopot, a nice polish beach resort, for one night, got to visit there and then have a full day in gdansk, which is beautiful i think...full of tall, skinny houses that remind me very much of a port on the baltic sea, not too dissimilar from hamburg, germany for example...but gdansk is much prettier! ah, my host G took me to a microsoft convention she was attending in the center...haha since the convention was in polish i just went for the free breakfast and showed up a few hours later for the free lunch...so it was nice! getting back to bratislava from gdansk was a little complicated and i had to pay way too much for a train ticket, because it was an international one...so i went to warsaw at night, waited there for an hour, got on a train to wien, although i only went as far as breclaw, in czech republic on the border with slovakia...and from there i took my final train to bratislava, which welcomed my last day of travel with quite some rain...i still managed to watch the quarterfinals there and it was fun...it always seems to be full of drunk brits, but i am a tourist too after all so whatever...i also met an australian guy who was going there for the weekend to write about the stupidity of the movie "hostel"...i haven't seen it, only bits and pieces at somebody's house in poland, but i have to say it seemed pretty nonsense, totally unrealistic and simplistic...but i could see some people buy into it...
ok, tonight it's rome where i will be for about 2 weeks teaching to some SMU students, and then we're going to tuscany for about 5 days, and we're ending it up in bologna for the last 10 days...should be fun, i won't be posting as much because i am not technically really traveling...but yeah.
my wonderful host T in bratislava suggested i look into submitting my travel pictures to some magazine or online something about travel photography, so as soon as i get to look at the pictures i will be giving it a shot...if anybody is reading this and has an idea, feel free to bring up suggestions...