Sunny Spain

Tomorrow I'm going to Madrid to learn Spanish for two weeks. It's a bit of a test run for us, a short period away from home - then back to catch up with my family, then holidays in Sardinia, then back for boring training, then the real live away-from-home experience, moving to Teguc. I cried this evening when I was packing, when my ipod played Here by Pavement. The one that starts, "I was dressed for success". Simp's song.

I still haven't quite worked out what I want to do with this blog. I've always held that I read blogs to keep up with faraway people. Like this one. And this one. So this is partly so that people know what I'm doing and where I am. But blogs are necessarily riven with self-censorship - I can't tell you which good friends are driving me crazy, or the failings of the particular NGO I work for... things that would end up in a journal if it wasn't published. What in god's name is the point of a public diary? Shazzle is of the opinion that it's about describing your life as you'd like it to be - thus reinforcing that imaginary life... but I'm not good at not wearing my heart on my sleeve.
Simp, meanwhile, feels that a blog is a functional, sharing thing. Somewhere to point out things that passed under the radar. Like boing boing or the huffington post. Simp's blog does that - shares snippets on his beliefs and experience in Dublin and the wider interweb.
I'd like to make a combination. I want to think about development, and poverty, and ex-patism. I did before in Central America, and I kept a journal which is by far my only literary achievement to date. I'd like to make this the online version.

So it won't be tech-savvy, and it may not be as honest or as informative as you might like at times. But I'll work it out.

In the interim, pues, hasta la proxima...