The Red Dragon is a travel agent

I go between being fucking pissed off we'll be here for more than another year, and thinking, shit, that ain't long - and the second especially when I encourage myself to carpe diem, and love Belgium for the things that are lovable about it, despite the iniquities and the gross. One thing I love about Belgium arrived in my account within the last few days, and that's that workers in my bracket or classification or what have you get 14 months salary, one of the extra months payable at the end of May - just cuz. Aside from any company bonuses, which we also get.

It's awesome. The Claeys formula, the indexed salaries, the unlimited sick days, the five weeks holiday, the nom-dom taxation status - my savings have never been so happy and sometimes I need to go through those things and remind myself I wasn't an absolute assbrain when I decided to move to this puddle. The money and the benefits don't even bear comparison to Canada. I don't think I'll look back in ten years and ask myself what I was thinking over these years. But we'll see. A lot of it depends on what sort of weather rolls out over the next 14 months, to be quite honest with you.

The further consequence of the shit, that ain't long line of thinking is how some of that money - a proportion I try to keep small, so I can walk away with most of it - will go to travelling over the next little while. Four of my five weeks of vacation are happening this summer and I'm trying to soak every work excursion I can out of the rest of the year. A great deal of this summer, however, is repeats - I'll be heading home for a couple of weeks, and back to Portugal (although a different part of it than the last two times) - so here's list of the places I haven't been yet that I dearly want to see within the next year or so:

- Croatian coast (already scheduled)
- Turkish coast (already scheduled)
- Alhambra and Madrid, Spain
- Rif Mountains, Morocco
- Egypt, desert and old thngs
- Copenhagen
- Greek islands, in the non-vomitous-limey season

And some returns:

- Vienna, for cheese strudel (already scheduled)
- Yorkshire, to spend some more time with family
- Florence, for tattoo pattern
- Calabria, to spend some more time with family
- Finland, for kayaking
- Barcelona, just because I really want to

The list is long but not impossible. If I don't get the transfer I want when I give notice, we can take a couple of months after I stop working to knock any incompletes off the list. Scandinavia, and that includes Yorkshire, we can do all in one two or three week go after the F-word finishes school next year, and benefit from some 24 hour days. Something we'll have to start planning now or it will be prohibitively expensive. Calabria we can get in with Greece - Rif Mountains and Spain . . . it will take juggling but we can do it. I'm hoping to get a day or two stopover in for Florence on my way to Vienna - it's just a matter of going up to San Miniato and eating some chocolate ice cream in Fiesole; not to sound like a philistine, but I was in Florence for about a year and it's not really fair for me to keep on taking up space in the Uffizi or what have you when so many others need a turn.