D-7

This time next week I'll be in China. Sort of a scary thought! The trip is finally happening, no turning back now. I'm looking at my bed here and it's covered in clothes to take back up to dublin with me, and two big-ass bags to put them in. I'm not sure how much of this stuff I'll actually be taking yet, but my plan is to bring two bags with me, one full and one half-full. On the way back then, the half-full one can be stuffed with pressies. Not sure what my weight allowance is tho, seeing as I'll have 10kg of laptop with me too!

I had my last night out in waterford last night anyway. I was thinking it's going to be sort of wierd not going to Geoffs for like 11 weeks, but then I realised that it won't be that unprecedented. I mean, last year there were stretches of nearly two months where I didn't go out there either, between me travelling and the weekends where none of the others wer going out and I didn't fancy the €30 taxi fare home if I was pretty much heading out on mny own. Can't remember the last time I was out in The Forum actually. So, it's not like I'll be missing a huge chunk of my life there! Didn't end up going ther last night either, as one of the lads has recently re-entered the world of singledom and didn't really fancy it. I dind't mind, it's not like I was out on the pull or anything anyway (not that it makes a difference to the end result whether I'm on the pull or not!).

It's sort of strange tho, it seems that everyone else is more excited about me going than I am! I've been getting all sorts of advice on what to buy when I'm there (pearls and jade are the big things, apparently), what to eat, where to go see and all that. I'm not really thinking that far ahead yet, I'm just planning on getting there, getting settled in with work and then evaluating my options from there. It's almost strange tho, that I'm not as excited about it as ppl seem to think I should be. Then again, Ive never been the jumping-up-and-down-screaming type of person anyway. About the only time I rememeber having the "can't sleep with the anticipation" type thing is when I was going to italy the first time, which was pretty much my first big holiday away from home without parental supervision. Possibly had a litle bit of it too when I was going to Poland back in '00, but then again the whole still thinking I was in love with Andrea thing was probably a factor there too (one of my big all-time regrets is lacking the cojones to actually do anything about it on that trip).

Anyway, I think a lot of ppl are hearing that I'm going for 2 months and are sort of thinking of it as a 2-month holiday, but the only "holiday time" I'll really have will be the weekends. I'm defintely not going to make the same mistake we made in california when we were there for 6 weeks! Then, we were just hanging around for most of the weekends, thinking "ah, we have plenty of time to do the tourist thing", then suddenly we realise "crap, we only have one weekend left and we still have to do the pressie shopping for the people back home!" I'm not saying we did nothing, but we could have done more - we never got to go to Alcatraz for example. This trip, I'm dropping my bags off in the apartment and heading straight out!

Anyway, time to go back to the packing.......