Big day today … For my niece at least. She's on a flight to Istanbul and then after a couple of days there will be going on to Bangkok. Huge adventure! She plans to travel around south-east Asia for several months (or until she runs out of money, presumably). At first she will be travelling with a friend but the other girl apparently needs to go home sooner.
I guess this is not as big a deal today as it would have been when I was her age – we have the Internet and mobile phones and giving off signs of life every so often, with instant delivery rather than air-mail delays. Still, I'm not sure my parents would have been keen on the idea. We used to go off on Inter-Rail holidays for three or four weeks at most, in a large(ish) group of people with carefully planned itineraries and pre-booked youth hostel stays (oh for the International Reply Coupon! Those were the days), but a solo trip of indeterminate length to the other end of the world? No way, José. So, good for her that she gets to do it! Anyway, my niece is one smart young lady and a fairly experienced traveller for her age, and I'm pretty sure she's sufficiently street-savvy to handle pretty much anything short of armed insurrection. Of course, having grown up bi-lingual, she's fluent in English so that should help, too.
(I'm also tickled pink that she's taking the Olympus E-M10 II camera I gave her a few years ago. I was sort-of assuming she'd want to save the weight and take pictures on her mobile instead, as young people do, but apparently this seems to be important to her. Nice.)
In unrelated news, the other day I finished my materials for the Easter workshop at the Kuckucksnest and sent them off to Akiko and Kana in Japan. I've now heard back from them and they seem to like what they're seeing. I suspect we're going to have a lot of fun together! Today I spent some time scanning the original dance descriptions so I won't need to carry a huge stack of books. It's nice to do this with lots of time to spare, and I'm looking forward to trying a few of the dances in Frankfurt first.