New Beginning

I picked up our clothes at the laundromat, a concept that baffles and amuses my Serbian mind, bought some touch too greasy chineese food and came home. I sat down to eat at our new laptop, cheked my e-mail for news from back home or potential employers and looked out the wet window onto the misty Manhattan skyline in the distance. I realized that despite of our temporarry accomodation and current lack of income I now feel sufficiently at home to have a quiet moment and start writing again. In the next few days I'll post a couple of short texts about the last two weeks in New York, our impressions of the city from a new perspective, about the food, about the people, a short trip to Boston and the seemingly impossible quest to find a decent cheap apartment.
After that we will resume regular blogging.
If anyone is still reading, thanks for your patience.

Absence

The day I went to pick up my visa was the hottest in recorded meteorological history of Serbia. As I stepped off the sidewalk onto one of the busiest streets in Belgrade a gust of thick hot wind hit my body and I realized looking up the empty street that the city was deserted.
Absence seems to be my key word of this summer. The empty streets, a summer full of events which I missed because I was busy, the absent friends that I didn’t get to properly say goodbye to. I’ve been absent from this blog for a while, because I couldn’t find the time to write and I’ve been generally absent-minded for months, finding it difficult to do any work because I knew I was leaving, and as difficult to prepare for leaving, because I wasn’t sure it was really going to happen until the last minute.
Well, I am leaving. We’re leaving. Tomorrow morning Ivan and I will be on our way to New York. We have done so much and there are still so many unknowns. I don’t know how I feel. Everybody around me keeps crying. We’ll be back next summer for a few weeks. I know this is what we wanted and I am happy, but I’ve never been away from everything I know. So far away. For so long.
I ‘m going to stop now before I start to cry.