Break Over

To my faithful readers:

You may have noticed that I haven't posted too much since I returned from China three weeks ago. Please accept my apologies for this lapse. As it turns out, travelling nearly constantly for three months is exhausting. You may have seen in the Final Statistics post that I averaged less than 34 hours in each city. In each city I had to research, locate, and eat the most representative local street food, plan my itinerary for the next few stops, buy train tickets, find Couch Surfing hosts, and find time to sleep. All within those 34 hours before jumping on the train for my next city. Imagine doing that on repeat for three straight months through 53 cities without the regular restorative benefits of free weekends and evenings you would get from a standard 9 - 5 job and you will have a sense of what this was like. These are not complaints, of course. I chose this path for myself and have no regrets about my hectic schedule. That being said, it was more tiring than I expected. I had planned to give myself a week of rest before beginning to work in earnest on my book. It seems, though, my body and brain wanted a little bit more than that. With no firm deadline for book completion breathing down my neck, I decided to ease into things at whatever rate felt natural to my brain and body. So here we are three weeks later. I am feeling rested and able once again to focus on Chinese street food. I expect there will be more regular posts these coming weeks. Thanks to all for bearing with me during this resting period. I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.

Your friend,
Frank

Adjusting

It's probably clear by this point that I've never written a blog before. I am adjusting, but the writing style doesn't come naturally to me. To put it differently, concision is not my strong suit. I need to channel my inner Raymond Carver and focus on economy of verbiage. Practice makes perfect, I hear, so it's fortunate that there will be much practicing in the future for me. In the meantime, thank you for bearing with me through some of these long posts.

Worth Channeling