Find myself a city, find myself a city to live in

It's a dangerous business going travelling. There's a fair chance that, if you even vaguely enjoy it, you'll catch the notorious travel bug - after all, other places are always so much more interesting than home, whatever Dorothy and the Wizard might want us to believe. And yes, sure enough, I caught that bug, along with a few others, while in China for two weeks. The holiday was too short to really do the country justice, often just giving me glimpses of what could be an amazing place to explore more (albeit with improved Mandarin), and also reminding me of other, nearby places (Mongolia, Nepal, South Korea) that I'd also love to see. Ah, if only we could do nothing but travel.

Which, of course, we can't, much as the British girls I met climbing the Wall might like to believe differently. Yet even they recognised that there was a difference between the kinds of places it would be fun to visit and the sorts of places where you could handle living - because, at the end of the day, we can't always travel; we do also need some kind of home.

In many senses, my home has become Melbourne. I've almost been here for seven years, which is the equal record for the longest I've ever lived in the one place. I like it here, and it seems to like me, as much as a place can, and I've got family here. It's important for me to be near family and friends, and, much as I love the idea of travelling, I doubt I could uproot and spend the rest of my life somewhere else.

That said, I am finding myself increasingly attracted to the idea of teaching overseas for a year or two, yet don't want to do so just for the hell of it. Too many people want to live overseas for the wrong motives: because they find their own lives boring and suspect they'll be more interesting elsewhere. My Year 12 Literature class have learnt from Chekhov that an attitude of "life will be better in Moscow" (or any city/country/place) is based on a fundamental inability to be happy where you are: something that will plague you wherever you go.

If I do work overseas, I want it to be for the right motives, not because I am easily bored and want to escape into another culture to feel like my life is somehow now more exciting. Other people's lives are not there to be stolen for our own pleasure. Other people's homes are not there to be invaded to help us feel more alive.

We can learn from going somewhere else. We can benefit from travelling, even living, overseas; and, on the right occasion, others can benefit from us doing so. But we have to remember: everywhere we go, short of Antarctica, is someone's home, and so everywhere we visit, someone has to make do with life there, boring as it may well seem to them. Which means that, when we go overseas, we need to be going there with a view to making life sustainable - either in settling down in another place, or in coming back home having benefited from what we experienced.

I'm not sure how to do that yet. But I suspect it's something I'll spend quite a bit of time thinking about.

Back, Babydoll

Not really jet-lagged - the two hour time difference between Melbourne and Beijing time has hardly thrown me at all. But the overnight flight with some reasonably crap, neck-destroying sleep has left me pretty out of it for this, my first day back in the country - and a full day at that, which I'm trying to get through without sleeping. Let's see how I go.

No coherent thoughts on the trip yet, but I can offer photos for the visually inclined among you. Some will feature here over time, but right now you can check them out at www.flickr.com/photos/photosfromthenorth. I've only uploaded the first couple of days so far, but there'll be plenty more to come.