What's strange and foreign for you might just be home for me.

Me and the boy are off to Noo Zulland on Sunday for another frenetic round of family and friends and decent cafe indulging. We decided a few weeks ago that it was time to do it, hopped online, got our tickets and called in the dog-sitter. When we go we will only take hand luggage with (and a few plastic bags for the mountains of my favourite breakfast cereal that will be coming back with us).

But one of the Oztralians from the office is also going there in a month or so, and another Oz mate is there at the moment. The office mate has been planning her week at a conference in Christchurch for months - flight bookings and accommodation through an agent, travel insurance yadda yadda yadda. The mate that is there now emailed me 2 weeks before she left to ask if Noo Zulland has the same power supply and plugs as Oztrailer! (the answer is 'yes you bleeding idiot' BTW).

So that got me thinking in a minimalist non-theoretical way about what is foreign to us - I am off to Vietnam again in late June and have been planning for yonks - travel insurance, travel plugs, guidebooks, visa etc etc etc. But my mate whose family lives there is just as likely to do what I do with Noo Zulland and grab a ticket at short notice and pop over.

Now if I was Hammy or Tezza I would probably start raving about globalisation and shrinking worlds and conceptions of the 'other' and probably some social inequality (if I was Hammy) for good measure.

But I couldn't care less cos' I'm going on holiday!

And what's more, I'm going 'home' - where people pronounce the letter 'H' properly, don't drive like they're on a pedestrian assasination mission, have a decent version of the warehouse instead of the anemic piece of crap they have here and where you would get slapped if you asked for a Chicken Parmigiana in a decent cafe (and they're all decent!).

Rose tinted glasses? Hell yes! But it's my blog and there's nothing you can do about it :-)

See ya in a week!