Long-lasting brief trips

         What??? Long-lasting or brief? Well..., both in fact! Don't frown like that, let me explain it. Have you ever took a vacation for just a few days, but in your mind it lasted much longer as you remembered it with great fondness?

        This happens mainly with those first trips on your own. I have a pair of good examples:

      My mother's holiday in Schwitzerland
             
             Today, my mum was silent with her typical dreamy smile... So I said: You're in Schwitzerland in this very moment, right? 
- How do you know it?
- Your face speaks for you! :)

          She was there this october just for 12 days to visit my brother and his, by that time, girlfriend. Well, her vacation began the day she knew she was going... Immediately afterwards, started looking for a cheap flight to Milan, then going shopping and deciding what kind of clothes she might need there, wondering what to give them as a present to thank them for putting her up... Even the search of a good suitcase was made with utter eagerness. And once she found it, it was ready almost one week before the departure day!

         No, no, guys! Don't raise your eyebrows like that. Her behaviour wasn't odd at all, ultimately that was her first time doing a lot of things. Her first:
* True holiday.
* Time abroad.
* Flight.
* Time alone for so many days.
* Try to speak and understand a different language. (She's really proud of being capable of going to the supermarket in Lugano and buying all the things she needed) Even now she often asks: Do you guess how "X" is called in italian?  :) That's why I use to say that her brief vacation is being a long-lasting one, as at times she still seems to be there! Her thoughts are always there! She really enjoyed it before it had started, while it was going on and even now, so many months later!

           My english course in Kettering, England



Stratford-upon-Avon

               Its real length was just one month... But I could hardly sit down with anticipation during the two preceding months! And, like my mother, after coming back I would be always going on about it, because that trip was  full of first times too (I was just 17):
* 1st time alone on my own for one whole month.
* 1st vacation.
* 1st time abroad.
* 1st time speaking English almost all day
* I had never met so many people from so many different places...

(No, not that first time you're thinking of! Don't be gossip!!)

        We can make many more trips to amazing places, but admittedly none of them will be quite the same, won't them? For one thing, first times only happen once!!