Darkness. The door to my block of flats clanged shut in its latch leaving me standing in the cold winter rain whilst the early morning commuters sloshed past on their way to nowhere. Me? I was on my way to somewhere although to where, I wasn't exactly sure.
I needed out and an Erasmus programme had handed me a golden ticket. 18 months of physical stagnation since my last travels had left me yearning for a new angle on the world. However much I surrounded myself with guidebooks, photo-books, maps and other paraphernalia of the travel persuasion it hadn't quenched the wanderlust eating away inside me. Blaise Pascal wrote "Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death". He was right, it was time to move.
Light. The early morning sun burst above the cloud base and suddenly, spectacularly, everything was blue. Half an hour later and below me the clouds started to break up, thinned and then disappeared completely. I was flying over the Pyrenees, vast, white and wonderful. A physical, impenetrable barrier of rock and ice. There was no going back. I was in deep.The plane began its descent, banked out over the mediterranean, twinkling in this otherworldly light, leveled towards the coast and touched down in what I thought would be my home for the next 3 months, Valencia.
As the taxi made inroads to the old city centre I wound down the window and trailed my arm in the warm morning air. I was surrounded by light, a light I'd never seen. A light to live in, to play in, to be inspired by. A seemingly inexhaustible supply of the stuff for me and me alone.
