11,25-12.00 AM, breakfast on the pier, Kitee summer house, eastern Finland

• bread from a local bakery, with cheese
• rye bread, with cheese
• 2 kiwis
• 1 orange
• plain yoghurt, with wild blueberries and mysli
• orange juice
• mint tea

All things come to an end. Except those that go in circles. And what we did during the last 10 and half months was kind of a circle. So let's just call this a pause.

We wish to leave you (for now) with a quote from a book we got from a travel companion (Thank you Alistair!) on the ferry from Osaka to Shanghai. It's called The Old Patagonian Express, written by Paul Theroux.

"Meanwhile, what of the journey itself? Perhaps there is nothing to say. There is not much to say about most aeroplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the aeroplane passenger is a time-traveller. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time-zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright - from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, 'What I'd really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.' [...] Although it has become the way of the world, we still ought to lament the fact that aeroplanes have made us insensitive to space; we are encumbered, like lovers in suits of armour.

This is obvious. What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing."