I have been looking for another place to live as in another country for some time. For the last 14 years in fact and have travelled as much as I am able and have come up with a myriad of ideas. One such plan was to be a joint venture with one of my mates who is a fitness instructor. We were going to buy a boat and sail around the world. Whilst we had good intentions we had greatly different ideas for how we should go about this. For instance would we want a motor yacht a sail boat or something else? How would we afford it and how would we live once we had set sail on the briny, what we would do for money? The instructor wanted a motor boat so we would not have to struggle with sails while I wanted something that would not stand still on a calm day. I managed to find what I believed to be the ideal vessel in a deep sea trawler and the instructor said “how many birds are we going to pull in that”? I knew then it would never happen, he wanted the blue serge blazer the white linen trousers, the white plimsolls and a captain’s hat with scrambled egg around the peak. I wanted a sack full of beer over the side keeping cool, a pair of shorts, bare feet and just the sun on my back.
Alas due to family commitments I can no longer travel due to the constant care my mother needs. So another friend of mine whom I went to Greece with a few years back to look for property there announced he was going to Croatia. I looked at a few properties on the internet and asked him to scope out the laws, taxes, crime rates and living costs for me while he was there. He was also going to look at a pig farm for me that had a large plot of land a few pigs and a huge industrial barbecue. A couple of nights before he left we finished off a bottle of Absinthe, said our farewells and looked forward to our future prosperity raising pigs and running a barbecue type smokehouse. You just don’t get that sort of thing in the UK. If you go to Austin in Texas and stop by a venue called Stubbs, you will see the sort of place I mean. It’s a smokehouse that serves cold beers and has live music on most nights of the week and Gospel on a Sunday to cater for the church going crowd. There are a couple of places like that in Memphis and New Orleans. Apart from the weather, we just don’t have that type of mentality in the UK.
Well last night the traveller arrived back at my front door with all the news and none of it good. The pig farm had been sold the day he got there, most of the other places he went to see were either falling down or so remote you would not be able to get medical help if it was required. I suppose many of us think of a tropical island with no worries as Paradise. However what do you do for food, power, medical supplies and doctors and communication? Sadly Croatia is for the time being out of contention, however my travelling friend is off to China in the middle of May. I await a full report and who knows, one day it maybe a Texan style restaurant in China it would make a difference from a chinese restaurant in the UK?