Sorry for my absence over the last few weeks I've been on holiday! I meant to make a post before I left but between moving back home and getting ready to leave things got a little manic and I ran out of time.
The holiday itself was wonderful! I went with my family on a cruise around the Mediterranean; we started in Venice and over 12 days travelled to various ports in Italy, Croatia, mainland Greece, the Greek islands and Turkey. I'd not been to any of these countries before and although we were never in one place for more than a day it was great to get to see so many landscapes and cultures in quick succession. I'd definitely like to go back to many of the places we saw - Dubrovnik, Venice, Rome and Santorini were particularly beautiful and I'd really like to explore more of them. Not only were the locations very aesthetically pleasing but they're so full of fascinating history. I haven't studied ancient history since I was about 12 and it's not a period of history that I'm usually very drawn to but wandering around Rome and Athens and in particular Ephesus it's hard not to be drawn in by these histories which are at once so very distant and yet so present.
Between all the sightseeing, the family time (we did the trivia quiz everyday and my years of indulging in pop culture finally paid off when we won the entertainment trivia!) and the eating (the food was AMAZING!) I didn't get as much reading done as I thought I would - I only finished 3 books but I did learn to crochet! I'm hoping to have a granny square blanket for this winter!
I have a couple of posts in the pipeline - in the next week or so I'm hoping to review the books I read while I was away and post my monthly round-up and I'm also planning to make a post about reading fiction as a historical source - but I have 25,000 words to write before the end of August so it might be a little over-optimistic to expect much more than that! When I'm writing I find it difficult to concentrate on fiction so I'm hoping to use any downtime over the next few weeks to reread a few of my favourite series that I haven't revisited in a while starting with the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series (I've been meaning to do it for a while and being in the Greek islands only made the urge stronger!) I probably won't be posting about the books individually but I might do a re-read round-up in the autumn.
No comments:
Post a Comment