Hi! Thanks for checking in, I’ve moved to Dublin. I’ll be here until Oct. 2, when I’m flying to Cairo. That'll be my base for at least three months. In the second half of October, I’ll head to Syria, where I’ve arranged to visit this archaeological excavation up near the Turkish border, on the steppes in the eastern part of the country. Tell Sabi Abyad was a Late Bronze Age military and trade outpost of the Assyrian Empire, on the border facing the Hittite Empire. Don’t ask how all this fell into place. It just did.

I plan to blog in the meantime. I’m not sure about what, but please continue to check in. I’m staying in a house in the southern Dublin suburb of Churchtown, if you’re interested.

It’s been one hell of a week, with all the goodbyes, giving away all my furniture and all the crap I’ve collected during nine years in Prague. I realized that despite an increasingly urgent “gotta get outta here” attitude over the last – well, actually, at least the last two years – living in the Czech Republic was actually a helluva lot of fun.

I was way over the luggage weight limit at the airport and had to send one entire huge suitcase back to a friend’s apartment via taxi. Czech Airlines wanted me to pay over CZK 5,000 ($200) for the 14 extra kilos. As if!

I had a moment of clarity when I ripped opened the suitcase and thought, “OK, how much stuff here do I really really need?” The answer, of course, was practically nothing. So I'm living out of a backback. In hindsight, it would have been nice to have brought that new suit.

Sucks to be in New Orleans, by the way.