Final post

The Final Blog

I’m back. I met my family at the arrivals of Glasgow International Airport at about 1 o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday 18th August, 2013, and so nearly concluded (I still have a debrief to attend on Coll next week) a very formative and very enjoyable period of my life so far.

The journey back was trouble free. We flew from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai, then Dubai to Gatwick and finally I flew from Gatwick to Glasgow. The journey actually felt very short – despite the selection of films on the flights being thoroughly average. But given that our average journey time between places of interest in Malaysia was about 10 hours, a couple of 7 hour plane journeys were nothing.

Seeing my family again was brilliant. I was met at the airport by my mum, my dad, my gran and two of my brothers (one of whom has grown up so much this past six months he could be a different person!). The reunion wasn’t emotional (thankfully) and in fact returning home hasn’t actually been as big a deal as I had anticipated. It feels like I haven’t been away in a lot of ways. But I’m very glad to be back.

Mid year I would have taken a ticket home almost instantly had it been offered, but as the time goes on at your project you become less and less aware that you’re away from home. All the little things you miss like the food, the weather and the myriad of other idiosyncrasies you find are lacking in your life become much less significant. However what is excellent is seeing the people you’ve missed. I think eventually feeling so at home and welcome in what was, at first, a very foreign community and feeling so pleased at seeing your family and friends again goes to show that it’s the people that really make a place what it is.

I’ve enjoyed eating square sausage, fish and chips and all the other fried scottish things since I’ve been back which have been very nice. The weather is greyer here, but not as cold as I expected. Its brilliant to be surrounded by the Scottish accent again. Not too much has changed but you do notice little things that are new, every now and again. Like the huge new row of shops opposite Buchanan galleries.

I haven’t actually got too much to say about being back. As I said it’s not been too big a deal or too much of a readjustment. Im glad about this because it means I can just get back into the everyday routine here and the briefness of the ‘wow’ factor at returning means I’m looking forward to university, getting a job and seeing all my friends again. I’m not terribly sad about being away from Besut and Malaysia; I suppose it just felt that it was about time we came home. But I suspect that as time passes here I’ll start to miss the project a lot more, the brilliant people I met there, and travelling around in a very different part of the world.

So…where too next?