Dear readers, welcome

To travel is to learn and to realise just how much you know nothing. Stay curious. Avoid indifference and apathy as if they were a disease.Because in a way, they are. They sap the human being of all wonder, the desire to discover and seek knowledge, of what, in simpler words, makes life beautiful. And it leaves you with four walls, a bed and room service. Is that how anyone would want to spend their life? Given the golden opportunity to travel widely, is that how you would want to spend those few precious hours in a country you have only ever visited on TV or maybe in your dreams?I did not think so.Before launching into anything that attempts to be philosophical, I believe an introduction is in order. My name is Roberta and I come from the beautiful island of Malta. Having been away for more than 4 months have made me realise what a veritable gem I have as a home. I truly feel proud when people ask me where I’m from and I put on a grin and say MALTA .. not Molte but MALTA, in that Mediterranean accent I’ve come to miss. But I’m getting carried away like I normally do when I speak of home. More on that later.I’m a twenty something year old and I work as Cabin Crew for Emirates, have been so for the past four months or so. I joined and moved to Dubai on the 9th of August, after much thinking, over-thinking, crying, arguing, and so on and so forth. When you have spent all your life living in a small country, in a tiny village in the south, where all your friends and family are within a 30 minute radius, when you have a good stable job and when you lack nothing really… well I’ll let you do the math. It wasn’t easy. The decision to leave everything and just go took some time to get used to. But happen it did. I knew, deep down, that if I had refused it, I would have regretted it forever. For one thing, it is extremely difficult to get the job. The selection process is quite .. challenging, for want of a better word. Only around 4% of those who submit their application in effect get chosen. It is also a job which offers something few other jobs on Earth do. A glimpse into other worlds, other times, other people. It is something which I find truly fascinating. It fills me up with something which is hard to describe. Like a child being presented with something he’s wanted for a long time. The wonder. The magic of it. It is magnificent. I’m a very sensitive person and travelling touches something in me, similar to the way books have a tendency to lose me in their worlds. And I do not say this lightly. Of course, that’s not the job. Of course, you have to meet standards, serve the food, be friendly and patient. Very patient. But the rewards you reap are priceless.I had an argument with a friend back home the other day. She told me I had run away. I frowned at this. I hadn’t run away! I had a good life back home, But I wanted a challenge, to learn to be more independent, to see the world and get paid for it. Running away sounded bad and I didn’t like it. And that’s my flaw. When I don’t like something, when something sounds wrong to my ears I close down and turn defensive (you learn a lot about yourself when you live alone, by the way). Then I came across this article. And the more I read, the more my eyes widened. It was like I had written the thing and I realised that I had truly run away. Don’t get me wrong, I was not oppressed or unhappy. I just felt that at that time in my life, I needed to be somewhere else, doing something else.  I had to get away, if only for a while, if only to appreciate what I had and what I feared I was taking for granted. So I fled. Now I yearn to visit my rock, see the faces of the people I had “run away” from and I think that that is a very good thing in itself.I started this blog because I wanted to share my little adventure with the rest of the world. I will write about the entire journey which got me here in the first place, hopefully help out a couple of you who would love to join too. I remember reading similar blogs before and I know per experience how helpful they have been. I will write about the places I have visited, the people I met, the food I tasted, the wild ever sober nights out. Maybe a couple of travel tips here and there. It would be great if I could be of some help with dealing with other, more serious issues. The separation from home, the stress of the first few weeks, the feeling of loneliness you may experience. I want to share my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions. I want to express myself in the way I feel better at. In words and writing. Alas, this is not the novel I have always wanted to write. It’s just a diary of a girl whose office is 35,000 feet above the Earth we tread on and whose curiosity and sense of adventure are what keep her sane in a world which can be welcoming and warm but which could as easily be alienating.Where will this blog go from here? I do not have the vaguest idea. But it gives me space to write and share my writing with anyone else who is interested. And that, for now, is enough.