Everywhere is Boring

So this was found buried deep in our drafts. Based on the ‘stag-do’ bit it must have been written sometime last August but for whatever reason was not posted.

Well…

…That’s a lie, I know exactly why it wasn’t posted. I’m not usually into thoughtful posts, reading or writing them. For some reason though I obviously felt like writing this at the time, perhaps because we would shortly be leaving home yet again.

Reading this back now though… I quite like it. I sure hope Bucharest isn’t boring.

I recently spent the weekend in Belgium with nine of my closest friends for some excessive drinking, laughs and more excessive drinking but this really isn’t the place to talk about what goes on during a stag do. What is relevant though is a comment that someone made out of a second story window at around 3am in the center of Ghent, although how the hell I remember it I will never know.

Why are you here? Tourists come from all over the world but it’s boring here, I want to live somewhere else, it’ so quiet

Of course in our rather, shall we stay ‘wobbly’ state we defended our choice of location and explained that we consider where we’re from to be similar to what he described and that Ghent was far more exciting.

Maybe we’re both from ‘boring’ places or maybe that’s just how everyone feels about their hometown after a while?

It doesn’t look that bad surely?

It’s a conversation I’ve had a million times before, usually with someone from my hometown who never plans to leave and is fine with that. I used to discuss (I’d say argue but I can’t do that to save my life) what I thought were the issues with that; boredom, missing out, there’s so much more out there etc but more recently I’ve realised it’s all nonsense.

Yes I love to travel and see new places but to some people it sounds like hell and I understand that now too. This isn’t another post about travellers vs non-travellers but instead a realisation that everywhere is boring. What?

People get used to situations and it becomes normal.  You can kid yourself that you’re different and you never get bored of exploring so and so on but, the more time you spend somewhere the less and less it surprises you on a daily basis and it’s easy to get bored.

Everywhere is the same, my hometown is boring because I know it so well and it’s predictable, London is boring because it’s so expensive and it’s cheaper to stay in, Bangkok was boring because it was so busy all the time and I couldn’t be bothered with it.

That obviously isn’t the truth and I love all of those places but they are all thoughts I’ve had while living in them and eventually if you dwell on the downsides it’s easy to become disillusioned with somewhere.

So what I’ve come to realise, especially in these last two years, is that it really is what you make of a place that matters rather than where it might be. I’ve spent a lot more time in Lincoln, our hometown, recently but embraced it and enjoyed every moment. Back in 2010 before we set off for China I was desperate to leave and felt like I’d had enough of it to last a lifetime. This time around it’s very different, I’ve loved being surrounded by my friends and will almost miss the routine of waiting for Friday to come around knowing that I’ll have the chance to spend lots of time with them over the weekend.

So my friend in Ghent is right, it’s boring there. The problem is wherever he moves he’s eventually going to face the same problem unless he makes the most of it. Maybe it’s time to spend less time hanging out the window moaning to drunken strangers and get out there with your friends (and get drunk too?).