Good news! The Concordia International office just announced to Sabrina and me that we were accepted for the study exchange program next year. And what is great is that we can go together! But we were accepted only for half a year in Cairo, so they gave us some options to consider, and in the end we decided to go to Hong Kong first and Cairo second. Hong Kong then! Who would have known?

So next year is going to be a long year around the world. It will start in May in Norway, where I will visit my step family and the vikings, then I will drop by France to visit my own family, and then I will go to China in the beginning of June. There I will travel around the Kashgar region on the silk road for a good 2 months. That should give me plenty of time to discover the area [relatively] in depth. I now daydream about Kashgar and its surroundings, the mighty Pamir mountains, the Himalayas, the desert, the half buried 1000 years old fortresses where the caravans on the silk road would take refuge for the night, and the wild camels! And the Chinese government allowing I might get a glimpse at the Tibetan region of Qinghai, and maybe even Xiahe, which was closed last year.

And when I’ll be tired of moving around I’ll go to Hong Kong for a couple of months. Then it’ll be Christmas time and the 6 weeks vacations that comes with it, thus traveling again. And then the American University of Cairo for a semester, and finally back to Montreal July 2010… In short it is going to be similar to my first sabbatical year – 2005-2006 – when I traveled for a year in Latin America and New Zealand.