Houston, we have lift off

With the flood of new visitors to my blog at the moment being directed here from Romania-Insider, it's maybe moot to point out that my first guest article was posted there last week. However, for my old-time readers - your fan t-shirts are in the mail - who didn't spot the article, there's the update, and I've in fact just submitted my next column.

Judging by all my posts here bemoaning my inability to move to Romania, you'd have thought I'd just about given up. Nope: it's just turning out that the journey is a bit slower than expected. For you, dear reader, that's a benefit: if I'd just packed up my bags and hopped on the next flight to Bucharest, this would have been the world's shortest blog.

The Romania-Insider link-up was a natural one: I liked writing about Romania in English, and so do they. The challenge, however, is that now I have to generate twice as much content, because if I duplicated content there'd be no point. Where I build on a point made on Romania-Insider, rest assured I'll link to the story - you won't have to follow two sources, but if you *do* you'll get the full package.

I've been receiving a lot of support from expats and even a couple of Romanians about this blog and as a result of that first story on Romania-Insider: finally I've broken through the wall of 'Err, is anybody out there?' to 'You love me, you really love me!' Ok, lol, not quite so far, but at least somebody cares. If you're new to this site, why should you care about a South African thinks about Romania? No reason: it's all about entertainment, and I believe that boring writing is a waste of both my time and yours.

I've also got some plans in the pipeline to visit Romania towards the end of the year - hold thumbs that I can manage to do that, it'll be awesome beyond description and obviously as the good little content generator I am you'll see a huge spike in photographic content here. Looking at the blog up to now you wouldn't think that I'd specialised as a photojournalist at University, but I do in fact love taking photographs: I just need something new to stimulate that interest.

Thinking about my journey towards emigration, I have to laugh at the preconception that waves of immigrants flood into all countries. Maybe for some people it really is that easy to just give up everything and start with the shirts on our backs, but for the vast majority of us eyeing out a new life in a new country it's a longer process undoubtedly. Or maybe it's just me. Amid all the scare-mongering stories about floods of Romanian immigrants into the rest of Europe, my little story as an African headed to Romania is completely different.

In fact, I'd like to document more stories from people such as myself, as a complement to my friend Matt's project speaking to Romanians who've emigrated and examining their motivations for doing so. Who's talking to immigrants, finding out why and how successful they are? We can't all start blogs, but somebody can listen to our story, because we all have one and all stories have insights and human tragedy. Let's just add that to my To Do list for when I finally move to Romania, shall we. If you're an immigrant living there, book an advance slot in your calendar for me ... there's coffee in it for you.

With that, let's call it Short Post Saturday - my wife's hungry and we've got a sushi restaurant around the corner: do the math! Pe curand ['see you soon' in Romanian]...