Before I tell my story of the trip to Gori, a bit of background is needed here. In 2005 I visited Poland for the first time. The city where Stalin built the Palace of Culture and Science. A few months later I was working in Bournemouth selling hot dogs with Rafal and Artur- two top…
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“Someday we’ll return here. When the Belfast Child sings again” – Simple Minds. How can you go backpacking in your home country? Is it even possible? You know the towns, you know the roads, you know the local lingo, you can talk your way out of a political argument. But then…I’ve been away a while.…
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“In order to write about life first you must live it” – Ernest Hemingway. Well life continues to inspire me and when you wake up in the morning you have no idea where you will end up that night. This is what I buzz off. However before I had even got my bus to San…
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“There’s a bridge to the other side, don’t take your eyes from the prize.”- Dodgy Get ready for it to pour out of me. It feels like some back tracking is needed to my teens and a follow up to last Friday’s Paddy Campbell story. This won’t fill you with wonder or excitement, but it’s something…
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“I, I sometimes lose myself in me, I lose track of timeAnd I can’t see the woods for the trees, you set them alight.Burn the bridges as you’ve gone, I’m too weak to fight yaI’ve got my personal hell to deal with” – D:Ream (Londonderry, 1993) Paddy Campbell and I sang along to it instead…
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Time for one of the most random posts ever on here. I’m not giving you a visa guide for Suriname, a backpacking overview of Taiwan or indeed how to get a farming job in the land down under. Life can freak you out sometimes. And in this case it’s a good thing. If you have…
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So it’s official – this is my 1,500th blog post on Don’t Stop Living that is published and live for the whole world to read. Not a brag or a boast by the way, but certainly this is a reflective post for me – it was only something I noticed as I logged in and…
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It’s a long time since I wrote anything about Belarus (even though I once wrote a chapter for a book on my trip there). And as it’s yet to feature on my Friday’s Featured Food series, I thought it was time to recollect that day I tried Belarussian Porridge in the drab city of Bobruisk.…
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Get the champagne out. Don’t Stop Living is SIX years old today. The travel blog I started while backpacking in Toronto in 2007 has now amassed over 1,200 travel stories over a six year period. Life’s been pretty good in the intervening years. I’ve managed to backpack my way to almost 80 countries, across all…
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Of course travel leads you to random job opportunities all the time, some voluntary, some well paid, some just for the hell of it and others because of a pure passion for something (such as my travel writing and organising football events). For today’s Working Wednesdays we head back to a cheeseburger counter in Bournemouth,…
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