Hello! It's been a while. I've been slacking quite a bit with the writing of this blog. Our travel blog - gochasethesun - it started over 6 years ago.
Though it's not really a travel blog anymore. We retracted it from all social media years back, SEO has also been out of the picture for a long time.
It's just a random blog now, living in the depths of the internet, hidden by undergrowth and moss covered rocks.
Welcome to the covid-19 times. Our holiday in Corfu was about a year ago, but for lack of anything else worth while, I though I might revisit it and dig out some memories.
Corfu old town 
First thing that comes to mind is Dimitrios, our host. He, his pregnant wife and his dog were in the process of finishing their little tourist accomodation, brick by brick, completely self-financed as the banks in Greece won't give out any loans. I wonder how they are doing now. I hope they are well.
The second thing that comes to mind was the smoldering heat. Cofu was hit by a heat wave during our stay, 37 degrees in the shade for multiple days. Sometimes I felt so hot it almost made me panic. Hard to picture now, for over a month we have been hammered by permanent rain and cold weather. I guess the summer of 2020 fits in line with everything else that has been happening recently. What a putrid year.
But back to Corfu. It's a strange little island, with it's own micro climate. Unlike all the other greek islands, Corfu is green. Someone explained it to us, but I can't quite remember. In a nutshell, it's location somehow creates it's own climate, resulting in significant amounts of precipitation in the winter months. It's quite strange, when you look at Albania just across, you just see a barren desert.
Donkey sancturary
I'm trying to conjure up more detailed memories, but although it was less than a year ago it feels distant. I have to work through the avalanche of stuff that happened since. We have been to a donkey sanctuary. I love donkeys. I do not understand how some people cannot feel compassion towards animals. When someone mistreats an animal it's whole life until it's broken, and then tosses it over a cliff, what goes on in the mind of a person like that? I don't understand it. Just thinking about it while writing this makes my stomach turn.
Cruelty is nature. Watching any wild life documentary is enough to understand that. But there is a difference. When a cat plays with its pray, it does so on instinct. There is no cognitive process going on. It is not aware of the other "life". We as humans are though. I guess it comes down to compassion, but compassion is not really necessary.
Feeling no compassion towards an animal, or a human for that matter, has no repercussions. Suffering is an intrinsic part of life - every living thing will suffer, and it will eventually die. So why feel compassion in the first place? In my opinion we cannot get out of our own skin, so the world is how we perceive it. So in a way, we all create our own world, or a version of it that is explicitly ours. And for me, I want my world to be a compassionate one. It's an egocentric choice really.
Anyway, I miss Corfu. I also miss normality, the sea, travel and everything else we lost recently. I wonder if travel will ever be the same as it was before the pandemic, especially with the whole financial fallout that will undoubtedly follow.
Mum always used to say, we never saved much money because we were always traveling. Then the war hit and everyone lost everything anyway. I'm kinda glad we didn't save much over the last 6 years either...
