Done and done.

It's Sunday in Bangkok, and my flight leaves in 4 hours. 24 hours from now I will be back in Atlanta. The surreality of these two sentences has not sunk in. I am tired, and in many ways I am ready to come home. Bangkok is a great city but it was a harsh way to finish the trip considering the level of sleep deprivation I currently operate on. I'm sure that the long flight and concomitant jetlag will only make that situation better.

I have done much, perhaps too much. When I arrive in Atlanta, I will step off my twenty-fifth airplane of the trip. I have visited five new countries. I have snowboarded. I have visited six beaches. I have mixed it up with the people all over the world. I have made many new international friends. I have participated in a series of death defying adventures. I have seen more world heritage than I can list off the top of my head.

The end of this trip marks a major turning point and transition for me. The last year and a half of my life has been hectic, jampacked with rapidly changing and varied activities and focuses. I have done so many things: third year of law school, bar preparation, the bar exam, and this two month international trip. Each of these major steps have required a different mentality and attitude. This last step, this trip, gave me the opportunity to divorce myself from the well organized, regimented, and planned life that I introduced during law school. Now it is time for another huge reversal; understanding that I have delayed for as long as my bank account will allow it is finally time for me to join the professional ranks. This will be a major change for me, once again.

Honestly, in many ways I desire and feel ready for the new challenges that becoming an attorney and moving to a new city will present. At work, I'm excited to see what I can do with the training that I have (or lack thereof), and to see what other skills I can acquire and cultivate. Outside of that world, I'm excited to learn about the workings of Washington, DC, to link up with friends and family that I have there, and to live with my friend David Berger. After graduating from Northwestern, I took a year off to become a snowboard instructor and to backpack around Europe. It was a fantastic experience that I would not trade for anything, but at the end of that year I was ready for a new chapter of my life, prepared to rejoin a competitive and intellectual atmosphere; I have similar feelings now. Hopefully the realities of legal work as well as the harsh juxtaposition with my free-form of travel, with ambiguous goals, minimal obligations, and randomly shifting plans, will not dash my relatively optimistic attitude regarding this next step. There is only one way to find out.

For now, the next immediate step for me is to get on a long flight, watch some bad movies, eat some better than average airplane food (Cathay Pacific), and breath a day's worth of recycled air. When I get back to Atlanta, I'm going to have a complete reset, take a nap, call some friends, watch Monday Night Football at a sports bar, and eat fajitas. It's going to be great.

This entry marks the end of the EKO World Tour. The blog has been an interesting project, considering what it has meant both for me and for those that view it. For those that have logged in to see the adventures and exploits, it has provided me an outlet to keep the people in my life informed as to what I and the friends and family who have been on the trip have been doing. Although it can not, and needless to say, should not, completely capture the events, the time, the feelings of what it has been like to take this trip, it has developed into a window to view with some detail specific random events that have happened as well as a rough linear chronology of those events. Personally, it has provided a writing format that bucks the rigid structure that I adopted during law school. It has been a much-needed creative outlet, although some of my structural writing habits successfully shine through. Just as the traveling itself was an important deviation from the rigid structure I had imposed during graduate school, the writing about the traveling provided an analogous deviation towards creativity. I'll keep the site going, but I cannot promise that I will post with regularity, as the demands of my new life are completely unknown to me (although I have been given a pretty good idea of them).

I also appreciate the interest. In the last 2 months there have been approximately 4000 visits to the page.


Much thanks to Ben, Ben, Chandler, Mike, Ezra, Mo, Jim, and all those that I met and met up with along the way for making it what it was. Peace, all. Much respect. Safe.

EKO