The more things change, the more they stay the same

As the slogan goes on the ubiquitous traveller t-shirt, 'Same, Same... But Different', it kind of sums up my feelings after our first month of travelling.

For the last 6 years, I've worked from home, my work life and family life merging into one.  Working daytime, evenings and weekends, gong to the supermarket and kids activities in the middle of the day, time of day has become less relevant.  The traditional 9-5, 5 days a week is just not how my life is structured.  Add to this, that Shoshi had been at home since the end of June, having finished the school year, then the last 4 months in Israel, we were together most of the time especially with the children during the summer holidays and the Chagim.

So to some extent, I probably didn't realise how similar life on the road would be to life in Israel.  We are still all together, I am still working whenever it suits and whenever needs must. Certainly more time with the children, certainly more leisure time, we have certainly had so many amazing experiences and visited amazing places.  But it hasn't felt that we are having to transition to a completely new way of life.

We have met other families who describe how it took them some weeks to settle into travelling, how they struggled with the culture shock of going from the office environment to an unstructured life.

We just haven't felt that.  Perhaps it would have been nice to experience such a change, made us more appreciative of how lucky we are.  Perhaps Thailand has made the transition easy, it has been a soft-landing in terms of culture, language and the ease of travel.  As we move onto the Philippines and a new destination for all of us, a culture shock may be about to hit us.

But for now, it's been somewhat a case of same, same....