THERE ARE MANY REASONS why I am sheepishly scooting back to Canada this week. Not to get into fine details, they have to do with the impending expiry of my health care, credit card, driver’s license and, well, passport. Yep.

Anyway, dear Toronto: Surprise!

It’s a convenient time, since this is the halfway mark of my trip; winter is coming fast in Europe, and I had needed to throw away my Southeast Asian summer clothes in exchange for wooly winter ones, which I had previously planned on spending a few hundred dollars on in Serbia. Now, on visiting Iceland in December, I’ll be a bit better prepared, having given those several hundred dollars to Lufthansa instead.

My return flight to Budapest is set for the evening of November 18. Things will resume sort of as scheduled from there, to Vienna and Prague, Berlin and Frankfurt, Paris, London, etc. Hopefully by then I will have arranged all of my Canadian paperwork, and not become a ghost of the Canadian citizen that I, for now, still am.