London

I am now in London.

Alhamdulillah... after a long challenging, sometimes annoying, most of the time exhausting, I finally had a chance to visit London again.

This is my second time to go here after more than 10 years ago I visited this place with my father. This time I am going to participate in an international workshop related with poverty and forestry. Not only participating, I have a task to identify key points of all the presentations in the workshop and try to figure out the policy implications of each research presentation.

Again, I always believe in dreaming :)

I am a daydream person and I like to have imagination.

One of my dream of course (as a Sagittarian) is to travel, to venture the world. Not too long though, as I can't stay far away from my son for a long period.

So when one day there was an opportunity of funding from my office, I braved myself to apply.

After a long pause, I received a positive reply. The fund manager said yes. At first I wanted to apply to a training course in Helsinki but I cancelled it because the course is for three weeks. Too long.

Then I tried to talk again to the fund manager if I could attend short-term activities which I am interested to and to my surprise, he said OK as long as my supervisor thinks it is useful. Then the series of challenges start from here. From my supervisor being reluctant to give approval if I don't have any role in the workshop, not giving me permission to apply visa due to heavy workload , from applying visa itself: when I just realized in the last minute that there is one document missing and in the end the visa receipt is missing. From there finance saying the budget is running out and when there was a news of volcano eruption.

But in the end everything went smooth, alhamdulillah.

Tomorrow I will be going to Norwich to prepare the workshop. It crossed my mind sometimes to have a chance to live here in UK, either for school or work and bring my little family with me. Or maybe visiting my friend who is studying here ;)

I am truly blessed for having a complete set of supportive family and friends.

So lets not stop dreaming, dream on...dream on... :)