From the sleepy edge of a Friday.

My room has a slight chill to it and the American-sized coffee I had at 3 o'clock is still pulsing in my veins and keeping me up.

I clambered down from my bed (which is tucked under the eves of the roof and is reached by a ladder) about two minutes ago and I have settled myself here at my desk to write off the caffeine trail.

Photos of Myanmar line the walls, an African mask sits beside a basket from a market bought at the base of the Himalayas, my mementos are stripped down to what could fit in two 23kg suitcases. These are my touch stones.

This morning I sat over a pot of freshly ground coffee on my balcony, chatting with a friend on skype.

Incredible, that the world could have changed so much as to make it possible to spend two hours looking into the face of a friend sat in his Dorset farmhouse so far away. And incredible to step back from the day-to-day grind that is the cycle of J-school and think about the bigger trends of our lives. Incredible, yet somewhat unnerving - in the way that really good conversations with friends often are.

He made me realise that I've stopped writing my blog, that studying writing makes it hard to write, makes me write less.

So here I am.

Five weeks in California. Five weeks making 2 minute videos and watching edits and trying to understand the Californian health system and whether Medicare works and how on earth one can simplify language and words to make the complicated easy and the boring fascinating. Five weeks of riding my bright green bike up the hill to North Gate and falling asleep in my bed under the eves.

It sounds so picturesque to write it out like that. A series of beautiful, romantic, Berkeley experiences. But of course, beneath or above the picturesque is that funny, exhausting reality of having to line up for the supermarket and being uncomfortable and broke and grumpy and human, before we step back and realise that we are in fact exactly where we want to be.

Five weeks of too much coffee in the week and blue moon lager on a Friday night. Five weeks of realising what a beautiful and special profession journalism is alongside five weeks of wondering if I'm really cut out for it. Five weeks of waking to yoga on my blue mat and missing a certain boy before I go to sleep at night.

Five weeks of forgetting Myanmar, or finding it emerging at the strangest times: in the depths of a discussion about sources, in the sparkling blue of the sky, as I read my iphone between classes.

Perhaps that's why I bought the plane ticket. It was a ticket I can't really afford.

There are ideas that are so powerful, that you know as soon as you have them that not doing it is not an option. When I voiced the idea to mvd for the first time I realised I had already made up my mind to go. It was decided as soon as the idea plopped into my head.

You see, I want to have another chance at Myanmar.

Older people talk about it all the time - "if I had my time again" they say - what would I have done differently?

I think that about Myanmar - Did I do enough?

Should I have written more blog posts? Should I have pushed more articles abroad? Should I have tried to be more of an activist?

The experience there is so inverse to the experience of journalism here that the two don't seem like the same discipline. Working in a local paper in a country of censorship, where copywright is not an issue and the main government paper sources articles "internet", verses a country obsessed with litigation and law suits and paranoid about the availability of information. California is a place where a paper trail exists and everything can be traced and found through public records and laws (that function) and procedures (that work). Myanmar is not.

I feel a bit like an alien from the past, time-traveled into the future and I stifle stories of foreign places for fear of sounding irrelevant, far removed from this Californian "reality".

But I digress, as gloriously, blogs are allowed to do. And I write in British spelling and I will not edit this or re-read it or check it for inconsistencies or facts. It is just for me and that friend in Dorset and any of you other woanderers passing through.