Right now I should be writing. One would say … hey, that’s exactly what you are doing now. Yes, that’s true, but I should be writing an essay on “Thermal Spray Coating” instead of an entry on a blog which nobody has seen so far. The blog was started almost a year ago in Istanbul and it should have been an weekly if not daily entry based blog. However it did not make it even to a monthly entry blog. Things are about to change, hopefully.

So … this night’s subject is bed time story. It’s a true story and it goes like this:

Fourteen years ago, a small boy saw a book, high on a shelf. It was a thick book, written by an author whose name was at that moment rather hard to pronounce (Frans G. Bengtsson) and it was named “The vikings”. The small boy climbed on the shelves, about half a meter from the ground to get that book, and almost fell back. He went to his parent’s bedroom, turned on the lamp and started reading. It took him less then a week to finish the whole book. It was really amazing as it talked about longships, warriors of the North, sea people, Scandinavian legends and last but not least the old Rune alphabet. The little boy became fascinated by the Northern Europe history and mythology and dreamt that one day he will go there and see those places with his very own eyes. So he started to read more and more in order to prepare for that event. And among other things he learned the Futhark – the old Norse Rune alphabet, in order to understand what those vikings where saying. Years have passed and the dream faded away, since other dreams had priority.

At one point, chance smiled on him, and he went to Northern Germany, only 12 kilometers away from Denmark. It was only then when the long forgotten dream emerged from deep down inside and all those viking stories returned to his head, and started calling him towards a small village in Jutland, center of Denmark, called Jelling. He went at the border crossing and asked at the tourist information office how to get to Jelling. The lady there was pretty astonished that this Eastern European, coming from the Black Sea coast heard about Jelling, since there where a lot of people living nearby that never heard of it. She started to look on the map and showed him the way towards there. These being said .. full speed towards King Harald Bluetooth’s former Royal Court.

Among all the internet blogs there is a new one. It is called Nautical Dreams. Why this name? Because when I was searching for a name I was in Istanbul, chatting with a friend of mine from Romania. She was telling me about her father, who at that point was commanding an oil tanker across the Indian Ocean. The oil tanker’s name is now Nautica Muar, but at some point in its history it was called Arges. Arges is a river and a county in Romania. The ship was build in Romania but it never had a Romanian flag on board as it was registered in Bahamas, Hong Kong and then in Malaysia. From Nautica we have passed to Nautical .. and then the Dreams appeared. Nautical Dreams. Dreams of the sea … It is easy to dream of the sea once you are on land. Perhaps if I would have followed the Maritime University in my home town I would have called this site Solid Dreams, being fed up with all the vastness of the ocean that I would had seen. Some say that “there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea” (Joseph Conrad) while other say that “the sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever” (Jacques Yves Cousteau). The truth, as always lies somewhere in between. How ever, my dreams for the sea still remain, and somewhere deep down inside me I am looking forward to the day when I will be sailing my yacht through the Dalmatian coast or better yet, through the South Pacific islands . Only time will tell …