If you could see this posted before the 1st of April then that means I have succeeded admirably in logging in to the Internet and to the blogging back end, in a place on earth where such thing is still considered a luxury.

Tomorrow is the last of my nine days holiday in Syria. The purpose of this holiday was to see my immediate family and to take a rest and think about my career and my future. You arrive at Damascus Airport (thank god it's not yet renamed into some historical figure, especially when history starts 1963 or maybe 1970). As you go down the escalators towards passport control you feel your screen settings are being automatically adjusted to grayscale. All of Syria's touristic attraction s have been reduced into a small and ugly information booth you can hardly spot on your way out. The passports officer takes your passport and asks “Where are you coming from?”, but given the tone of speech you could possibly think he's asking “Why the hell did you come back?”.

The luggage delivery section looks like it has survived a fierce war. My guess the conveyors might have been used to transport dead bodies from the field to the premises.

My suitcase was fluorescent orange so I didn't expect any problems finding it. An old lady stepped in next to me and asked me to get her a trolley. Luckily, I had 50 SP left over from my last visit. Christ! You should have seen the trolleys. You have to take the first one in queue, although you'd prefer to hop in the barn and pick up the one with the least possible mileage. The one they gave me have made at least six figures of miles. Were they using them to smuggle things from Lebanon? I'm not quite sure!

I brought her the trolley. She asked me to stay next to her to help her pick up her luggage. She made me pick up seven huge suitcases asking me to check if her name is on the tag. Oddly, the only thing in common between those suitcases was the colour. My parents were out waiting for me, so when I got my suitcase I told the old lady to go relax, have some coffee and wait for everyone to take their belongings, and her suitcase will most likely show at the end. Too bad for her there was no coffee over there. (didn't wish to write this story here but I thought it'd put a smile on your faces; or is it a frown?)

On the way to Damascus your screen settings get adjusted to 256 colours as you start to see some Syriatel and Areeba signboards planted over levelled buildings or construction projects that are still going to take forever to be completed. The air is polluted. The traffic is a total mess. The place doesn't look like an inhabitable city. That's why I decided to stay in, spend the time with my family and care less about hangouts and old friends.

It had been less than a week when I decided I no longer wish to stay here in Syria. I'm missing a life back there in Dubai. This here is not a life. This is a still; a snapshot from a sad movie. Things never change. You can only expect the worse. I'm missing a love back there in Dubai. Here there's no love. Here there's sick people, sick habits, sick souls. If it wasn't for the Sudoku puzzles or the games of cards that we played I would have been taken to a sanitarium for mental illness.

Anyway, the rehab visit is over now and I would like to write down my decisions:

• Unless Syria becomes an inhabitable place (Lebanon is not a valid model) I will never ever live there. Dubai is my place now and I'm planning to stay there as long as I have to.

• I will keep going with my career in the IT industry while trying to maintain and foster the fair knowledge and experience I had in accounting. One day it's all going to make sense in a private entrepreneurial consulting business.

• I don't care for the 'values' my society back in Syria is asking me to hold deep. I create my own values. And it did prove that, at all times, my own values did less harm to people than those of the society I belong to.

• The next year will be a year of financial wisdom. I will try to ration my resources to end up next April with some savings and a sound plan for financial freedom on the long run.

• Of course health is on everybody's todo list, and I'm not an exception. I have already lost some weight and I'm planning to lose some more. Health club is going to be a regular thing not something that I do in my spare time.

• Marriage is one of the biggest decisions one can ever take. The next year is certainly not place for any.

That is all I could think of at the time of writing this boring post. You go pour yourself a glass of anything you like, relax, and try to think of your plans for the next year (starting 1 April). A good way to do this is to think of what you want to be a year from now, meaning your targets. Once you have determined your targets you can easily write down a plan.

We all know that, most of the times, one can never carry out a plan one have put, but it's still useful to have a plan, just in case one got asked.