It's amazing to me sometimes, the extent to which travel changes things like mood, outlook, understanding and health. Going from one country to another and being somewhat immersed in different cultures (although the culture of the traveling poker circus remains a constant bubble within all of that) means that I'm constantly having to re-evaluate things from a new and different perspective.

I was in Paris last week for the WPT and this morning, I've woken up in Malta. The difference between how I felt last week and how I feel right now is HUGE.

Most of the people I know love Paris. It is an incredible city on so many levels - architecture, food, culture. I was walking around the Champs de Elysee in my scruffy, hippy clothes which make me blend right into the scenery in Brighton and I was very aware of how those same clothes made me stand out like a sore thumb in fashionable Paris. It takes a while to catch the rhythm in each new setting. Culture-lag.

I'm not as big a fan of Paris as my friends are. For some reason, I've always been a bit melancholy in that city. I spent most of last week trying to fend off a migraine and that definitely didn't help. In the last year or so, I've started getting these really strange visual migraines where my head doesn't so much hurt (although that's definitely part of it) as feel like it's stuffed with cotton. Everything is a bit fuzzy, I can't get my eyes to focus through the weirdly psychedelic light show my brain puts on and I feel dizzily like someone has slipped something into my caf© au lait.

Maybe this is why I blew up during the tournament and crashed out in dramatically (bad) style. Or maybe (more likely) I'm just playing really badly right now. I started Day 2 with a good chip stack and then at times during play, I found myself really having to concentrate to remember my own hole cards. Not great. I got lucky in a few spots to build a good-sized stack and then had a brain explosion to make one of the worst plays ever to crash out of the event. Embarrassing. Sincerely embarrassing. "Dear god, I hope it doesn't make the TV coverage" embarrassing. Especially the post-interview where I vaguely remember trying to justify the unjustifiable. Bleurgh.

After busting, I retreated to my hotel and wrote on Twitter "sometimes playing poker for me feels like a monkey banging away on a keyboard trying to write Shakespeare." I've found that when I'm embarrassed about something, putting it out there in public actually makes me feel somewhat better about it. And it worked, kind of. And then I spent a full day in bed with the curtains closed, trying desperately to get the headache to leave me alone.

All in all, I was happy to leave Paris and fly to Malta last night. I woke up feeling like a new person. My headache is gone, I can focus my eyes and the optimism is back. Paris-Kara has been replaced with Malta-Kara and thank god, because she is WAY more fun.

I messed up my buy-in for this WPT and didn't send the re-entry on time so I've only got one bullet out here. I'll play Day 1b and see what happens. I'm going to try not to play like an asshole in this one. Yes, I'm setting my standards ever so high.

But that's a couple of days away and in the meantime, I'm in Malta. I fucking love Malta. Bring on the strawberry mojitos and reggae music.