Dec

1

When you’re at the very bottom, you can only go up

Filed Under backpacking europe, failure, fear, people i like, perseverance, quotes, self improvement, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

I read this comment below today by Pistolette and have many times thought of the same thing. To digress, the blog post where I read this comment is a great one — I’ll write up on that in a separate post.

It’s been two years since Hurricane Katrina desrtoyed the homes of my entire family, but now we are more successful financially, mentally, and career-wise than we were before. I suppose its like the saying goes “it’s only when you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” After a few days of moping around we quickly regrouped and simply felt happy to be alive. Every day since then I have lived strongly in the present, and have an awareness of things around me that I did not have before. We lost most of our fears, and learned to enjoy life through experiences rather than material things. Perhaps a record-breaking hurricane seems like an extreme case of happenstance, but I think it still qualifies. I see many people around me trying to endure life here (in New Orleans) with the same old attitudes and they are suffering so much. I choose to see the positive things the storm brought here, and as a result I am “lucky”.

Don’t you sometimes get tired of defending all that you have accumulated in life? Ironically, sometimes it’s the things that you have amassed that now holds you back from otherwise going in a much different direction than you would like to; effectively becoming “baggage”.

Recently when I was backpacking Europe alone, I met this shopkeeper lady in the beautiful city of Nürnberg, Germany. She used to be a school teacher, she was old(er), but very upbeat, positive, and energetic. We had more than a superficial “tourist to shopkeeper-that-sells-to-tourists” talk. Turns out, I found out that she had recently been through some difficult times and as a result lost almost everything, including her house and her significant other.

She smiled as she said to me enthusiastically, “I have lost everything, and now I can only WIN!” (now imagine that, in a thick German accent)

We bonded with a short conversation about life in general, after just 5 minutes. I guess we hit it off really quick. Her name is Christina, and I’ll never forget her (I hope I don’t). She was shy in front of the camera but I insisted that I wouldn’t leave without a picture. So here it is, and I’m showing it although I look like an idiot (my eyes are closed)

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To go off slightly on a tangent, Christina’s store is one of those makeshift ones. It was among a few others set up on a broad pedestrian-only bridge. Here’s a scene from the bridge, across from her little store. Pretty, huh?

Picture 107

Nov

25

London to Bruxelles, Belgique

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Update 2 DEC 2007 - My attempt to upgrade WordPress has left some formatting on this post messed up. I am aware of it, and I’ll fix it as soon as I find some time. I’m kind of busy at the moment.

london-to-bruxelles

Wow, I have been super busy since I last blogged about my Europe backpacking marathon. Oh where was I? Oh that’s right, I was in London on my way to Brussels, Belgium. In French, Brussels is “Belgique” and Belgium is “Belgique”, so if I interchange the words, I still mean the same thing. Personally, I think the French equivalent sounds better on the ears :p

I got to meet up with my ex-girlfriend Caroline, from my college days in Louisiana. She showed me around the country a bit. It’s a small country, so we covered a lot of ground in just a few hours.

Belgium, among other things are known for their waffles. Here you see me munching down a Belgian waffle in the middle of some really important historic building. I did it for the waffles. And the priceless picture.

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Here’s the building again, from a distance. I really like the flag flapping in the air. It almost looks like a little flame, just suspended in mid air by magic. The grass is very well kept, and it’s nice to just sit down and enjoy the scenery.

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Downtown Bruxelles, the streets abuzz with people and food, enjoying the good Belgian life! Notice the pavement: someone had to arrange those bricks by hand. This was very common throughout Europe. Some of these places had to bricks laid there since hundreds of years ago.

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A building, designed by a famous architect in all Belgium.

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Caroline and me.

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What do you eat in Brussels? You eat mussels and french fries, of course!! Did you know, french fries was invented in Brussels? (If it wasn’t, then all the Belgians just lied to me)
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Nov

4

Where the hell I have been for the past month

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* The title of this post is inspired by the “Where The Hell Is Matt” project. I have wished I could travel like him, and I am thankful that I now have this opportunity to see the world.

This is my first full weekend in San Diego — after a week since I got back. Technically, I got back late Sunday night and had to work the next day .. so needless to say, didn’t have time to write much. As I have previously mentioned, I was backpacking western Europe. This is the first of my deferred blog post series on this little life-changing experience of mine, where I’ll wrap up in a final post on lessons learned, etc. I would have liked blogging live while I was actually traveling but am faced with certain constraints, such as: internet access wasn’t too easy to come by (I veto’d against taking a laptop at the last minute), I have to pay for ‘net access in euros (uhh, weak US greenback doesn’t help), the time writing and searching for access is wasted instead of exploring Europe.

So why go? Why backpack Europe, why travel alone, how do you justify this expense, what is the return on investment here? Why go on a vacation anyway? Aren’t vacations for people who are lazy and can’t stand what we call “working in the real world”? When I first started working, I pooh-pooh’d vacations. I loathed what was to me, a waste of precious time and money. Needless to say, after 3 years of “real world work” just right after my bachelors, it was really tough for me to admit that I was losing my sanity, and a vacation *gasp* was in order.

My doctor didn’t _explicitly_ recommend that I take a vacation, so it was even tougher to justify. I couldn’t say “oh, my doctor recommended it”. In the end, I read this great story here, and decided that enough is enough. My sanity is far more important than any job I will ever have in my life. What’s the point of having a great job if you are insane? You can’t function anyway. And so that justified the expense, I bit the bullet and paid for my flight. *I highly recommend workaholics to click on that link to the story

At this point in my life, money is nothing more than an enabler for me. If I don’t use it to enable me to do something, especially when it means to heal myself when I am sick, then why make money in the first place. Money making is just a skill. If I use up that money today, I can make that money back with my skills. I am confident in my skills. You could rob me of my money, but not my skills. Sanity, I rather not risk, since I don’t know if I can get that back. (Lack of sanity also means loss of skills?)

The backpacking trip was pretty much a marathon: 3 weeks, 12 places (2 repeats). Yes, I traveled alone — and I lived the pros and cons of that (cons include having to negotiate with a mugger/extortionist in Amsterdam, more on that later). I was careful though, to pace myself and take a breather, to say smell the flowers, and actually enjoy the scenery. Last thing I want is a vacation from my vacation. I wasn’t going to “work” myself just to hit up all the places I had on my mind. I was going to relax and enjoy this.

Since I was making the trip up as I went, I didn’t know what my final journey would look like while on the trip itself. I only planned a 24 hours ahead, sometimes only a few hours (like3-4 hours) ahead. The joys of unpredictability and randomness ;) In my normal life, I am very structured and I plan meticulously. Being this ad-hoc and unpredictable was not easy, but I got used to it, and look, I got back home in one piece!

I flew out of Los Angeles to London because its much cheaper than flying out of San Diego. My drop off point for my sprint across western Europe was London. I would land there, and depart from there. In case you’re wondering (I get asked this a lot), I got a return trip from LAX to London-Gatwick for about US $560 (from www.priceline.com’s “name your own price” game — which I must say, wasn’t too easy to game :/ I tried).

Just to mention, London has multiple airports. The London Heathrow (LHR) airport is probably the main one, and was a bit more expensive than if I were to land in London Gatwick (LGW), hence I took the latter. The Gatwick airport is a 30 mins train ride away from downtown London, not that much further than Heathrow. The train ride (Gatwick Express) takes you direct from the airport to the Victoria Station in downtown central London, a good starting point for backpackers. Each train ride costs about 18 pounds sterling, or about US$36.

Here’s my final itinerary:

  1. Arrive in London from Los Angeles
  2. Bruxelles, Belgique (Brussels, Belgium)
  3. Paris, France
  4. Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
  5. Interlaken, Switzerland
  6. Venezia, Italia (Venice)
  7. Nürnberg, Deutschland (Nuremberg, Germany)
  8. Berlin, Deutschland
  9. Hamburg/HafenCity, Deutschland
  10. Amsterdam, Netherlands
  11. Bruxelles, Belgique
  12. London, UK
  13. (and back to Los Angeles)

Here’s a map of my route (in orange). I went in a counter-clockwise direction. The places circled in blue was the places I had hoped to hit, but could not — did not have enough time, and as you can see .. were a little bit further from the circle around Europe I was taking. (Sorry I couldn’t make it to visit you in Sweden, Mathias! Rain check?)

countries_europe_map

Alright, so .. get on with the pictures already and stop babbling!

I arrived in London, but my trip really began with Brussels. I arrived in London in the morning, fought of a bit of a jet lag (stayed just 1 night), and took the “Chunnel” — a super high speed train across the English channel to Brussels. Cost was 60 pound sterling, and took 2.5 hours.

The beginning of my “Watch out world, here I come” 2007 western Europe backpacking trip. Yes, I do it like Hans Solo — me, myself, and I ;) If nobody wants to do what I want to do with me, then I will do it myself!! (I decided that “Watch out world, here I come” would be my motto for this little trip of mine)

Chunnel station

Looks like an airport, does it not? Security was about as tight as US airports, when it came to boarding:

Chunnel station, looks like an airport doesn't it?

Me and the “Chunnel”:

Me and the "Chunnel" itself!

.. and some Canadian chicks!

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Next stop .. Gare du Midi, Bruxelles! “Gare” means “station”, “Gare du Midi” means “south station”. My first time in a non-English country. Wow-wee, should be fun fun fun.

Oct

28

Europe backpacking marathon

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I have just arrived back in San Diego just a few hours ago, still serving the remainder of my jet-lag sentence. This has been the longest that I have not posted anything on my blog (almost a month), and sorry for the lack of a notice — I had to leave in a hurry to catch my flight out from Los Angeles to London-Gatwick.

I have about 3 gigs of pictures and short video clips, which I will put up soon enough. Right now, I have to take care of business. Here is just one picture. More to come.

Any guesses of where this was taken? (answer below)

Chunnel station

London.