Every year, the service that I offer to my clients is getting better and better. Beginning immediately, I will apply a
That’s right. I am probably the only lawyer in the world to implement a money-back guarantee. This will not only cover my legal services, but it will also apply to all my other freelance services, including translations, academic writing, speeches, consulting and all of the other odd jobs I do from time to time.
* I guarantee 100% that if I don’t like your money, I will give it back to you.
When a film is bad or mediocre, there is a lot to write about it. When a film is as perfect as Django Unchained, one could keep the review short: Go and watch it. You will enjoy it.
The plot is set in the southern United States in 1858. Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz of Inglourious Basterds fame) is a German bounty hunter who is both linguistically and morally superior to his American contemporaries who understand neither his stilted English nor his distaste for slavery. Dr Schultz buys the slave Django (Jamie Foxx) from a somewhat uncooperative owner because Django can identify the Brittle brothers whom Dr Schultz wishes to find and capture or kill, although he clearly prefers the killing option. Dr Schultz and Django are less master and slave but rather turn into partners in the bounty hunting business. Jamie Foxx plays one of the coolest Western heroes of all time. In reward for Django’s help, Dr Schultz then helps Django to find his wife who has been sold as a slave to the plantation of Calvin Candie (Leonardo di Caprio in a mad and evil impersonation of the Old South). They embark on an anti-racism, anti-slavery rampage which is bursting with energy, passion and violence.
The acting by the aforementioned and by most other actors (especially by Samuel L Jackson) is fantastic. The music is fantastic. The cinematography is fantastic. Django Unchained abounds with references to other works of film, among them of course the soundtrack of the original Django (1966) and a meeting of the old Django (Franco Nero) with the young one.
As you would expect from a film made by Quentin Tarantino, it is at times very brutal, with a forced fight between two slaves, the whipping of Django’s wife and an encounter with dogs (which confirmed my fear of those creatures) among the most horrifying scenes. The shootouts on the other hand are so overblown that they are almost funny (the character played by Quentin Tarantino himself dies in a massive explosion). The film also does have a lot of funny scenes, from great dialogues to the Ku Klux Klan scene. In fact, I already had to burst out in laughter at the very opening of the film when Dr Schultz’s wagon with the wobbling tooth came riding along.
Django Unchained is a Western action thriller comedy which excels in each of these four genres. The film is 2 hours and 45 minutes long, but I did not notice the time at all. A great film, which is not a minute too long.
From an article in The Huffington Post about a young man who took part in a riot:
“Rag Gu Rock Gue Kim, also known as Rocky, was caught on video during the June 2011 riot damaging vehicles and trying repeatedly to set a truck outside the post office on fire.
[…]
Kim did not say anything in court Wednesday, but during his sentencing hearing Kim said he no longer expects to be accepted at a medical school because of his criminal record, so he plans to become a lawyer instead.”
Based on my extensive list of travels, this is probably the question I get asked most: “How do you finance your travels?” Many people tell me that they enjoy my blog and my travel photos, adding “I wish I could afford to travel as well.” – Today I will explain how I do it and how you may be able to afford much more than you think you can. I am also curious to hear more advice from fellow travellers.
1. income and expenses
The first thing to keep in mind is that your cashflow is determined by two monetary streams: income and expenses. If the first one is higher than the second one, you are doing fine. The first mistake that many people make is that they think about how much they need to work every month to be able to pay what they pay now. – I do it the other way round: I address what I am spending every month and try to reduce it. Keep your expenses low and you will have to earn less, work less, you will be less stressed and you will have more freedom.
2. keeping the expenses low
In order to keep the expenses low, you have to look at all the things that you spend money on. For most people, the biggest chunks are rent, food and a car.
I decided to get rid of my car and I am saving thousands of $ every year. A car is one of the most stupid things to own because it sits there idly 90% of the day. I think there are only two useful scenarios for a car: (1) You get rid of your apartment/house and live on the road. (2) You share the car with many other people, keeping the expenses per person low.
The single biggest chunk of your monthly expenditure probably goes to your landlord or to your mortgage. You are either making the landlord rich or the bank (or your children who will inherit your house once it will be paid off). None of this makes sense.
Everything in life is about priorities. Any 10 $ that you spend on your phone bill, gas, or a movie ticket will be missing from your travel savings. I always have to laugh when people with cars, expensive phones and expensive clothes ask me “but you must have a lot of money to travel so much?” No, I don’t, but I am content with my old phone, without a car and with second-hand clothes.
3. saving money by travelling
Now comes the best part: I do not save money for travelling, but I actually save money by travelling. How that? Easy: by moving to a cheaper place.
When I moved from London to Malta, many of my friends and co-workers in London were openly envious: “I wish I could afford to move to the Mediterranean.” It made me both laugh but also despair at people’s financial and maths skills. When I lived in London, I paid 550 € per month for a room in a shared flat in a normal residential area in London. When I moved to Malta, I paid 150 € for a larger room in a shared flat. It had a balcony from which I could see the Mediterranean Sea, it had a roof terrace for barbecues and it was a 30-second walk to the sea. I paid a fourth of my previous rent, but I gained in quality of life.
By travelling, I save money. Every month.
I have now moved to Vilnius where I was able to rent a whole apartment (furnished) for 200 € per month. I pay much less than I used to pay a year ago in London and I have much more space.
Rent is not the only factor. Many countries will also have lower transport costs, lower food and restaurant prices, lower prices for anything than your home country. If you follow the business section of your newspaper, you will get a sense for what countries are cheap. Where income or GDP are low, prices will be low as well. Numbeo is a very useful site to compare prices for everything from meals to rents.
Another trick is to stay away from capital cities. Very often, the second city of a country will be much cheaper, but the transport links will be just as good and you might even have more of the original culture of that country left there.
4. long-term travelling
Of course this trick works best with long-term travelling where you are willing to both give up your home and take up a new temporary residence for a few months. I prefer to stay in one place for several months, use it as a base to explore the whole country or even the neighbouring countries and get to know the people and the culture and the history. To me, this is a more intense and rewarding experience than hopping through all of Europe in 14 days.
5. Time is more important than money.
I don’t agree that “time is money”. I think time is much more valuable than money. Therefore, the best thing about saving money (whether by travelling or otherwise) is that you save time. How? The less expenses you have, the less you need to earn, the less you need to work.
When I lived in Germany and then the UK, I had to work all week, every month to pay the bills and to survive. If I could take a few weeks off each year, I was lucky. Now, my expenses are so low that I can cover them with working only 1 or 2 weeks per month. The rest of the time I am a free person.
Every $ that you don’t spend is free time that you have gained. Every item not bought is a day in the forest or at the beach. Every phone contract not signed is a trip to the desert.
6. “But how do you earn money?”
Many travel blogs don’t mention at all where the money comes from. If you have 100,000 $ in savings, it’s no big deal to travel. I don’t have any savings, and my blog is different: I will tell you exactly how I finance this lifestyle.
What I would recommend for work depends completely on your skills, your abilities and what you enjoy doing. I try to focus on work which I can do from anywhere in the world (as long as I have internet). In my case, I work as a freelancer and I can be hired for lawyering, translation and academic writing projects. The trick is to work for clients in the EU or North America and charge the corresponding fees, while living in a low-expense country oneself. My clients find me through this blog, my website and freelance websites like People per Hour or Upwork.
My goal for 2013 is to move into journalism, obviously also with the intention of being able to get paid to travel and write about my trips.
There is a lot of freelance work available. If you are good with computers, you’ll find plenty of work. If you speak several languages, you can work as a translator or teach languages. Generally, practical skills are much more useful than academic skills. If I had learned how to cook or how to repair a car, I would get much better work than with my law degree which is rather useless once you leave the jurisdiction in which it was obtained. There are also many possibilities to work in exchange for a room and food, for example on farms, in hostels or on ships.
As you see, it doesn’t work without work, but at least work no longer takes up the majority of my time.
7. The best things in life are free.
Under no. 5 I already explained that money is far less important than time. Some of the best things in life are free.
Wherever I go, it is usually the nature that impresses me most. A beautiful forest, an evening on the beach, a magnificent sunset, the power of the sea or a long walk across the whole country. None of these places or sights charge anything.
If you are more into social contacts, meeting interesting people on your trips is also free. Whether you chat up the Bedouin in the desert or you listen to the stories of kibbuzniks, you will gain insights beyond your expectations. A great way to meet people is Couchsurfing, a website where people are willing to meet strangers that come to their town or area and spend some time with them, often even allowing you to stay at their place. I have had several guests staying with me, and listening to the stories that they told about their travels was almost as good as travelling myself.
8. There is no risk.
Many people are afraid of taking that plunge of leaving everything behind, even though they also want to see the world. But I am not sure what they are afraid of.
Just do it! You have nothing to lose.
If your plans abroad don’t work out, you can always return and move in with your parents again. You can always return to your home country and find an office job again. If you don’t like the vagabond life anymore, you will quit it. You don’t really risk anything by going on a long journey, but you have a lot to gain. Enjoy!
In the right hand column of this blog you see a flag counter which records the number of visitors from each country. As of today, this blog has had visitors from 204 different countries. The US, Germany and the UK are the top three countries. (The distribution on my German blog is of course different.) From many countries, like Niger, Gabon and Vanuatu, I have only had one visit so far. The latest country to be added to the list was Liberia on 5 December 2012.
Some smart-ass will say “But there are only 193 countries in the world”, probably referring to the number of UN member states. But of course you don’t need to be a member of the UN in order to be a state; just take the examples of Taiwan or Kosovo. And then there are a number of disputed territories.
In any case, just click on the flag counter on the right hand side to get the details. If you dispute the independence of Kosovo or believe that the Falkland Islands belong to Argentina, you can take your fight to the company that made this flag counter – or discuss it in the comment section below.
More interestingly, the flag counter also lists 33 countries from where my blog has not yet had a single visitor.
The countries or regions that are still missing are:
Thinking about how this list will be reduced over time, I have been wondering: “Which country will be the last one to remain on this list?” Where will people refuse to read my writings until the bitter end? Or: where are people so happy that they don’t even think of wasting their time on the internet? – And I decided to make the promise (or threat) that I will visit the country which will be the last remaining one to have ignored my blog and I will then write and report extensively about it.
(Found at Freakonomics.)
I know that Americans are wondering why somebody from Germany would want to live in America, with the economic and social factors that we enjoy in Germany, with the lack of school and other shootings and with politicians working together across party lines, even in an election year.
But you don’t know how boring Germany can be!
I have come up with the ultimate test to determine someone’s age, their general education and how corrupted or uncorrupted their mind is. The best thing: it’s not some complicated test which takes hours to administer and weeks to evaluate. The test only involves two words.
Situation 1:
You are talking to somebody about the Dodo and he or she doesn’t understand what you are talking about. Sooner or later he or she asks “Are you actually talking about a dildo?”
Situation 2:
You are talking about a dildo and the other person doesn’t seem to understand. Sooner or later he or she asks “Is this something similar to the Dodo?”
Situation 1 is an indication that the other person is younger than 30 years, not too well-read and has a highly corrupted mind. Situation 2 on the other hand indicates that you are talking to me or someone like me.
The video of people moving in a weird way which I found funny in 1970:
– – –
The video of people moving in a weird way which people found funny in 2012:
It seems to be that time again in which at least some of the different calendars used around the world come to an end. No, I don’t mean the Mayan calendar. I mean those which only have 12 months and then you have to buy a new one. People call it the “end of the year”.
I don’t need such a calendar because I can easily tell when this time approaches by the number of people who ask me “What are you going to do for New Year’s Eve?” When this question first pops up, it is exactly 2 weeks until the new year. The question then continues to be raised every day with increasing frequency, until one day it disappears and people are either hung over or get up at 0800 to go running with newly purchased running shoes. Then I know that it is the first day of the new year.
I have always hated that question “What are you going to do for New Year’s Eve?” because I failed to see what was so special about a day in the calendar. The next day would be another day, and it would be just as long, as cold or as busy as the day before. I actually often slept at midnight when everybody else was partying and burning off fireworks, because sleeping is what sensible people do at midnight.
So what am I going to do for New Year’s Eve this year? I may – depending on my workload – escape to the Baltic Sea, take the ferry to the Curonian Spit, walk 50 km through the snow in sub-zero temperatures, enjoy the nature and the expected solitude and try to fend off the wolves. If I won’t get to do it on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, I will do it a few days later. It doesn’t matter to me which calendar we’re on and which year we’re in.
If you don’t have any plans yet, I recommend the following:
By the way, there is also no point in making New Year’s resolutions.
Sunsets are beautiful. If you don’t love them, something is wrong with you and you might as well get off my blog. On second thought, if something is wrong with you, maybe this blog is exactly for you. In any case, I’ll teach you how to take beautiful photos of a sunset today.
1. Find a good location.
Nature is usually better than a city because the sun sets on the horizon and buildings tend to get in the way of your view. I will use an example from my time in Malta to illustrate the search for a perfect spot. Malta is an island and the sun will set in the West. By going to the West coast of the island, I will see the sun setting in the sea, with no buildings or any other obstacles or distractions between the ball of fire and my camera.
So I went to the West coast of Malta and found a peaceful and beautiful spot. I went to the coast south of Il-Majjistral Nature Park, at Għajn Tuffieħa.
You see that I got there with plenty of time until sunset. That’s important. You want to have time to walk around and find a good and comfortable spot where you can sit or lay down with your camera – or set up your tripod if you have more equipment than me. By the way, this is also where I saw the paraglider.
2. Find the sun.
If the sky is clear, that’s easy. The sun is the big shiny round thing in the sky.
You see it? Hard to miss, you have to admit.
3. Take photos of the sun.
You may have learned to never take photos directly into the sun. That is usually true. I always have to cringe when I see people photograph other people against the sun. It won’t work. But today, it’s exception day because in order to photograph a sunset, you have to expose your camera directly to the sun until the very last moment in which it will drop behind the waterline. (Although you can also get beautiful impressions by using the last glows of the sun and their reflection on other objects, like here or here. Or you can use the sunset as a backdrop to something more dramatic, like here, but that is neither the mission of the day, nor can you predict when the waves will be that strong. )
As you see, I was actually moving around between different locations, in violation of my previously given advice (which, in my defence, I had not yet given by the time I was doing this). I personally can do that because I am really fast and because I can move smoothly like a gazelle even in hostile terrain. You probably can’t do that, so you better stick to one location.
Some clouds are not that bad. Even more clouds would have been OK, as they often add a dramatic touch. And notice how I picked a spot from where the rock in the sea is in one line with the mirrored light of the sun. That’s how you recognize a professional.
These last photos again show how much I was running around between different spots to get different compositions. It was exhausting.
And then comes the moment when the sun touches the horizon and it looks like it sinks into the Mediterranean Sea.
You only have a few minutes now, so just keep shooting.
That’s it. A beautiful end to a warm day in spring.
4. Return home.
Now comes the part which I myself had completely disregarded in my typically exuberant excitement: Once the sun has set, you have a maximum of 30 minutes of natural light left (unless there is moonlight, which in my case wasn’t available). If you live in a city or in fact anywhere close to civilization, you may not know how dark it can get after sunset, but I can tell you: it gets completely dark. I had forgotten to bring a torchlight. So much about the professionalism which I had claimed before.
Those of you have been hiking with me know that I am good in finding “shortcuts”. I wanted to find one that day as well, because I don’t like walking back the same way I had come. Bad idea. I ended up walking through gardens and fields, was chased by dogs and hunters, fell into cacti and in the end I fell into the ruins of an excavated Roman bath. From there, I could finally climb the fence to get onto the road where the bus which I tried to stop almost hit me, again for lack of any light on my part. I came home a few hours later, totally exhausted, but happy. Both the shower and the dinner felt better than usual.
The Happy Hermit 