Three years after the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize, we have mass graves in Europe again. But it’s easier to ignore them now, because this time they are at the bottom of the sea.
In a laboratory at the University of Milan, scientists go through the gruesome task of trying to identify the victims, a scene which we last saw after the wars in Yugoslavia.
To the people in that plane: You picked the wrong time to fly away. It’s so beautiful here in autumn.
That’s why I will spend two weeks in Germany before flying to Gran Canaria and then taking the boat to Brazil. OK, admittedly, it’s also because I still have a lot to prepare and many articles to write.
(Photographed on a walk from Ammerthal to Amberg in Germany on 31 October 2015.)
For All Saints’ Day (1 November), which is something like the Christian version of Halloween, it is customary to visit the cemetery and leave flowers and candles behind for the deceased relatives and friends. The custom seems to be respected mainly in Catholic areas and countries and even between them there are some differing traditions. From Southern Germany for example, I only remember visiting the cemetery during the day and leaving flowers. In Lithuania however, the whole affair is much spookier and more romantic: the visits to the cemetery happen late at night and thousands of candles light the cemetery.
Some graves are clearly more popular than others. The following photo shows the grave of the Lithuanian author Balys Sruoga, who wrote “Forest of the Gods”, a very memorable and shocking book about his experience in a Nazi concentration camp.
I took these photos during a tour which was organised by a local Couchsurfing member and which included Saulės, Bernardinų and Rasų cemeteries in Vilnius.
After the semi-successful completion of my mission in Romania, it’s time to move again. That means that I have to go through the same protocol as with every other move before.
Step 1
Burn all documents about the completed mission. For that purpose, it’s good to have a balcony. Otherwise, you may accidentally start a forest fire.
Step 2
Dismantle the computer you used for this job.
You have to destroy your computer because even after formatting it, some tech-savvy people could recreate your files or traces of your activity. And it’s far too dangerous to take a computer through the airport, where it can easily be confiscated under some pretext or where the data on your hard drive can be scanned (why do you think you have to push your notebook through these big machines separately from the rest of your luggage?).
After dismantling it, you put the parts into the bathtub or you boil them for 15 minutes. (Like with pasta, add salt and oil for better results.)
Step 3
You put all the parts into a bag and go for one last innocent walk around town, obviously making sure that nobody follows you. You will drop different parts in different rubbish bins and recycling containers all over town. Even if somebody found one part, they wouldn’t know about all the others.
For the hard drive, you take extra precautions. It’s best to go to a bridge across a river and to drop the hard drive into the ice-cold water under the cover of darkness. If possible, pick a pedestrian bridge where there is consequentially no traffic. (All the time you thought I was jogging around town for fun, I was looking for locations like this.)
Even though it’s not strictly part of the protocol, according to spy tradition, you should do this in a night with a full moon.
Mission accomplished.
Now I am ready for new adventures on the other side of the world!
My father e-mailed this photo from his hiking trip in Northern Italy.
When you go to Italy, don’t just go to Rome, Venice and Florence. Don’t just hang around in Toscana, where all the other tourists are. If you have limited time, I would even recommend to skip these places and go to the smaller, lesser-known towns, and to the mountains instead. The good thing about Italy is that it’s beautiful everywhere.
It’s October, but we already have November weather. As much as I will miss Romania (the rest of the country is more beautiful than the view from my window), on days like this, I know it was a clever decision to move to South America in November.
I get this question so often that I could launch into a speech explaining that traveling doesn’t need to cost much. In my case, I actually save money by traveling because I can live more cheaply in most countries than I could if I had stayed in Germany. Of course I need to work a bit, but who says you need to do this in the same country for all of your life?
I could expand on this, but sometimes, when someone tells me yet again how much they would love to see the world, if only they could afford it, I ask them to show me their phone. They pull out a fancy Samsung/Apple/something phone with touchscreen, camera, internet and so on, which cost them 550 $.
Then I pull out my phone and slam it on the table, explaining “that‘s the reason why I have been to 10 countries this year without working much.”
“How are these two things connected?” you wonder. I’ll tell you: This phone cost me 6 $ and I have had it since 2009. If you only buy a new iPhone every two years, you have spent at least 1,000 $ in that time. For the 994 $ which I saved, I can get enough plane tickets to fly around the globe.
You may have a monthly phone plan for 50 $, I charge my phone with 6 $ every month. By doing that, I save enough money every month for a cheap international flight or a train ticket across the country. That alone finances six return journeys a year. This March, I flew from Romania to Israel and return for 70 $ for example. Even my boat trip across the Atlantic next month will cost less than your phone did.
Of course, that’s just one example. I also spend less than 100 $ on clothes in a year – and yes, that includes the original Gabor hat I recently bought in Romania. Everything else, I buy from cheap or second-hand shops. As those of you who have met me can attest, I still look sharp. ;-)
Only with my shoes, I may be going a bit too far, literally. I fear they will fall apart soon.
My running shoes have even more holes, but I ran five half-marathons with them this year alone. Trust me, it’s really not the equipment or the gadgets that make you faster.
But we haven’t even started addressing the real money-wasters yet. Don’t get a girlfriend. Ok, seriously now: stay away from real estate and from cars.
This is my house
and this is my car.
Just kidding. Of course I would never buy a house or a car. I think of both as bottomless pits into which people throw their money. Cars are the worst. When I still had one, I used it maybe 5% of the time. The remaining 95% of the time, it took up space, cost insurance, taxes and repairs. Unless you drive all day and make deliveries with it, a car is the worst investment you can possibly make.
I will stop with the examples now because this article is not about clothes or phones or cars. It’s about priorities and about opportunity costs. Don’t go around complaining that you don’t have enough money to do A, if you prefer to spend/waste it on B! By the way, something similar applies to time.
And now we get to the real luxury. The funny thing is that by needing less money, I have so much more free time because I don’t need to work that much. That’s a real win-win situation, particularly if you have time-intensive hobbies which can be pursued relatively inexpensively, like traveling and reading in my case.
Whenever I see people toiling away at their desk or in their cubicle to save money to travel later, I wonder why they don’t quit their job or at least go part-time and travel now. Most of them are not really saving money to travel the world, instead they are working their ass off to make their landlord, their car dealer and the bank rich. If you want to save for a big dream, you have to really think about your priorities. On the train from Serbia to Romania, I met a young man from Tennessee who was on long journey around the world. He had saved for it for only one year, but in that one year, he had given up his apartment, moved back in with his parents, worked a lot, didn’t go out, didn’t get drunk and didn’t buy a new phone. “It sounds a hard thing to do for a 26-year old to move back to his parents’ house, but it wasn’t, because every day I thought of my trip around the world. I knew what I was doing it for.” In my experience, setting yourself a strict time limit for when you will shoulder your backpack and leave is important.
I don’t claim that everyone can do this. There are millions of people who don’t know how to fill their belly tonight. To them, all of this sounds like mockery. But if you can spend time reading my blog, it shows that you belong to the luckier part of the population. In that case, you can do it, too!
With Vingis Park, I had a large urban forest just around the corner from where I lived in Vilnius. Now in autumn, I miss it even more. I never tired of going there because the color of the leaves changed every couple of days.
This is how it looked exactly three years ago:
And then it would become night.
No, of course it is not. But one could be lead to believe so, looking at the list of projects carried out by an organization that donates shoes to poor children. Besides Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua and Timor-Leste, they have a project in the EU member state Romania.
Admittedly, some of the slums here really look like third-world places.
The Happy Hermit 