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.
Death in itself is nothing to fear. We know it will happen, and we know it has to happen, for otherwise the world would become even more crowded. It is the time and the manner of death that we fear.
Regarding the latter, lies are being told every day. “He was dead instantly”, “it happened so quickly, she didn’t even realize what was going on”, “they didn’t feel any pain” two men misinform the bereaved family across the door sill before they return to their sedan to work down the list with eight remaining names and addresses scattered throughout the state like cow dung on a meadow, wondering where to stop for lunch.
A Boeing 777 working hard on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur fell from the sky over Ukraine on 17 July 2014. Everyone on board died.
The plane was shot down, which happens surprisingly often to unsuspecting civilian aircraft. It was nothing personal against Malaysia Airlines or anyone on board. Quite the contrary, it was one of these accidents bound to happen when a bunch of separatist rebels get new a weapons system and nobody volunteers to read the thick manual. Like when you got that air gun for your 14th birthday, or – for my American readers – the AR-15 assault rifle for your 8th.
Once again, some airline dude or the coroner or a priest is going to tell the families that their disappeared sons and moms “didn’t feel a thing”. Except that this time we know it’s not true. Looking at these photos from the crash site, I can see a lot of items looking better preserved than in most children’s bedrooms. These books aren’t bent or burnt, these clothes aren’t torn or seared.
If books don’t burn and teddy bears don’t bleed to death, then at least some of the passengers must have survived the impact of the missile as well. This has always been my worst fear when flying: the scenario of a disintegrating plane and me, still conscious, falling for several minutes, towards certain and brutal death, with no way to stop or shorten the suffering. Plus hundreds of other people in the air, all screaming or texting on their phones as they race towards potato fields and power lines. Plop – plop – plop, three hundred times.
After seeing these photos, I know my fear was justified. I will make it a point to prefer trains and boats on my future travels. Or maybe planes should be equipped with extra explosives to ensure a sudden and truly painless death.
(Klicken Sie hier für die deutsche Fassung dieses Beitrags.)
Photographed at Kalemegdan fortress in Belgrade, Serbia in October 2014.
