Minimum Life Traveling Baggage

If I look back at the most successful posts on this blog (and there are more than 500 articles published so far) they’re all emerged as part of interactions, not as standalone revelations or epiphanies. They became popular only when they were part of some challenge or response to other bloggers.

I don’t know if this is the rule on the internet, but it’s certainly true for this blog. For instance, 100 Ways To Live A Better Life, a blog post with more than 250.000 unique page views, was part of a challenge from another blogger. A quarter of a million people can’t be wrong.

So, I decided to take on challenges more often. Of course, I will apply some filters. I won’t engage in challenges I don’t like or in stupid link memes. But if there’s something that really rings a bell inside, I will follow. And that’s exactly what happened this morning when I read this blog post by Nina Yau, from Castles In the Air.

In short, it’s a challenge about your fundamental or non-avoidable luggage that you will be willing to take on a distant journey. I dig distant journeys. Been around the world twice, visiting Vegas, Japan, Thailand or New Zealand. Even came up with 44 tips for traveling long distance.

But enough with that. Let’s get back to the point. I split the challenge into 3 main parts. First one is about what I think it’s absolutely necessary to take on a journey. Things I can’t live without. The second part is what I call “nice to have”, things that would be cool to have, but not compulsory. And the third part is about what I will leave behind.

Unavoidable

Things I can’t really leave the house without.

Id papers

From a long experience I know these are fundamental. We live in a world which needs written proof of your existence. Without it, you’re not there. So, I usually take with me my identity card (in Europe I can travel only with that, I don’t need a passport), my driver license and my passport.

Money

In the form of the most used currencies (USD, Euros) or debit cards. I own only one credit card and I keep it topped most of the time, just as an emergency package. The debit cards are used to carry cash in a little bit more flexible way. Never used traveler checks so far.

Basic Digital Gear

By that I mean: laptop, iPhone, iPad. I’m a digital nomad and traveling without any of these won’t make sense.

Pens And A Moleskine

Again, from a long experience I learned that you need to fill in a lot of papers when you travel and if you don’t have a pen handy you will lose a lot of time. The Moleskine is needed as backup if any other digital method of storing information fails me (out of power, broken, etc).

Clothes

For maximum 2 days. A pair of bluejeans, two teeshirts, one shirt, 2 bandanas (I’m hearing my head shaved so I need a way to protect if from sun), socks and underwear. At any decent hotel you can find a DIY washing facility so you don’t need to carry any extra clothing in your luggage. But I still think I need to be covered with clothes for at least 2 days.

A Pair Of Shoes

Only one, and I prefer Caterpillars. They’re good on pretty much any terrain (urban or hiking) and they’re very resistant. I seldom carry more than one pair of shoes in my luggage.

Basic Self Care Stuff

Tooth brush, tooth paste, soap and that also includes some fundamental meds (antibiotics are hard to get in some countries, for instance, and a band-aid never hurts) and sunscreen. After getting burned a few times on some of the most strange meridians of this globe I decided I will never leave home without it.

Backpack

I have a Crumpler which went all over the world with me. But if I didn’t have one I would pick a backpack which can accommodate at least 2 days worth of me: clothes, self-care products and digital gears, and yet will be still easy to carry.

Nice To Have

Things that I usually take with me if I know where I’m going to or if the initial research gave the impression I could.

DSLR Camera

It’s a nice to have equipment but also requires a great deal of attention. So I don’t consider it a fundamental gear.

Local Phone Cards

Not necessary if you’re going there for the first time (and kinda hard to get it in advance) but if you know you’re going there at least a few times per year (like I do with New Zealand) it’s good to have one handy. Prepaid phone and internet cards.

Sun Glasses

I kinda hesitated if I should put it this under unavoidable, but I think you can do without it, and get one pair when you’re at your destination. But again, if you travel a lot and if you’re in some very sunny countries (New Zealand or Australia would be a good example) you need to have a very good piece of equipment with you. It can make a lot of difference.

Extra Clothing

A jacket, a pullover, stuff like that. Just in case the weather goes bad on me.

To Leave Behind

Everything that doesn’t really matters.

Furniture

In fact, all you need is a bed for the night and some tables and chairs every once in a while. You can get those at motels or restaurants.

Car

I did a few trips by car, but it proved to be more cumbersome than I thought. Now, even if I go pretty close, I do it without the car.

Garden

Of course, it’s impossible to take it with you. As much as I love taking care of my vineyard and my cherry tree and my flower garden, I am somehow relieved to leave it back.

TV Set

Of course. Who needs that, anyway?

Kitchen Gear

I like to cook and I do it quite often. But when traveling I’m again relieved to not take care of that.

Maintenance Tasks

These are not technically objects, but they do take a lot of our time and it feels good to leave them behind. Or at least I feel good to leave them behind.

The Aftermath

If you really look at the items you have when you travel, it isn’t that much. Life should really be a holiday and enjoyed as such.

The Anatomy Of A Blog Post

Whenever I stretch myself enough to get out of the comfort zone, wonderful things are happening to me. As you already know, I am on a trip to Japan these days. Whenever I am on longer trips I usually stretch myself a lot out of the comfort zone, by projecting my activities into a complete realm of unknown. This trip is even more demanding as I barely know the language and find that getting over small tasks like eating and finding directions is quite a challenge for me. It surely gets me out of the comfort zone, that I can tell you.

The good news is that each time I’m getting out of the comfort zone I find new perspectives to old stuff. I start to look at things I already know from different angles. Of course, I already wrote about that in the travel as a personal development tool, so if you want to find out more you can read on. In today’s post I’ll share a refreshing perspective about my blog posts. In fact, this is a fresher perspective of all blog posts, not only mines.

Your Blog Post Is A Traveler

Once you hit the “Publish” button, something magic happens to your article: it starts to travel. It becomes independent and it engages on a journey of its own. Your blog post becomes a traveler. And everything you wrote into it will carry your message in a special way. Here’s how various components of your blog post will influence your traveler’s story.

Keywords And Tags

Your keywords and tags are the invisible structure of your blog post. In the blogging world, every traveler is defined by a series of invisible attributes and those are the keywords. No one really see those before seeing the traveler but most of the time the traveler is found because of those tags.

Every time you chose your keywords and tags think of what you would like your traveler to be found. Are those tags relevant for the traveler? Are they enhancing his story or another story? It will be easier to be found by other people?

Paragraphs And Images

Those are the visible appearance of your article. The other people will actually see and perceive your traveler based on these forms. It’s not about the actual message but mostly how it is presented, it’s the fine and subtle clothing that shapes your traveler’s body.

Is it properly dressed? Those paragraphs are aligned with the traveler type and gender? Is it fashionable? Remember to check your blog post structure every time you’re ready to publish, you’ll always find some small adjustments to make.

Links

Links are the hooks your traveler send to other traveler or other countries. These are pointers that your traveler holds for proving his friendship and / or his grudges (in case of linkbaiting). In other words, think at the links in your posts as some friendly pats on the back to other guys.

Are those pats polite? Are they understandable? The other guy will benefit from those links? In case you’re linking to your own post, you’re telling the right story? Keep in mind that your popularity might be judged by the number and quality of your pats on the backs sometimes.

Categories

Your blog post categories act like countries, in the sense of defined territories. Your traveler comes from those areas. It is defined by the categories in the same way we think at citizenship. In case you’re using only tags and not categories, this is even more important as they will shape its invisible structure too.

Are your countries correct? Your blog post is comfortable with its categories? Your traveler is having a real citizenship? It is this citizenship in sync with your blog post values? In case it’s not, your blog post will be hard to recognize?

Title

The title of your blog post is the exact address. If categories are the countries, the titles are the exact address where the traveler can be found. Most of the time, this address must be unique in order to keep your traveler’s house easy to find.

Are your titles easy to remember (that’s fundamental for an address, you know)? Are your titles unique? If not, your traveler might share a house with several other travelers which can make him a little difficult to spot.

Downloadables

If you have downloadables in your post, those are usually perceived like gifts. Every people on Earth loves gifts. They can be anything, from simple diagrams or mind maps to complicated plugins or complete ebooks. But your traveler is carrying a gift now, which will make him much more appealing.

Are your posts carrying gifts? Is not always mandatory but when you can add some gifts to your traveler, don’t hesitate, it will make his journey much more easier. A traveler with gifts is usually a very easy to recognize and can become famous in time.

The Words

That’s the real message, that’s what your traveler speaks. That’s your blog post story. If your traveler is telling a complicated story, people will stop listening. Even if he’s well dressed, from a famous country and with a respectable address, even if he’s carrying gifts and he’s friendly enough, if his story is boring, people won’t listen.

A traveler with a nice, entertaining message can come from a less popular country, can share an address with many other travelers (if his message stands out of course) can have no friends in the beginning and can be unfashionably dressed. You can take care of these later, but the message is crucial.

Is your traveler ready to tell YOUR story? Is your blog post in good shape, prepared to carry your message? If not, make this traveler happy to hit the road for you.

This Post Mind Map

Well, that’s a gift – I’m trying to bribe you, right – a mind map for this post.

The Anatomy Of A Blog Post (1004)

Keep it closer to you and have a look from time to time. Or even make it into a habit and write your posts as if they’re set to travel the world. Round and round.

Perfect versus Better

We tend to define perfection as the absence of flaws, which is inherently wrong, since flaws are part of the reality. Too often, our perception of perfection as a flawless situation or individual proved to be not only difficult to learn, but plain wrong and deceivable. Striving for perfection causes more harm than good, leading into a land of frustration, weariness and misery.

Defining something by the absence of something else is a mindset of incompletion, a hedonistic and fearful approach. It’s hedonistic because we try to isolate only the “good” things from the whole, and it’s fearful because we do that by fear of the other, “bad” side. Choosing only one side of the coin is useless and ineffective. You can’t have a full coin if you chose only one side of it.

On the other hand, being just better assumes you know your flaws and accept them. You’re just getting better, not perfect. You’re embracing your whole structure. Not seldom, what you considered to be “flaws” are just violent pointers for a path you refuse to see or to take. What you may call “flaw” is in fact just an open window for another reality, usually much better than the current one.

Dry Future versus Rich Present

When you move your focus from your current reality and projecting it into a future, flawless reality in which you are perfect, you are depriving yourself from the only precious tool you have: your present time. When you step out of the living second and project yourself into a dry future you’re not actually living to the full. Whenever you strive for perfection you step out from the current time space continuum and try to insert into another, illusory one.

Whenever you strive for getting better, you’re in the present moment. You have to continuously assess your progress, you have to keep your focus on what you’re doing. If you had goals, you have to constantly check if you reached them. And if you did, you have to evaluate your options and set up the next goals. When you chose to become better, you never get out of your current time space continuum. Your present is real. And is rich.

Destination Oriented versus Traveling Oriented

When you strive for perfection you’re destination oriented: your goal is to attain a certain state, a flawless situation in which you are perfect. When you strive for being better you’re traveling oriented: your goal is not so much the destination, which changes continuously, but the travel itself.

I find much more joy by traveling than by arriving to a certain destination. As long as the current destination is also the departure point for my next trip, I can understand and I enjoy it. But if my final destination is reached, that means it’s the end of the travel. My trip has to stop. Which I simply don’t want to happen. I enjoy the trip much too much.

Focus On Bad vs Focus On Good

Striving for perfection is such a wearing attitude, it really drains you out. In fact, striving for perfection is quite a negativistic approach, if you look carefully. Since we define perfection as the absence of flaws, when we strive for perfection we focus on eliminating our flaws. Hence, we focus on flaws, instead of things we can improve.

Striving to be better is a fulfilling attitude, it fuel your body and mind. Striving for the better is focusing on the positive side. By accepting your flaws as part of your inherent nature, focusing on becoming better forces you to focus on your positive qualities and start enhancing what you already have an can grow.

The Dumbo Paradigm

I guess you all know by now the famous Dumbo cartoon. For those living on planet Mars in the last  50 years, Dumbo is the touching story of a baby elephant which had a big problem: huge ears. So huge that it actually had integration problems in his environment, a circus. His mother had to defend him from picky boys saying bad things about it, the other workers in the circus were also bothered by the little cub which only use seemed to be a very dangerous leap into a bucket filled with water, and nothing more. That little elephant with those incredibly big ears was no good even in a circus. Dumbo was tainted by his flaw: those huge and almost obscene ears.

But after the little elephant touches the bottom of his sorrow, with a little help from his friends, stumble upon a great discovery. His ears are so big that it can actually… fly! Right, those ears are so big that it can become a flying mammal just by flipping them. His biggest flaw has become the trampoline for his biggest success. The cartoon ends with a happy image of Dumbo flying all over the country above its personal tour train.

There is much to be learned from this story, and I do intend to write another blog post about it, but for now I’ll just say that Dumbo became better not because he tried to eliminate his flaw, but because he accepted it and made the best out of it. Dumbo focused on becoming better not perfect. If Dumbo would have been a perfect elephant, I really doubt that Disney would have made a cartoon about it.

Perfection is boring. Getting better is where all the fun is.

Trip To Thailand – Day 1

I arrived in Bangkok at 10:30 on a Sunday morning. I checked in to my hotel, a nice one located in the Siam center area, and then went out for a quick check of the surroundings. Most of my impressions after this quick walk were described in the first post about the trip to Thailand. Not only I walked 3-4 blocks around the hotel in several directions, but I also checked out on the public transportation, changed some money in the local currency and tried to identify some shops and restaurants around the hotel area. A part from this, I also checked the hotel pool and spa, which, in total, took almost my entire Sunday.

So, although I arrived in Bangkok on a Sunday, I consider the next Monday to be technically my first day there. With just as much information as I needed, I started to explore Bangkok completely “a l’improvista” . Please be aware that this post contains more than 40 photos, so if you’re on a slow connection or just short in time, make sure you bookmark it and come back later to fully enjoy it.

I though that going with BTS a little far today, maybe until the end of the Silom branch, to the main pier for the boats that are crossing the Chao Phraya River would be a good idea. I went out from the hotel a around 10:00 AM. Outside it was cruelly hot and humid, but apparently that didn’t stop those who make their living by selling food on the streets.

Just 50 meters away from this street food vendor it was Gaysorn Plaza with the boldly BTS rails curbing away.

Watched the morning traffic for a few minutes

And then walked 5 minutes to the nearest BTS station from my hotel, Ratchadamri

I had to go 4 stations from Ratchadamri to the final station, Saphan Taksin, which is also the main pier for the boats which are cruising the Chao Phraya river. I took a one day ticket (120 BAHT) and waited for my boat. This ticket gave me the possibility to go out and down at any station whenever I wanted to for an entire day. While waiting, I watched the spectacular boats of the luxury hotels from the other shore ferrying their customers to this side of the river.

I started to read the brochure they gave me with the ticket. Apparently, there were around 8-9 piers where you could stop and for each pier there were listed some main attractions. I had no idea how much time would take to go to a specific pier, not to mention how much it will take to actually visit every attraction mentioned, but I decided to give it a try with the temples Wat Pho and Wat Arun. Wat Pho was on the same side of the river but for Wat Arun I should take a ferry (3 BAHT) to the other side of the river. In around 5 minutes my boat arrived and I walked on board along with a crowd of curious tourists. In about 6 minutes we were already at the Wat Pho pier. I get down on the boat and slowly walked into my first Bangkok individual exploring adventure. (more…)

The Trip To Thailand

Traveling for personal development isn’t just a recent post on my blog (quite popular if I’m looking at statistics) but a real lifestyle for me. I always do my best to practice what I’m preaching so several days ago I started a trip to Bangkok. A week before the trip I had no idea that I would go there. Bianca had a one week holiday from the kindergarten and Diana decided it could be great to spend it at their parents. That gave me a window of opportunity, so to speak, so I jumped on it.

Planning For Thailand

Planning the trip took me around 3 hours top, including printing vouchers and arranging payments. Everything was done online of course, and you can imagine I did planned a little loose. I bounced back and forth a little between orbitz, travelocity and expedia, and eventually chose expedia. I booked the flight, the hotel and 3-4 additional services, out of curiosity. For instance, I booked transfer from the airport and to the airport, and 2 half day tours.

If I would go again I won’t chose any of those services, because you can find your way around without them, but overall it was a useful experience. I know by now that a taxi fare to the airport from downtown Bangkok is no more than 400 BAHT (around 13-15 USD) and that a tour to one of the temples can be done with no more than 2-300 BAHT (including transport via BTS and Chao Phraya boat).

Oh, ok, ok, I started to talk a little ahead and mentioned things like BTS and the Chao Phraya river. I’ll stop that and come back to the main story because there is still some more to say until we’re in Bangkok. Just teasing you a little, of course.

Flying To Thailand

I flew with FinnAir and that proved to be a good choice overall. The route was Bucharest – Helsinki – Bangkok. The flights were very well connected and from what I read in the planes and in some of the materials in the airport, Helsinki is trying to become the first Europe – Asia flying hub. One of their key points in achieving that is to provide good flight connections and fast transfer of the passengers. When I flew to Bangkok I stayed in the Helsinki airport around 4 hours and when I come back I stayed around 3 hours. The airport is quiet, clean and it has free internet connection in one of its areas. Not in the whole airport, which is a little strange, so you have to go through passport check in order to reach the free internet area but it didn’t felt like an inconvenient to me.

From Bucharest to Helsinki I flew with an Embraer 170 which might be the tinier airplane I flew with so far. It’s an airplane manufactured in Brasil, quite exotic in Europe. But the Boeing MD 11, a somehow obsolete tri-jet which took me from Helsinki to Bangkok was even funnier. The entertainment system in the economic class consists on 4-5 large monitors with a fixed program for all passengers. All the other transcontinental flights I had so far had individual entertainment systems. Other than that, both planes proved to be extremely reliable, clean and well-serviced.

From Bucharest to Helsinki you fly 2:40 hours and from Helsinki to Bangkok 9:30-10-30 hours. When I got back I was so relaxed that I slept most of the time and when I arrived in Bucharest I actually didn’t felt tired at all. On the way to Bangkok I had some mild anxiety moments, but all of them were related to my old pattern of “not being able to enjoy stuff” that I’m working on for several years now. (more…)

Trip To New Zealand – first impressions

It’s my 3rd day in New Zealand and I finally found a little bit of time to blog about my impressions about this. First of all, this is what I call a “pulse taking” visit, in which I will try to incorporate as much information as I can about this country, while trying to understand at the emotional level how can I congruently vibrate with such an environment. The complete move, including my family and all the stuff I consider necessary to take with me will take place in 2-3 months. So I don’t have any specific goals for this visit, just trying to enjoy as much as I can.

Traveling

I had around 22 hours of flight in order to get here from Bucharest, and after adding the checkin times and other amounts of time spent in airports between flights I come up with a total of 37 hours of traveling time. Quite a lot. I had to go to Vienna first from Bucharest, from there a I took a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, and then from Bangkok I took the last flight for Auckland New Zealand. The last 2 flights were around 9 hours each. The second was with Thai Airlines, my first flight with them, and I had to say that I was pleasantly surprised about the quality of services. From the way the plane was prepared and presented, to the steward’s care for the passengers, everything was nice and easy. I even got a bunch of salads for dinner after I told to a steward that I am trying to keep a raw food diet, and I won’t eat the chicken whatsoever. Very nice .

There is another point that is worth mentioning about the travel and that is the very strict control about biosecurity. New Zealand is making a public statement about keeping the Earth green, and especially about preserving New Zealand natural habitat, and they are respecting it. You have to declare all the food you have with you, or any other plants in any form, even woodcrafts. You also have to declare even if you had camping in the last 30 days or if you have hiking boots with you. This is making even more difficult to enter the country, once you are in the airport, not to mention the time spent to get there, of course. If you are messing around with those things they can fine you up to 100.000 New Zealand Dollars. Auch!

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