Stories For Inspiration, Guides For Information

 

Looking for stories to inspire you to get out there and see the world?

 

How about guides to help you out, once you’re on the road?

 

Funny Travel Stories

When I was thinking about starting this site, I read hundreds of travel blogs as research. That was six months ago and today I only continue to follow a handful of them because most of them had one thing in common: they put me to sleep.

With my blog I wanted to avoid the generic “I went here and did and saw this” style of travel blog, because let’s face it: that’s only interesting to people you’re related to and even then, most of them soon find themselves lying about having read your latest updates.

The good blogs all offer something extra, be it good pictures, great writing, excellent advice, etc. My pictures suck, my writing’s average and my advice useless, so I had to come up with something else.

I decided to ignore most standard attractions and focus on places people don’t usually go and activities others don’t usually do. When I do write about something already covered exhaustively elsewhere, I try to look at it from a new perspective.

Travel is made up of just as many crazy, insane, chaotic, annoying, frustrating and ridiculous moments as it is amazing, beautiful, educational or wondrous ones and while I certainly touch on the latter, I prefer to focus on the former.

If that sounds like the most idiotic idea for a travel site you’ve ever heard, you probably should have stopped reading a few paragraphs ago. If not, why not have my new stories delivered directly to your inbox?

 

Budget Travel Guides

After a few months of nothing but stories, I started thinking it might not hurt if I made my site even the slightest bit useful to my readers. The five I’m not related too might actually be current or future travelers and might benefit from some of the things I’ve learned over the past nine years. With that, I started writing destination guides for the places I’ve been.

The main focus of my guides is budget travel. I give you tips on how and where to save money, even in destinations known for being expensive. I also try to focus on more offbeat attractions in lieu of the standard ones. I won’t mention many temples, parks, monuments, etc, unless they offer something unique. You can find plenty of information on those types of attractions elsewhere.

The travel guides are a work in progress and I am updating them slowly but surely, until I’ve covered all the places I’ve been over the past nine years. At that point, I’ll either hire people with firsthand experience in a location to write guides for places I haven’t been or I’ll just do some more traveling. Most likely the latter.

 

Who Am I?

I started traveling before I can remember, I suppose. I grew up in a military family and moved constantly as a result. I was born in the United States, but moved to Germany when I was four. We lived in Germany for the next eleven years, but not in one place, naturally.

We lived in five different cities in Germany before moving back to the US where I finished high school and university. After graduating from Washington State University with a BA in Business and an MBA, I moved to Las Vegas and then Chicago. At some point while living in Chicago, I decided to go work as an English teacher in Japan for a year. I suppose I was just bored with the US.

Within a few months of arriving in Fukuoka, Japan, I decided to extend my contract for another year. After the second year, I got bored again; I still had a year remaining on my work visa though, so I decided to move to Tokyo. I loved Tokyo and it remains my favorite of all the cities I’ve visited. I worked as a freelance teacher while there, taking various corporate gigs as well as accepting private students.

When my visa expired, I went to Southeast Asia and traveled around for a bit. Eventually my travels led me to China and by the time I got to Shanghai, the constant job offers being hurled my way got to me and I accepted one of them. I lived in Shanghai for two years, working in public schools, which left me with three months off during the summers (at half pay!) to travel around the country.

After finishing my work contract in Shanghai, I traveled around China and Southeast Asia a bit more, before deciding to return to Europe. I landed in Frankfurt and pretty much immediately bought a train ticket for Barcelona. I was thinking of working there for a year and really wanted to like the city, but I didn’t. I gave it a few days, thinking it might grow on me, but I liked it less every day, so I ended up hopping a train to Madrid.

It was much more to my liking and I stayed for a year. While there, I managed to find some time between all the partying to visit a few more Spanish cities and even make a quick trip to Morocco. After ten months in Spain I got pretty sick of it though, so I decided to join a friend working a summer camp in South Korea. My friend ended up not going, but I went anyway.

I liked Seoul enough to want to stay longer, so I went back to Japan for three months and then Southeast Asia for five as I waited for a new Korean visa. I ended up working in the north of Seoul for a year before once again hitting the road.

This time, I traveled continuously for a year and a half through most of Asia, including Nepal, India, Laos, Myanmar, and more of China and a few other countries I’d already been to as well. Then I left Asia for Europe and now find myself in Berlin. From here, I will………do something. I have no idea. And that’s how I like it.

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