travel costs

I found some notes for blog entries I made while traveling which never got up here. The first one:

I'm not quite sure exactly how some of the people we met while traveling bankrolled their trips. I know people here weren't sure how we bankrolled ours (we worked in New Zealand, had some money saved, and used some credit cards). There were, I'm sure, people whose parents were paying for it. The English just saved up some money and then saw its value double or triple once they started exchanging pounds into other currencies. Other people had obviously laid out money for a round-the-world ticket and then squeaked by on odd jobs and low standards. We met a couple of people who had bought or inherited property they were renting, and using that income to travel.

One German guy we met in New Zealand had an even better system. He'd simply registered for classes. I didn't verify the details, but according to him Germany not only gave him free tuition, but also a living stipend and insurance as a student. So he simply wasn't showing up for his classes, since he happened to be about 11,000 miles away.

a funny thing happened on the way to berlin...

In 2004, I traveled to Germany as the third stop on a European tour and found the language impenetrable and the country extremely foreign.
In 2006, I traveled to Geramany after spending six weeks in Asia and was amazed at how much meaning I could parse from the written language and how un-exotic the culture seemed.

I'm so far behind on posting things my stories are going to be well out of date by the time they get up here - it'll probably be when I get back to the States and just want a place to put the stories.

We are now in Ireland - spent a day in Dublin and are heading west to meet our friends in Cavan (more New Zealand flatmates). This will conclude our New Zealand reunion - in the last few weeks we've seen Stephen and Reike in Germany, we just left Lang and Steph in Newcastle, and now we're off to see Paul and Kieran.

The tour has been good - it's been great to see everyone, although we haven't always had enough time to see them. We ran into a serious time crunch at the end of Germany. In Freiburg we spent a couple days with some family friends of my uncle, who showed us wonderful hospitality, took us on a day trip into France and walks in the Black Forest. We also found time to see Reike, our former flatmate, although since she was working and we only had a few days, our time was short.

We left Scotland this weekend for Newcastle and stayed with another set of flatmates, Steph and Lang. They managed to get a couple days off work and took us on tours of the countryside (and then on drinking tours of all Northern England's beers). Also had a day to wander around the city, including the old castle.

Not sure what we'll be doing the next few weeks. Two weeks in Ireland, then a weekend in London, a few days in Iceland and back to the States...

those wacky british...

Exchange with the immigration desk after arriving in Glasgow, Scotland from Germany:

Official: How long will you be staying?
Me: About 10 days.
Official: And what is your next destination?
Me: Ireland.
Official: Yeah. How long will you be staying in the UK, including the Republic of Ireland?


And I thought they'd settled the independence question years ago...

steven

This is Steven, our one-time flatmate in Wellington. This week we traveled to Magdeburg, Germany, to renew our friendship. In Magdeburg we sat up and talked while playing dice at his kitchen table, met his latest collection of wonderful flatmates, made a half-day side trip to Berlin, stayed up far too late generally, and definitely stayed up too late on Saturday, our final night. We accompanied Steven to his friend's birthday party. By the end of the night I was talking with someone who barely knew English (I, of course, know no German). He made statements in his language, I made statements in mine, and we had what I think was a rather lengthy and enjoyable discussion in which neither of us knew what the other was saying.

This German trip has been quite nice - it's always good to have someone to talk to when you are in an unfamiliar town, especially if that someone is also giving you a free place to sleep. We've been quite lucky, especially since two of our stops have been to visit people who we did not know two months ago and who we previously met only for a few days during our travels. Everyone has been very gracious (we're in Munich now, staying in the apartment of a guy we met in Thailand. We knew him for three days before we arrived, and here he handed us the key to his apartment so we could stay even though he isn't in Munich tonight). What goes unsaid, and mostly unthought about, is the fact we are unlikely to see these people again. I hope they take us up on our own offer to house them on any future trips to the States, but the odds are against it. Even an email correspondence might die out over the passage of time.
It's nice to think, however, people are willing to put us up even though this probably will be a momentary blip of acquaintance rather than a lasting friendship.

Hopefully we will be able to reciprocate for some of them. We will have a definite karma debt to repay.

the couch-surfing tour continues

To Giessen, Germany, a small university town just north of Frankfurt. We're staying with a couple we met while sailing in Australia. We met lots of people over the course of the past year from several different countries who offered us a place to stay, but no country's people have come through on those promises quite like the Germans. We have a couple of old flatmates here we planned on visiting, and then we're breaking up the trip here and in Munich, with some travelers met on the hill trek in Thailand.
We're also getting help in Scotland, and should have a lot in Ireland. Unfortunately for Ryan, the rest of our London connections never did materialize.

filling up the passport...

Left London today to fly into Germany, where we'll be for the next week and a half.
It's my second time in Germany, although the first time around two years ago was mostly just a brief stop in the middle of a long train ride from Amsterdam to Prague. On that trip Germany seemed like a very foreign destination. Now, after six weeks in Asia and 14 months away from the States, Germany seems like a very easy place to travel. Sure, a lot of things aren't written in English (although quite a bit is). But at least you can figure out a bit of what is going on with German, or at least pretend you can, which is something you can't do with Chinese.

It's one aspect of a larger difference I'm noticing after a few months of solid traveling. On my first trips to Europe, and even when arriving in New Zealand, there was a serious feeling of displacement. Even London, on arrival after a long flight when you have`t been abroad, seems like a very foreign place. When I first got into London the jetlag and culture shock froze my brain; it took at least a day to even recognize the language people were speaking to me was English and I should be able to parse their meaning and perhaps even respond.
I haven't had quite as much of the displacement buzz when we've arrived at our last few destinations - probably not since Bangkok. Switching languages, surroundings and cultures is starting to seem like the ordinary manner of things, rather than a huge abrupt change requiring a serious mental effort to accommodate.
This is a good thing, I suppose, in that it means I've traveled around enough to deal with different environments much faster. But I do miss the feeling of arriving into a complete unknown. Not just the unknown of a place you haven't been, but the unknown of a mental shift and adjustment you haven't made anywhere before. Just landing in London that first time set off a buzz in my brain for a few days, and that's always fun.

One other downside to becoming used to traveling is being totally unprepared for jetlag. Before, jetlag was an excuse to explain the brain's inability to keep up with all the new input. When I arrived in London, since it didn't seem particularly daunting, I also expected my body to adjust as easily as my mind. My body had other ideas.
We left Beijing around 11 a.m. (which meant a 6:30 a.m. wakeup call). It was a 10-hour flight across seven time zones, so we landed around 2 p.m. It was a long period of daylight, and by the time we got to bed, our bodies were at about 4 a.m. although the clocks were at 9 p.m. I figured a sleep would put me right, but all week I felt a wave of fatigue hit in the late afternoon.