They love ham. Smoked, halal, superstar chef recommended, Italian, unsalted, made from chicken, 2 slices, 4 slices, 6 slices, 8 – you want ham? They got ham. You want anything else?
Non.
I try to learn a new word every day. I have French class but it’s not teaching me the words that I am really interested in, so I rely on colleagues and friends. This process is haphazard at best, for example I know how to say “you are talking a bunch of crap” and “this shit sucks” but I don’t know the words for spoon, fork or knife.
This will be a weekly feature, for now let me introduce you to the wonderful word of French I have become acquainted with so far.
C’est le bon dieu qui t’a puni – karma strikes, or in Dutch ‘God straft meteen’.
Nous prenons boire une verre – let’s have a drink
Mollo mollo – calm down
Faire le teuf – literally, to make a party. Teuf is fête with the syllables switched, something that the French do all the time. For example, they say tromé instead of metro. It’s called ‘verlan’
Meuf, poule, gonzesse, zouz – chick, babe, etc. All of them apparently also mean bitch or whore and I highly recommend against using them unless of course you’re cool with communicating either interpretation. It does combine well though, like to say “ey meuf veux-tu faire le teuf?”
Franchement – obviously. It’s the word I use the most out of these.
Degeulasse – disgusting!
Piccoler – boozing
Moule – not to be convinced with poule, this means ‘mussel’ but is also used as a term for a very specific part of the female anatomy. After learning this I get a laugh every morning from passing a billboard in the metro that advertises delicious mussels. I feel like I’m 12.
Il y a une salope sur la plage – there is a bitch on the beach. This is not particularly noteworthy in French but it’s hilarious in English because francophones are unable to distinguish in the pronunciation of the words ‘beach’ and ‘bitch’
Bouder – pissed off, sulking. Only works when you cross your arms at the same time.
Raz de paquerette – to be a classless bastard. Everyone tells me that they don’t use this word often but dammit people I work in luxury and I’ll use this all the time!
N’importe quoi – nonsense, whatever. Best used as a response, and again it needs to be combined with the appropriate shoulder-swinging gesture.
Ca craint – that sucks. Like a sympathetic version of n’importe quoi.
Faire le pouet pouet – talking crap. I aspire one day to be able to do this in French the way I do it in English.
I am kicking life back into this blog.
A month ago I moved to Paris and every day I run into something remarkable. Maybe these moments are not the crazy wonderful adventures I had around the world, but to me this new world is a fascinating, funny and highly share-able experience.
I look forward to telling you about the slang words I learn every day (including a half dozen ways NOT to address a woman), the peculiar behavior of people on the metro, regular updates on wino/bum fights, and generally the very cute moments where Parisians approach that fine line between brilliant and retarded and then proceed to veer deep, deep into absolute ‘how do these people live like this’ territory.
Sometimes here I ask myself ‘is everyone here crazy, or is it just me?’, and I try to be receptive and convince myself ‘no no they must have a point, some reason behind this’ but then I think ‘hell no these people are definitely nuts’ – I look forward to sharing these moments with you.
Where am I going? - posted on June 17, 2010
So far, so good: Memphis - posted on July 5, 2010
USA Road Trip, part 1 -posted on July 11, 2010
Road trip complete - posted on July 20, 2010
Exit USA, Enter South America - posted on August 3, 2010
Colombia! - posted on August 16, 2010
Salento – getting all Zen in the mountains - posted on August 23, 2010
Gold, Guns, Guerrillas and Gringo tax – Cali, Colombia - posted on August 29, 2010
Ecuador: tries to kill you - posted on September 7, 2010
Peru: first time for everything - posted on September 18, 2010
Earthquakes, Deserts, Incas and Astronauts - posted on September 28, 2010
Peru: hard to leave - posted on October 8, 2010
La Paz: so, so crazy - posted on October 19, 2010
Bolivia: everything, everything, everything – posted on November 1, 2010
Buenos Aires: world class - posted on November 11, 2010
Suramérica es el mejor: wrapping up - posted on November 17, 2010
The Superclasico: world’s craziest football match - posted on November 22, 2010
Australia: heaps good - posted on November 28, 2010
A quick week in New Zealand - posted on December 7, 2010
More tales of Adelaide - posted on December 11, 2010
Back in Backpack: Melbourne & Tasmania - posted on December 21, 2010
Sydney: sure beats Melbourne - posted on January 9, 2011
A Look Back at Australia - posted on January 10, 2011
A quick detour through Hong Kong - posted on January 15, 2011
Thailand: a very pleasant surprise - posted on January 23, 2011
Pai: drowning in a sea of hippies - posted on January 31, 2011
Everything moves slowly in Laos - posted on February 8, 2011
From Laos into Cambodia - posted on February 20, 2011
Cambodia: Between Heaven and Hell - posted on March 5, 2011
Vietnam! - posted on March 13, 2011
Vietnam: love it, hate it, love it again - posted on March 28, 2011
So Long, South East Asia - posted on April 1, 2011
Holy cow, India! A tale of three cities - posted on April 7, 2011
Rajasthan: camels and maharajahs in a furnace - posted on April 19, 2011
Final India: Lots, of Everything, even Beatings - posted on April 28, 2011
A Look Back At A Round The World - posted on May 4, 2011
Home! I’ve had my Dutch milk & peanut butter sandwich and have complained bitterly about the cold, so I feel pretty reintegrated again. This post will attempt to recap my entire trip as well as show you some of my favorite photos (out of the 10,150 I took in total). It’ll alternate between topic and photo and it’ll be long, so let’s see how far we get.
Best Year Ever? Yes! Definitely. A lifetime’s worth of impressions. A treasure chest of memories. And hopefully, on a personal level, a milestone year.
Hong Kong at sunset, smog shrouding the skyline.
Thank You For Reading. If visits to the blog had tailed off during my trip I probably wouldn’t have bothered to keep it up. But as it stands there are as many readers in April as there were in May. 2,168 visits in total, from 60 countries. And a modern bunch too: 40% using a Mac, only 17% with Internet Explorer. But I think some of you came to the wrong place. Search results that brought visits included ‘buy alpaca meat in england’, ‘is tasmania as boring as adelaide’, and ‘smelly bastards’.
One of Will and Katherine’s cats in North Carolina, USA.
Journey vs Destination. There are a lot of ways from A to B. Plane, train, tuktuk, rickshaw, camel, elephant, in a bus and on a bus, ferry, speedboat, junk, tube, bus, van, jeep, pick-up or ute, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, cable car, tram, subway. And a lot, a lot of walking.
My trusty Dodge Charger in the Appalachian Mountains, USA.
Where Next? It’s impossible to do a trip like this without eventually catching the travel bug. Places I’d like to explore in the future are Nepal & Kashmir, Chile, Bolivia’s jungle and Brazil, India’s southern states, and Marseille/Barcelona.
La Paz, Bolivia, as seen from above.
Hindsight is 20/20. I had no backpacking experience when I embarked on this trip, and as such had to learn everything on the go. If I could have given myself some advice then, it would be to not plan too much. Get my feet on the ground and find my way from there. The most valuable advice never comes out of a guide or a website, but from other travelers.
A curious kid in Pai, Thailand.
The Things I Can Leave Behind. As soon as I’m home, I don’t want to hear another David Guetta song again. His tracks have haunted me through four continents and while they’re good fun there’s only so much of I Got A Feeling one man can handle. Also, I now have an incredible aversion to toast. You would only burn bread if it tastes like crap to begin with, so why even bother? I want my bread soft and never again crispy. Also, squat toilets. Bah. And finally, people taking jumping photos. They’ve been lame for years and it’s just getting worse.
The fisherboats of Taganga, Colombia.
Should You Do It? I think that this trip has been incredible, and it’s definitely something that everything can do. Even with no experience or major aspirations or dreams. As long as you can think on your feet, stay relaxed, and keep an open mind, it’s a surprisingly easy, comfortable, and of course tremendously rewarding experience. A year, though, is a long time. I’m not sure if it was too long, I have no frame of reference for it, but it certainly was an incredibly long time to be away from a lot of people and places.
Self Portrait on Bamboo Island, Cambodia.
The Top Three. Colombia, India, Laos. In that order, if you will. These three countries struck me the most, in being so fascinating, wonderful, welcoming, pleasant, and unvaryingly amazing. It’s impossible to make a similar list with individual places and sights because I’ve been to so many incomparably unique places, but my favorite place to be on this whole trip was probably Bamboo Island (see photo above) – pure paradise.
An inquisitive kangaroo in Adelaide, Australia.
Inverse Insomnia. I had a hard time getting to sleep the other night because my room was too quiet. It was unnerving. I’ve gotten used to nodding off in just about any impossible situation. On a plane taking off, a high-speed busride across a dirt track, overnight on the airport carpet, with Indians outside celebrate their cricket team’s World Cup victory, standing up on a mountaintop in freezing temperatures, on the concrete floor of a rooftop – and all of these while sober.
Monks performing ceremony for deceased in Nong Khiew, Laos.
The World Is A Dirty, Dirty Place. I’ll never get used to squat toilets and fully intend to never acquaint myself with one again. And while India was the epitome of filth, the rest of the world is none too clean either. While traveling it’s essential to find a comfort level of dirty, and accept that things like a hot shower, flushing toilet, or clean sheets are a luxury. But I never had bed bugs, so I count myself lucky.
On the banks of the Ganges River in Varanasi, India.
No Emergency, No Panic. While traveling you encounter your fair share of people who’ve had some bad luck (or bad people) on their trip. I was lucky enough never to have anything stolen from me, also because you start taking ‘security measures’ for granted – locking my bag, chaining it to something when I sleep, having the most important things on my person, not carrying a wallet, using lockers. And, I guess, there are nowhere near as many people praying on innocent backpackers as you might expect.
With a curious monkey in Lopburi, Thailand.
The Costs of a Quarter-Life Crisis. €17,154 – give or take a few euros.
Kayaking in Halong Bay, Vietnam.
Wordle. 23,709 words is the total wordcount of the blog. Some words got used more than others, and after removing the most common ones, here’s what remained as the most frequently recurring words:
More Words, By Others. On a trip like this you have a lot of downtime, and as such I’ve read a ton of books. 32 in total, probably more than in the last ten year combined. They were (in chronological order): The Corner (David Simon), The Razor’s Edge (Somerset Maughm), Where The Blues Began (Alan Lomax), Dune (Frank Herbert), Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt), Brida (Paulo Coelho), Full Circle (Michael Palin), Film World (Ivor Montagu), Welcome To The Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut), No Country For Old Men (Cormac McCarthy), The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Juliet, Naked (Nick Hornsby), Nine Stories (JD Salinger), Fear and Loathing in America (Hunter S Thompson), Atonement (Ian McEwan), A Sort Of Homecoming (Robert Cremins), The Plot Against America (Philip Roth), Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: And Another Thing (Eoin Colfer), The Man Who Would Be King (Rudyard Kipling), The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini), The History Of Love (Nicole Krauss), Life Of Pi (Yann Martel), Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), Catch-22 (Joseph Heller), American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis), A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini), A Walk In The Woods (Bill Bryson), The Man In The High Castle (Philip K Dick), Mansfield Park (Jane Austen), The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time (Mark Haddon), Crime & Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevski), Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie).
My camel Archimedes in the Great Thar Desert of India.
In Conclusion. It’s the sense of adventure that made this trip worthwhile – not knowing from day to day where I’d end up, who I’d meet, what I’d do. And I’ve come to appreciate that the larger the challenge of traveling the greater the reward. In Peru I saw a slogan on a hostel’s wall that read ‘Backpacking: a champagne lifestyle on a lemonade budget’. It’s rung true this entire time. You don’t need a lot of money to travel. You also don’t need a lot of time. And you don’t need to be looking to find yourself, either. The only you need is the openness to explore, to accept that there will be setbacks, hairy moments, frustrations, and then to not let those distract you from all the amazing things that are happening around and with you. It’s one thing to fulfill the dream you’ve always had, but it’s another to fulfill the one you never knew about. I’ve been lucky enough to do this, and it’s a year I will always carry close to me.
View of the hills around Salento, Colombia.
