Italia è meraviglioso

As usual, I've been terrible at updating my travel blog. I'm already nearing the end of my stay here in New Zealand and I still haven't posted the pictures from Japan. Let's get that fixed :-).

 

Traveling around in Japan for a month with my lovely lady was just wonderful. We're both very fond of traveling and to be sharing such an experience together was just downright awesome. From the insanity of the metropolis of Tokyo and the calmth of traditional Kyoto, both exuding beauty in their own ways, the rest of our travel took us to Kobe, Okayama, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Obama and Osaka.

 

I think I must admit that I've kind of fallen in love with Japan as well (sorry Italy :$). Japan's culture is so incredibly rich and very varied throughout the country, making it a wonderful traveling destination. The people are so extremely polite and accomodating (although I guess I was lucky since I was traveling with my Japanese girl). The quality of living is so immensely high...and the food...ahhh, the food was just heavenly! The Japanese are so immensily good at what they do that even all of their foreign food just tastes as wonderful as in the original countries itself (their Italian food even rivaled mighty Italy itself!). The quality of their food was so extremely good that even Mc Donalds/Starbucks/Subway achieved (budget) restaurant quality (yeah, I know, weird eh?)! My tastebuds still joyfully remember the Kobe beef, the german sausages in Tokyo, the okonomiyaki in Nagasaki, the tiramisu in Osaka, the bento in Kyoto and many many more!

 

I would have found my perfect country to live in, if it were not for the immense price that comes with all these wonderfull things. I would definitely be willing to learn the highly complex language that is Japanese, and would put the effort into learning all the formalities and rules that come with Japanese culture. But the price at which the high quality of living comes would result in having to dedicate oneself so much to work that it would mean that I wouldn't be able to spend a lot of time with my love anymore (60+ hours workweeks are pretty standard, seriously :-o), which is too high of a price for me to pay :-(. Anyway, it's still a perfect land to go on vacation to with my baby, so here's to hoping for many, many returns ^_^

 

If you want to see the pictures, check out the new albums!

Travel...hah...what can I say? 3 years ago I started with my first backpacking trip in Italy and ever since a fiery passion for exploring new countries has taken a hold of me. I've been walking around with the intention of doing an internship in another country for a long time now, but it is this passion that has renewed my efforts. And thus I have left the Netherlands 7 days ago to do my master's project on the other side of the world and combine it with what I hope will be the first in many world trips.

 

Destinations? Well, at the moment I'm writing this blog entry from Tokyo, making Japan my first stop. My dear Aya was back in Japan for a bit, so I'm spending the first month exploring Tokyo and traveling around in Japan with my lovely lady. In November I will head for New Zealand for my master project (with a little stop in Sydney). I hope to be traveling around in New Zealand as well, although I'll probably be really really busy with my immensily fun master project (it involves 3d televisions!) there. Somewhere around May 2009, I hope to be heading over to the States...my darling girl will be back in San Fransisco by then, so I'll finally get to spend some decent amount of time with my girlfriend, while traveling around a bit and visiting companies in Silicon Valley (potential future jobs perchance? :p).

 

But for now, if I have the time and perseverence, I'll try to keep my travel blog updated with my adventures in Tokyo. There's already a lot of beautiful and weird things that I saw and had happened to me and I hardly have the time to let it sink in. Although I've made an extreme amount of mental pictures, I'm keeping the real ones to a minimum. You'll just have to take my word for it that Tokyo is marvellous :-).

So, once again, I'm terribly late with writing a blog about the latest traveling adventure, but at least I'm writing it in the same year this time ;-).

 

I remarked earlier that the fun thing about backpacking is that you meet people with whom you might travel at a later point in your life. Well...on my first Italy trip with Jurgen, we met two Singaporean sisters (I just love alliterations ^^), with whom I traveled in Spain in 2007. While traveling in Spain, I met Ayako Tanaka, a Japanese architecture studentessa studying in Berkeley university in San Francisco USA, whom was traveling in Europe (that's 3 continents right there, impressive!) for a summer school project in London. This year I traveled with her in Italy. It's funny how such a linking happens with backpacking.

 

I only met Aya one day in Barcelona, but that day was such an incredibly wonderful day, that we were reminiscing quite a bit about it when chatting afterwards. Then somewhere at the end of 2007, she mentioned that she would have an Italian architecture course in 2008 in....Italy! Seeing as we're both really passionate about traveling, we were building sky castles about how cool it would be to travel in Italy together. When 2008 came, my 3rd quarter on university was extremely demanding, so those sky castles seemed to stay just what they were at that moment. But by that time, we were so enthousiastic about traveling together, especially when remembering that wonderful day in Barcelona, that I just *had* to go visit mia bella Italia again. So I took on about double study workload for a few weeks (seriously, 70 hours/week studying is really just...uuurrrgh), so that I could leave for a little week without endangering my studies.

 

And it was the best decision I ever made in my life! Yay for being impulsive! This third trip managed to do the impossible; I never could imagine that I would experience Italy even more beautifully than I already had in the past...but I did :-). I shan't try to encapsulate in words just how wonderful Italy is, for it surely would do it no justice. Every day Aya and me traveled together in the two most beautiful places I know on this earth, Cinque Terre & Roma, was as wonderful as that day in Barcelona.

 

And...well...about me and Aya...it suffices to say that I have had to miss my darling lady for 6 months already by now :shy:. But I get to see her really soon now ^^

 

Anyways, see Italy Trip #3 album for the pics, later :)

In August of last year I went a few weeks to Denmark & Sweden with some friends from my World of Warcraft guild back in the time when I was still playing that game. Yeah, you read that right. It turns out there exists some rare breed of computergeeks whom do not shun sunlight and social contacts *gasp*! I know, right?!

 

Ok, all sarcasm aside, I was talking to Jimmy (my unofficial half-Thai little brother) and we started talking a lot about traveling. Since I've had the urge for a long time to really meet up with the foreign people with whom I have been playing that game for such a long while (I already met most Dutch people on our yearly Dutch meetings), I coined the idea of traveling there. First kind of as a joke idea, but the idea soon gained a lot of momentum when he told me Mark at one time had also coined an idea of the same sorts. So with the three of us, we were starting to really discuss the options of going. At a later moment, Mark told us Kris might be interested in joining as well, and so we were with a nicely balanced party to go out and meet up the Danes and Swedes of our guild.

 

What ensued was a very exciting, hilarious and fun trip through Kopenhagen, Goteborg, Stockholm & Malmo. Getting to know all those wonderful people we've been playing with for so long, whilst drinking (damn, those Scandinavians drink a lot of beer!), going out, sightseeing and admiring other local beauties :-). And I gained enough new epic, nay, legendary anecdotes (the Jimmeh song, SA550542.rar, adult movie casting at the theme park, Mark's mighty Subway beam, Potte's catnip kitty, etcetc) to last me another lifetime :P

 

A very warm thank you to our kind hosts Michael, Potte, Lubomir and Mans! You guys are the best! And likewise to Jimmy, Mark & Kris. You guys were incredibly fun to travel with and it was nice getting to know you guys better!

 

Pics are added in the 'Scandinavia Trip' folders

Ok, I guess keeping my weblog updated is not really my forte :-|. I've been extremely busy with work and uni since my last post. Especially my last quarter had an insane workload (think 50+ hours a week, seriously). I'm just really glad my courses are so incredibly interesting and my progress is going well, otherwise i'd never be able to keep this up :-S.

 

In the meantime I've been traveling in Scandinavia and had my 3rd visit to my lovely Italy! But first things first: the backpack trip to Spain in june last year! The fun thing about backpacking is that you meet a lot of people who are really passionate about traveling, so you can end up traveling around with people whom you might've met on totally different backpack trips. As was the case with this trip. Huiping and Yushan, two sisters from Singapore whom me and my friend met on my first Italy trip, happened to be backpacking through Europe at the time. Since I wanted to meet up with them again and I really needed a little break to the mediteranean climates, I played hooky for a little week (actually the professors were okay with it :p) and went to join their Spain leg of the trip.

 

The first part was four days of Barcelona. Although I had a lot of bad luck this time around (see last blog entry), Barcelona was still a really beautiful city to travel in. Although traveling with a party of three is not the ideal number, on the last day in Barcelona I met Ayako, A Japanese girl who was studying architecture in Berkeley, California, and we just had the most wonderful day traveling together (I will *never* forget the beauty of Parc Guell!), seeing loads of interesting buildings (private tourguide to Sagradia Familia = awesome!), talking a lot about cultural differences and travel experiences and...well...you'll read more about it in the travel blog of my third Italy trip later :-). In the evening of that day when the four of us wanted to get something to eat, we even got invited to  dine/drink with a group of local Spanjards! Naturally, in the beginning we were a bit shy and unsure as to whether to join them or not, but we just went along with it. The result was just a marvelous evening with good food, good drinks (gotta love sangria!) and wonderfull company (wow, these people were even warmer than most Italians!). Sadly at midnight we had to say goodbye to them and Ayako, since we needed to catch our flight to Sevilla.

 

The next three days in Sevilla were all about relaxing! Sunbathing on the terrace of our youthhostel was just *so* nice. And Sevilla is just a really nice city to walk around in; it's small enough to basically see everything in two days and there's loads of lovely parcs and quaint districts! The youth hostel we were in also organized a visit to a pub where they performing the flamenco dance, which was well impressive, since the pacing was really fast and the gestures and dance moves were really intricate. I ended up that night exploring the somewhat limited but still lovely pubbing scene with a guy from New Zealand (New Zealanders are apparently called Kiwi's :-) ), a Kiwi/scottish couple (they were traveling the world together for a year, respect!) and two girls from merry ol' England, which was loads of fun (although it made me realise I'm just not the drinking type of student anymore ;-).

 

Well, that was basically my Spain trip in a nutshell. Although quite a bit of things went wrong, I ended up having a lot of fun and relaxment any way and it really made me love Spain (although not as much as Italy :p). I uploaded the pictures as well, so you can check them out if you want to.

 

Next up: my summer trip from last August to Denmark & Sweden!

Wow, it really has been a long time ago. I know I had grand plans for backpacking in 2006, but lack of time and money did not permit me to follow through on them :'-(. But now I've ended my last week of the year at my new university by going on a little inbetween backpack trip to Spain. Specifically 4 days of Barcelona and 3 days of Sevilla! As ever, it was totally unpredictable and fun, although I did have quite a bit of bad luck this time around (troubles getting to my bankaccount, being stranded in the centre of Barcelona, etc :( ).

 

Since most of the cool pictures were taken by some lovely ladies I had the honor of accompanying, I'm gonna wait till I get those in the mail before writing a full wall of text about this one. I should be busy finding a summer vacation job anyway now, If I'm to have any chance of going to Greece at the end of this summer vacation :D.

Hmm, 'soon' seems to be relative...ah well, at least the pics are only 1 month too late =].

 

You might notice the total absence of new year's eve pictures. I shan't be lying that I was way too drunk to make pics..the sad truth is that basically everything that could go wrong, went wrong (thank you very much, mr Murphy). Without going into details, it suffices to say that our new year's eve lacked fireworks, alcohol and transportation; two of which are oh so vital components of a succesful new year's eve. Ah well, still had a bit of fun, and quite a long walk home :s.

 

Some mental notes about the London trip:

1) Ye Gods, the women are fabulous! Those thick London accents alone are *way* too charming. And personally, I could really appreciate the somewhat stoic and stylish demeanor the people near the centre of London seemed to posess.

2) The general atmosphere in London actually seems colder and more distanciated than in the Netherlands, if that is actually possible :-|.

3) We saw a grey Lamborghini Mercielago over there...me and my friend couldn't help but to be appalled with how someone could buy a super expensive car like that and then choose such a bland color for it.

 

Oh, and after my first year of intensive travelling, I've been thinking about what a perfect country would constitute for me:

- The spoken language would be English, preferably with a thick accent (*wow*)

- The temperament would be Italian (love la dolce vita)

- The social system would be Dutch (I don't need to go into this one, right? :P)

- The women would be...well...I guess there's something to say for every country ;-)

- The cooks would be Italian (absolutely *no* discussion possible there)

- Culture would be Italian (yeah, I'm biased ^^)

- Law enforcement would be handled by the Brits (I kinda liked CCTV...still being to feel safe in a big city like London is quite a feat)

- Infrastructure would be Dutch (which prolly would result into taxes being Dutch too...ah well :-S)

 

A Utopia, to be sure, but one can still dream, can't one?

 

Next stop: Italy in spring/summer again, probably accompanied by a full backpack trip to either Greece or France..looking forward to it!

 

PS: I've updated some of my other photo albums too