Backpacking through Europe

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At happy hour today, my co-worker and I were discussing about traveling and the Europe backpacking topic came out. Taking a gap year after high school before college seems to be more common in the Western culture compared to the Asian culture. I, unfortunately, didn’t have the opportunity to experience that. Although living abroad in different places since I finished my 8th grade probably gave me a somewhat similar experience, only minus the 24-hour travel time. Instead, I probably did 80% of studying and 20% of traveling. But I guess it gave me more time to experience the culture more in-depth compared to a short couple-of-days visit to a new city.

Nevertheless, thanks to all the people out there who are willing enough to share their adventure with the rest of the world online, my interest about travels seems to have grown these past couple of months. Reading and watching the things people posted online about their travel experience seem really fascinating to me. It also made me feel like I haven’t seen or experienced anything close to what they went through in their journeys.

In terms of traveling abroad, I feel a little envious to those who are an American passport holder. American passport holders don’t have to deal with the fuss of applying for visas when they want to visit other countries. You know those scenes that you see in the movies where the character spontaneously bought a ticket to fly somewhere overseas in the next couple hours? I don’t think those scenes would ever happened to, say, an Indonesian passport holder like me since there’s no way we would be able to get visas in less than 24-hours. Or I guess it’s possible if you have applied for a bunch of other countries’ visas in advanced—just in case something like this happens. Just saying :P

Traveling to Europe is something that I’ve had on my bucket list for a while now and hopefully, sometimes soon, I’ll be able to visit all the places and see all the paintings and architectures that I’ve read about when I was in college. One of these days. One of these days.

 

Stumbled Upon: Semi-Permanent

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I stumbled upon an interesting short web series on Vimeo today about expats living in South Korea. If you want to know a little bit more about the Korean culture, these videos give an interesting insight on different aspects of life in South Korea through foreigners’ perspective.

Meet Tiffany Needham and Erik Moynihan – entrepreneurs and your guides to the expat life in Seoul. In this premiere episode, they remember what brought them here and the opportunities and connections that made them stay and start up Magpie Brewing Co. We meet Hassan, another Seoul veteran and their business partner. He came for a two-week vacation seven years ago and liked it so much he never left. On the other hand, Tori is seeing the city with fresh eyes. She and her boyfriend arrived from Canada just six weeks earlier, moving for his job at an international school, and leaving her job as a radio producer behind. Tiffany and Erik explore the Filipino market in Hyehwa with Tori, then head to Suyu for a BBQ lamb leg dinner with Hassan. The day ends over makgeolli in Insa-dong, where the trio of veterans help Tori decide if she can make a long-term commitment to Seoul. We'll be posting episodes weekly, so to find out when the next ep is up, like our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/semipermanenttv