A 'world'-class education? Wocka wocka

Travelling can and will teach you more than even you know. From the moment you step off a plane in a foreign country, your senses are bombarded by stimuli that are different from what you are accustomed to. A mere glance at the landscape with all its accompanying sounds and smells will give you an inherent feeling of the place that you would not gain from reading an encyclopedia on your destination. Often, the feeling I get from people entering Bangkok is a "...Oh." Not many people expect a sprawling metropolis, massive skyscrapers in every direction, giant billboards and honking, state of the art Toyota (oh, aren't they all) cabs. No, Thai's do not live in mud huts. Yes, they have running water. Computers do exist in Thailand. These are the kinds of things that you take in nearly instantaneously without even realizing it, and they are invaluable in assessing the cultural norms and how they compare to your own back home.

Then there are the kinds of things you can actively learn from travelling - cultural displays like dance, eating habits or various historical monuments and museums - all of which offer you insight into what makes a different culture tick. I enjoyed this quote from a book I was just reading about the Vietnam War - a perfect example of how a cultural difference meant all the world. "To Asians steeped in Confucian concepts, time is an endless river flowing from an infinitely regenerative source. Time to Westerners is always precious; to the Oriental it can be spent with generosity." It even goes so far as to compare calendars in the West with calendars in the East: ours are linear, with pages that begin and end...a year is a long time. In Eastern calendars, time is a wheel with no beginning or end. It goes on to say, "Quick victory is a Western concept. All the Vietnamese had to do was not lose." They were patient, and it worked. But I digress.

For those out there who have travelled far and wide, it is all too easy to follow the rote tourist route, see what you came to see, and climb up on that high horse and say you've done it all. (Even if you go off the beaten path and do it your own way - if you aren't applying the things you learn to improve yourself or the world around you, there is another opportunity missed) And maybe you're right. But what is even more important about travelling is what you learn.

Travelling for the sake of travelling is just like any other hobby. What makes it unique is there are often more opportunities to take what you see around you and use it to better yourself. Look around you, at the things other people do through their unique personalities or through their different cultural perspective. Take those things you like and make them a part of yourself. Remove those habits that you hold on to that you dislike. Create your own culture and cultivate your personality to be how you want it to be. No one else has as much power to do that as you!

Whether it be exercising your body or your mind, testing your ideas against someone else's, helping someone in need, or contemplating your purpose in the world to better clarify your goals, make every day count. We only gots so many of em. And travelling is one of my favourite ways to find new ways of improvement!

The name of the game is self-improvement, and if a day goes by where you haven't learned something new or gained a new perspective or changed your life or anothers in any way, was that day well spent?

Is Patriotism Worth It?

I can see a lot of people not liking this blog post. Why? Because everyone loves their country. Everyone loves LOVING their country. We love our countries so much we root for them. We love our countries so much we fight for them. We love our countries so much we die for them. The funny thing is...those people on the other side of our gun barrels, they're doing the exact same thing. Everyone is willing to die for their country...but is every country worth dying for?

I will not bash my country, nor the significant things it has accomplished. I am lucky enough to be born in one of the most affluent parts of the world, and the standard of living is among the highest on the planet. We have lots to love. Free health care, high paying jobs, a relatively robust economy (for the times, at least), and two car garages. Sounds like the best place to live in the world. Nor am I saying that my country is better than any others. For the way most of us live our lives, it is one of the only conceivable places we CAN live - who grows up on a 6 figure household income and then goes to shit in a hole in a jungle for the rest of their life? Not many of us. But the point of this post goes deeper than a game of "my country is better than yours" and indicates a deeper, and occasionally dangerous, need of the human psyche - the need to belong.

Think back to your elementary school days, when you had those schoolyard rivalries with that other school down the street. It was us and them. Known and unknown. Good and bad. But then when you all went to high school together and went out to cheer on the football team, you were all buddies. Now it was the next TOWN over that were the baddies. "Kick their ass sports team X, they're not from here! Send em home crying to mama!" All of a sudden you've graduated and working at the local automobile factory. Now you and all your buddies are proud, Canadian auto workers, top notch workers in an industry floundering in our society's maturation to a services based economy. "Don't buy from that OTHER country! Support US! Your neighbours! Your countrymen! Our cars may not be better, but they're OURS!" It would take an extreme case of myopia to not see the pattern here.

The severe in-group mentality of patriotism can sometimes be alarming and has been the cause of more than a few world conflicts...and on top of that, the example above is just economically unsound in a properly regulated global market! The issue we are all forgetting when we stand forward to defend our country, whether from economic "backstabbing" or from the evil doings of another country, is that there is a deeper bond connecting all of us, running deeper than patriotism or all our other groups that we create to feel that we belong.

I'm not saying we should all hold hands and wear flowers in our hair being beatniks around a bonfire and be "citizens of the world", but I would question why that statement garners a "pshaw" from most people who hear it. Is it so unreasonable to extrapolate our lessons learned on the schoolyard and embrace that which ACTUALLY binds us as a species? We seem to so crave that in-group sense of belonging that we forget that we are ALL part of an in-group, as human beings. Should that level not take precedence over our nationality, no matter how awesome our country is? "Well that would be no fun, there would be no one to exclude!" Maybe someday we will find life on another planet. Then we can all have fun being xenophobes and maybe we can have peace on Earth.

Empathy has been called the most intelligent and evolved of all emotions. Perhaps that's what this is about. We evolved from solo hunters who had to kill any nearby stranger because they were a threat to survival. Now we've evolved into nations of strangers. Perhaps we have to evolve past that nationalism, too. I swear there's a quote from Lincoln out there somewhere about how if we grew up with the same influences and experiences as our enemies, we would be no different from them...so how can we hate them for it?

Granted our forms of government can hardly handle the burdens put upon them by supporting and ruling even their small amounts of citizens. But perhaps one day we can hope for a unifying body that is capable and trusted enough to carry out our next schoolyard evolution.

Update: Found this video from the RSA a few weeks after writing this and he brings up some really good points that go along with this post! Enjoy!

The Lottery You Never Knew You Won

This is a post done by a friend of mine on Facebook and I really liked it. I will cite my sources: This is by Madison "Big Cat" Schwartz. Awesome dude, and apparently he can write too! Our favourite pastimes include discussions about Russia, politics and failed states as well as doing push up competitions while drunk. Which I won. Here is a picture of him in a bath with another man and a teddy bear named "Mrs. Bear".

Told you he was awesome.

Take it away, Big Cat!

Whenever I meet people for the first time, the subject of travel seems to inevitably come up. Traveling is a major part of my life, I love it, and thus, I seem to always end up talking about it. People are sometimes unsure how to start planning, and saving for a trip, and a common response when I invite someone to travel with me, or to travel in general is “…Ya… when I win the lottery”. Well, here’s the thing, you’ve already won it, so pack your bags.

Think about your life. Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you’re from a middle-class family, in the Western world. Now, I’m not a statistician, I’m not going to bombard you with numbers, but I wager you’re pretty stoked that you haven’t been born one of those people that live on less than $2 a day. These people number approximately 2.8 billion, we number considerably less. Not everyone in the world today has the opportunity to travel, we do, and we should take advantage of it. In addition, because of where we live, none of us were pressed into military service at the age of 18 (more than eighty countries worldwide still enforce some level of conscription, effectively removing the ability to backpack freely, at least for a time).

Now think about the era into which you’ve been born. Many of our grandparents, and great grandparents had the opportunity to visit Europe, or Asia, but it certainly wasn’t for pleasure (this is a reference to the World Wars, for those who are less historically inclined). We live in the freest era the world has ever seen, we’re not expected to join the army, get married, have children, or own a home by the time we’re 25, we can, but we don’t HAVE to. We’re part of what’s being dubbed the “boomerang generation”, we have a unique opportunity to have been born into a time when it is very acceptable to pursue a travelers lifestyle for a few years, and most of us still have the safety net of a home to come back to.

We live in the era of air travel. Sometimes, bleary eyed, and pissed off at the lack of movie selection on my 12 hour flight to Bangkok, I have to remind myself that only a few decades ago that same journey took several weeks, and a ship full of hearty sailors. Take advantage of this era when flight prices are at all time lows, don’t wait for that big retirement trip in forty years, the way things are going, there might be no aviation fuel left. Pretty good timing for us I’d say.

And yes, I know, even though all these things have added up to create an era where world travel is possible, it still costs a pretty penny, but here’s a clichéd idea you could try. If you’re a student like me, you drink a shitload of coffee, and odds are you buy your coffee at $5 a cup from the capitalist heathens at Starbucks. Brew your own for a year, and pocket the fivers, and next year we’ll go to this little café I know in Bangkok, and the coffees are on me. Deal? Deal.

Just DO it.

Nike had it right all along.

When you're thrown in the deep end, you'll learn to swim. Fast. In other words, when you are committed to a course and have no option but to see it through, you will be surprised at what you're made of. So, stop worrying about it and let the cards fall where they may. All will work out in the end.

All you need is confidence.

Change yourself to suit your environment, not the environment to suit yourself.

While travelling, I found that I was very content with my life. Some people may say that is easy, given that my life was a permanent 'holiday', but it is surprising how many people still find discontent. "We hate waiting at the airport", "It's too hot here", "Why can't X be like back home?" are complaints that I hear often.

I relish waiting time, as it gives me a chance to listen to and record my thoughts in an otherwise fast paced life. Accept your environment as it is, and change it when necessary to suit your needs. But always be happy.

If you are cold, don't leap for the thermostat. Put on a sweater. Grab an extra blanket and get cozy. If you are hot, embrace it. Remember a time when you were extremely cold and bask in the warmth you are currently experiencing. If you are hurt, accept the pain as part of yourself. Do not consider it an external effect causing you discomfort. Absorb it into yourself and there is nothing more to complain about. Internalize the pain and concentrate on healing.

Don't miss the chance to recognize an opportunity when it presents itself. If you are lonely, see it as a chance to make new friends. If you are with friends, see it as a chance to enjoy time together. If you are bored, see it as a chance to look up something you always wondered about or read a book or learn a new skill. If you are stuck in one place for a while, see it as a chance to join something new and stick with it, enjoy your routine. If you change your perspective on your environment rather than seeking to change the environment itself, you may find that it is not so bad after all.

Perhaps discontent comes from within yourself rather than from without.

The phoenix had the right idea.

Travel is by no means about "finding yourself". That would imply that a perfectly formed version of yourself already exists somewhere that only needed to be adopted to become "you". No, there is far more truth in creating yourself...seeing parts of others and the world around you that you find beautiful and want to incorporate into yourself and share with others. It is frightening at how many opportunities for us to better ourselves passes us by without even our notice...every experience is one to learn from. It is never too late to change yourself to be exactly how you want to be - besides, phoenixes are pretty.

This brings to mind a pertinent quote:

I have learnt silence from the talkative,
toleration from the intolerant,
and kindness from the unkind;
yet strange,
I am ungrateful to these teachers.
- Kahlil Gibran

We should thank all those who put us through hardship, because they are the fires who forge us into the people we are.

The New Wealth

There's a new form of wealth, one you can't see or taste or touch. You can only hear of it, or experience it yourself. It is not a wealth displayed through cars or jewels or anything that can be measured against traditional riches.

It is in the experience of wealth, the ability for those who accept this ethos to live like they were wealthy rather than just collecting the ephemeral dollars in the bank. It is those gathered life experiences, that APPLICATION of wealth and the freedom it permits...that is the new wealth.

I hope I can remember to enjoy it.

Who said travel days had to be boring??

One would think that since the word 'travel' implies moving from place to place, then travellers would be accustomed to such a thing. Some more than others do enjoy the thrill of heading somewhere new and unknown, but I have seen more than a little dread cross someone's face when they look at the endless kilometres that must be traversed to their next fun destination.

Night train with a solid crew!

Crossing a border? We've got you covered on all party fronts!

Although the saying "It's not the destination but the journey that matters" is true in the larger sense of your life long journey, try quoting that to a haggard soul who has been on a train for 36 hours and they might tell you different. Travel in most people's experience involves seeing new places and experiencing new things, not just passing them by at 80 km/hour. And so the oft-dreaded 'travel day' is born. Luckily, Free & Easy has a solution to that.

With Captain "Clown College" Coolin in charge, a course was set for epic-ness!

It all started on the ferry back to the mainland...

Travel with Free & Easy is not comparable to anything I have ever experienced. What might have been a long, lonely, iPOD filled ride (better hope that battery doesn't run out!) if you were travelling solo or with a friend has the potential to turn into a massively mobile party on wheels. You are never alone without someone to share a conversation with when you are in a group of 20+ happy, friendly people travelling the same direction without a care in the world except when is the next bathroom break (or beer stop!). Whether it is chillaxing on a ferry from one paradise island to the next, playing games at the pier waiting for a transfer, or enjoying the wind whip your hair into a frenzy in the back of a truck, Free & Easy travel days are anything but boring!

The girls enjoy the wind in the back of a Song Thaew

While the boys take the back of a pick up

Indeed, they have perfected the recipe for group travel over the past decade, and even provide the Thailand trip with the ultimate travel vehicle: the PARTY bus! Equipped with a devastating sound system, indoor siren lights, and a leather couch at the back, the party bus is an explosion waiting to happen like a chemical reaction. Take a group of fun loving people, add costumes, a few road pops (that's allowed in Thailand, and for that matter pretty much anywhere outside of the western world), some sweet tunes and maybe a rainbow coloured wig, enclose for 3 hours, shake it up with some on bus crowd surfing and a bumpy road and BOOM! Party time! You are at your destination in no time, and kind of sad to be getting off the bus!

Party bus!!! With Bryn, Sara, Kimber, Coolin and me.

Aly, Kyle and Shawn join us while Roanne decides its roof dancing time!

The costumes get busted out - wigs and all!

Kirb-stomp finishes off the bucket by her lonely self =)

Even bathroom breaks can be a blast!

Even when things go wrong on a Free & Easy travel day, there is always a silver lining hidden in the clouds. While travelling from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang on the LTC, my group experienced quite heavy traffic due to excessive mud on the road caused by recent landslides. At first we were expecting a few hour delay and grabbed some snacks and beers from local roadside villagers, but as we edged our way around some clifftop roads and the tires slipped closer to the edge with every tap of the brakes, we knew something was up. As time wore on we realized we were in this for the long haul...it looked like we were going to be delayed over 15 hours and would have to spend the night on the bus! Not to be discouraged, we made friends with some of the locals to ferry a few crates of beverages to and from the bus for us to enjoy, and after a few hours of hanging out on the bus we decided to go and explore the local cliffside village. The locals were excited to see us, as they don't have much exposure to foreigners except in the odd roadside stop. The women of the village graciously offered us food for free as we were quite hungry and stranded with no dinner, but we understood the plight they were in living in such poor conditions so we offered them a fair price of a dollar or two for corn and rice to tide us over until we reached our destination.The children came out and wanted to play games with us, resulting in endless rounds of Stella Ella Olla for the girls and catching cicadas (a noisy but harmless bug about the size of half your palm) and giant bat-sized moths (honestly, it was as big as your hand!) for the boys. I have never seen a child so happy as the boy who had a cicada in each fist - it was like Christmas morning! Who needs that expensive plastic Tonka truck when you've got perfectly good bugs to put in your pockets?

Look at that thing! Isn't it cuuuuuuuuute?

At first we thought it was a bat.

Dani tries to steal local children. "It's not CREEPY, it's called the maternal instinct!!" Sure, Dani.

We also discovered that a 4 year old Laos child was much better at catching the cicadas than we were - they had no hesitation to get in there and grab it by the wings or thorax, where a lot of us foreigners would hesitate or recoil because we thought it was gross. It reminded me of how some people hesitate to take the reins on their life and idly watch it pass by from the sidelines - while Free & Easy shows us that it is okay to grab life by the horns and enjoy every minute of it. Even on a travel day!

Songkhran - Country wide water fight!?

Songkran...What is there to say about it? Perhaps one thing: if there is a time of year to be in Thailand, this is it. If there is a place, it is in Chiang Mai. It is in this very place that 16 Free & Easy travelers (and a score of others along for the ride) are lucky enough to celebrate the half week long Thai new year's festival.

That poor kid looks so confused by all those white devils...

Water accessories not only necessary, but encouraged!

The holiday of Songkran coincides with the coming of the new year in the Thai calendar (among others in South and Southeast Asia). Historically this was a time of cleansing and renewal, and a ritual evolved where water was poured over statues of the buddha to cleanse them of dirt. Afterwards, the "blessed" water that had been poured over the statues would gently be poured over relatives and friends shoulders to cleanse them of any past misdeeds. The holiday has largely modernized into a gigantic country wide water fight, in which it is perfectly acceptable to spray anyone anywhere as long as they are outdoors and it is relatively daytime.

Told you it was gigantic.

Outdoors? Check. Daytime? Check. Spray on!

Jon and Lindsay having a good time blasting people in the face. Note the foresight in buying classic WWI pilot goggles. This isn't his first rodeo.

Chiang Mai has an Old City surrounded by a moat, which makes for water fight central during this week of warring wetness. To celebrate the holiday in true Free & Easy style, we rented three pickups off of our good friends at Libra Guesthouse and placed a garbage can full of water in the back of each. To be extra sneaky, we bought a few giant chunks of ice to cool the water down and give it that extra kick when you dump a bucket over a stranger's (or friend's!) head. We took the pickups for a rip out and around the old city, and by ' a rip' I obviously mean waited in traffic for hours as the roads were full of revellers on foot, bike, and pickup dousing each other mercilessly with unending buckets of water. It was pandemonium! People lining the both sides of every road, two or three deep, and an equal number clogging up the roads themselves, with a few more unfortunate enough to have been pushed into the moat. I made the mistake of choosing the truck packed with Canadian girls...now if that isn't a target for Thai's and foreigners alike, I don't know what is. I tell you, if this water absolves sins, then by the end of this week I will have atoned for every sin of my life. Not that they believe in sin in Buddhism, but you catch my drift. Being in the back of that pickup was like being in a torrential monsoon, non-stop! There was no break in the downpour, not even time to shotgun a beer! That didn't put a damper on our fun though, as we hopped in and out of our truck, refilling our water guns and going to find our friends and blast them in the face while yelling "Sawat dee bpii mai!", which means "Happy New Year" in Thai. All in the name of cleansing, right?

Be healed, heathens!

The greatest thing about this holiday (other than being able to be a kid in a water fight again) is the friendliness and openness of the Thai people to strangers. I rode countless motorbikes and jumped on the back of dozens of trucks, just to catch a lift around the corner or to graciously refill my empty water gun with precious ice cold water, which I inevitably turned on those very same Thai people 30 seconds later. It's a blessing, right? You have to be polite. There were smiles all around, even after a bucket in the face. Locals would cheerily invite you onto their trucks, offering to share their whiskey as they asked about your home country and what you were doing in Thailand. This would all happen while you simultaneously soak every victim in sight. Now there's a bonding moment.

I'm pretty sure I'm in one of those trucks out there. Or maybe I made that up. You can look for me if you want.

Walking around the moat, you were inevitably targeted by Thais in posession of talc powder mixed with water, often used by monks for blessings but during this week of mayhem it was more for the purpose of face paint. You could expect to walk out of there looking like you were just in a mud fight with your younger sibling. But it washed off easily enough, and your luck should be improved for the rest of the day! More likely than not it would be washed out by the next wave of water to hit you head on. Even the street vendors got into the fun, getting soaked and returning the favour, shooting back with their own wares of water guns and buckets.

This is the only week a year where you can slap a complete stranger across the face with a full bucket of water with no explanation other than a smile. (Preferably a foreigner...the Thai's are usually more polite with a sprinkle of water from a bucket or a gentle pour over your shoulder). So I know where I'll be next April...do you?? Sawat dee bpii mai!