Well.

It seems that my laptop has decided to die on me completely. I'll spare you the technical details and will just commemorate it with a concise: Rest in peace.

I'll most likely send the thing home by mail, or put it straight into a trash bin... One less piece of luggage to carry around.

Anyways, dear family (Yes, I'm talking to you, dad!) - This means I'll still not be able to call you guys through Skype. Or upload photos, for that matter... Please call me on my (Japanese) phone though when you get the chance! Just to bring you all up to date. :)

Peace.

Life signs

Just to let you know that I'm still alive. I returned to Japan from China today, where the almighty Internet Authority had blocked blogspot.com, so I couldn't access my own blog anymore. And yes, I was just too lazy to use proxies to circumvent that problem.

Anyways. I owe you all a vast-sized account of the tales my life has spun in the past few days and weeks, but my graphics card is starting to die on me, which makes my computer randomly lock up and restart. Annoying, that! I guess my laptop's age is finally starting to show.

Right now, I'm sitting in the lounge of a backpacker hostel in Kyoto, decorated with a weird mixture of reggae posters, hiphop posters and sexist posters with nipples on them, and am trying to find another WWOOF host. The rough plan is to stay near Kyoto for a week, then go to the Nagano area for another week or so, and then finally gravitate towards Tokyo to get on that plane back to the fertile homelands.

Speaking of home, of course there is a part of me that looks forward to seeing all my friends again, to build a cozy little cabin with lots of pillows and candles, make friends with a cute kitty cat and invite it to live with me; but there's also the part that doesn't want to return to normality - doesn't want to get back to routine, resume studying, work, and all that everyday stuff. I think the far-away has gotten to me, has got me, and now it won't let me go again that easily.

Time will tell.

Hitting the road again.

Looks like I only ever post when I'm moving, and never when I'm in one place. Oh well!
Anyway, I've been at Keiko's farm for almost a month now, and it was a simply awesome time here. I've learned so much Japanese that I can even properly ask random people on the street for directions. Granted, I won't understand their answers, but you can't have everything, right?

Tomorrow afternoon, I'll take my leave again. Going to take the night bus to Osaka, do some sightseeing when I arrive there, find a place to lay my head to rest at night, and then board the ferry the next morning. 48h later, on Sunday, I'll arrive in Shanghai.

I'll see if I can't keep you guys updated in the meantime. Still have to buy a book for the boat ride, otherwise I'll be pretty bored...

又ね！

Yatta~, nihonni tsukimashita!

Wheee, I'm here!
Slept through the entire flight and woke up only when we hit the runway... But to start at the beginning, let's go back to Taipei.

When I arrived at Taipei airport yesterday evening, I called Stanley right away to meet up with him. We took the bus together with a friend of his, Steven, and first checked in at the YCMA where I would stay that night. It was right opposite of the Taipei Main Station, and the room was quite a lot more luxurious than what I was used to from Singapore and surroundings! Seperate shower, air conditioning and all kinds of goodies. Pricetag accordingly, who would have guessed.


Stanley and Steven at the main railway station

We then took a ride on the subway to oen of the night markets, where we met another friend of theirs, and had some steamed food. Unfortunately, I was already quite constipated from the lunch I had with Karla at Changi Airport before my flight, and then the meal on the plane... But the guys showed me one of Taiwan's original inventions: Original Milk Pearly Bubble Tea. It was quite something: Tea with Milk, iced, and inside it some pearls made of flour. The straw that came with it was big enough to slurp them right through - quite something!

Video tba...

It was only around 20 degrees that night... warm for the season, I was assured. So we walked to see the National Taiwan University, and it's pretty big! :) But then I already had to go home, so that I would at least catch some sleep before my flight.


Me, the morning before the flight.

Thanks again to Stanley, Steven and Victor for being such nice hosts!

The flight to Tokyo was rather uneventful, due to my above described sleepiness. But once at the airport, I got talking with a Japanese guy who had just spent a month in India traveling. Customs were quite curious as to all the things I had in my bag, and I had to unpack it and show them the goodies... they took away all my cocaine and weed and arrested me. I'm writing this from the Tokyo prison... NOT! Haha, gotcha.

After I had cleared customs and immigration, I tried to withdraw some money. Here's to the first of many linguistical difficulties! Besides, the ATM didn't want to accept my debit card, though my credit card was apparently fine.
Then I tried to find the right train. There are about 7 different services going from Tokyo Narita airport to Tokyo itself, and only a few of them take less than an hour... I opted to talk to the Tourist Information and have them write down the cheapest route for me, complete with the station's names in Kanji - which was helpful, but as it later turned out, not neccessary: most stations and trains are bilingual.

I can't really begin to describe the feeling of strangeness around here. Everything's in Japanese, duh! My first impression is rather positive though. I like it here! The hostel is cute as well, I'm sleeping in a 10 man dorm in the basement on a side street... nice and quiet!


The street where the backpacker hostel is located. The powerlines everywhere immediately reminded me of various anime...

Now I'm going to eat something with Atashi, the manager, and tomorrow I'll go and explore the city a little. Hopefully will be able to find a power adaptor, so as to upload some photos!

Stay tuned, beloved audience.

Ping from Taiwan

Yo!
Sitting in Taipei airport right now. I spent the night at the YMCA after being shown around a little by Stanley and his friends. Gotta say, Taiwan is pretty nice.

Now I'm waiting for boarding on my flight to Tokyo... I guess there's no turning back now, is there?

More when I don't have to fear for my battery!

Almost over, almost gone

Not even two days left to go, and I will be leaving Singapore. Things are hectic, and there is just way too much left to be done... Wednesday, I'll be in Taipei for a night, where Stanley (who I've met here in Singapore at NUS) has been so nice as to offer me a place on his sofa for the night, and to show me around the city a bit, before my plane for Tokyo leaves the next morning at 9am.

I still don't really know where I'll stay in Tokyo, but a friend has talked to a friend in Japan, and they might be able to let me stay at their place for a few days until I can go to meet and move on to my first WWOOF'er host.

Tomorrow I'll have to do way too much crap. Cancel my local bank account, pack a giant packet to Germany with all my excess stuff and bring it to the post office (after finding a post office), going to campus to pay my rent, and that's just a little part of it. Who needs sleep anyway? Evidently, I do, but my sleep cycle is still very messed up... as demonstrated by the fact that I'm typing this at 6am, before sleep.

Well, wish me the best of luck! I must say, I've been a little anxious about this trip, but as it's dawning closer and closer, I can't help but get excited. It's gonna be one hell of an adventure, but I'd be a fool not to dive right into the deep end of the pool, right?

I'll try to keep you all updated. Not like these last weeks... Yeah, I know. I still owe you all a blog about Cambodia. I'm going to get around to it, eventually... and to uploading all those videos I took to youtube.

New trip, new blog muscles!

Sweet dreams.

...and Landing

The second part of the big journey was kind of smooth. Our plane departed from Doha about an hour late, because the packers were too busy pulling wheelies with their luggage caddies to actually load the baggage onto the plane.
And it turns out I was lucky with my seat again! This time, right in front of an emergency exit. Not only does it provide a quick escape in case of an emergency - it also means loads of legspace!

I was really looking forward to the sunrise, but the crew ordered everyone to close their blinds at the time, so that people would be able to sleep... wimps.
Watched another movie, and then slept. Oh, the guy who sat next to me, Thomas from Paris, is also coming here to study at NUS. As were 3 other people - Gero I mentioned before, another German guy, and that French girl. They all got picked up at the airport and had rooms on campus... unfair! As you may or may not know, all 4 of us Göttingers didn't get one, and are now staying in a hostel for the first week, until we've found a proper room somewhere.
Anyways, I seized the opportunity of having someone else's meet & greet-personnel at hand and tried to make them help me get to my hostel. Our plane was almost 1.5 hours late, and the immigration queue was huuuuge, so when we finally got out of the airport, it was too late to get to campus for registration and check-in, so that's due for tomorrow, then! I grabbed a cab, and it came with a very chatty driver, with a very heavy singapore slang, who also managed to miss the street and drive me around the whole block once. But he gave me 2S$ for it, my very first Singapore note!

So then I checked in. The hostel is very nice, and they have wireless :) I ran into the other guys shortly after, and we took the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit from Chinatown, where the hostel is located, to Little India, to grab something to eat there. They have these RFID chip cards for the subway, where you always get billed the exact fee for the number of stations you passed through, at the cost of potentially complete remote surveillance.
On our way to a very nice vegetarian restaurant, we passed through what seemed like a food mall, with lots of little food outlets and very aggressive, personally targeted marketing. I must have looked very hungry, they kept trying to sell me something. :-/





It smells funny everywhere here, lots of strange and foreign tastes in the air. And there are sooo many little shops everywhere! In one alley I went through on my hunt for an ATM, there seemed to have been shops - small, private ones, nothing big - up to the second floor... I found that kind of impressive.

Now they're singing Karaoke outside the window of our four-bed dorm, weird songs. I think I'm gonna put on my headphones and catch some well deserved sleep.

Liftoff

Today was the big traveling day. Or rather, today still is. I'm sitting at Doha International Airport as I type this, and my connecting flight to Singapore departs in about 4 hours.
My first ever flight in my entire life was pretty uneventful. Takeoff and landing were kind of exciting, and I was glued to the window like a kid during most of it. Above the clouds! That's kind of awesome. But first things first:

I got up at 5:45 am, stuffed my last remaining things into my backpack, grabbed the last remaining trash, and went out the door. Wrote some sentimental SMS to a few people while walking to the Göttingen train station. There I got on the ICE to Frankfurt, and sat down on a seat next to a very uptight lady. I find it kind of interesting how you sometimes know that you really won't get along with someone, without even having exchanged a single word.



Frankfurt Airport is kinda big. Having never ever been on a plane before, I was just a little lost... If it wasn't for all the signs and friendly people willing to help out a noob like myself, I probably wouldn't even have made it to check-in. Only 2 hours to kill at Frankfurt (and they died to a hot chocolate, a croissant and a couple of long queues), and we finally got on the plane.



The captain had such a horrible accent, I think I didn't understand a single thing he said, but apparently, they weren't all that vital anyway. Cue starry-eyed child pose.



Amazingly enough, I seem to have been lucky: The seat next to me was free, so I had a lot more legspace than I'd anticipated.



I even met someone on the plane who is also going to Singapore to study. He's called Gero and somehow guessed where I was going when we were standing in line to get to the toilet... He mentioned a french girl who was also going to NUS apparently. Funny :)



2 movies, lunch, sandwiches and coffee later, and here I am - Doha, Qatar. A lot less confusing than Frankfurt, a lot smaller too. The plane didn't dock at a terminal (don't they usually?), but dropped us off in the middle of nowhere, complete with those funny staircase cars and shuttle buses! Now that's an airport I like. None of that "Board the plane without ever hitting ground level" crap... That seems so depersonalized to me. Anyways, the heat out here is incredible. We landed at dusk, and it was still 32°C. The shuttle's AC was running so hard there was dew on the windows.

Now I'm sitting in the waiting area at the airport. Checked out the Duty-Free store, and why is it that these things never have any non-alcoholic beverages for sale? Didn't find any in Frankfurt at least. After a lot of looking around (Hmm, should I buy a PS3? New headphones?) I grabbed a bottle of "pure drinking water", cooled, yay! Tried to pay for it with my credit card, that I still haven't got used to, and it turned out it was only 1.- Qatar Riyal, which apparently equals about 0.20€ so the clerk gave it to me for free. That's nice hospitality :)



4 hours to kill before my next flight. I don't want to sleep, can do that on the plane... but I really don't want to miss the sunrise above the clouds, because that's something I really want to see! Cue dreamy gaze.

With the stress and annoyances of the last few days finally gone, it's really nice to be on the move.

I hate moving

Most of my stuff is packed up now. Some small things to go, also have to disassemble my bed, and lots of cleaning up... it's 1 am, and the packers are coming in 7 hours.



31 hours until I get on the train that takes me to the airport.

I hate moving. It always makes me feel kind of lonely. And nostalgic... all those little things that will now be gone, and gone for good. And also, a little overwhelmed.

My oh my, I'm such a pussy.

T minus 83 hours

I'm starting to get just a little nervous now. I never stepped on a plane, or helicopter, or balloon, or anything like it before. I have rented a hostel for the first week in Singapore, but after that? Here's hoping that it won't be too hard to find an affordable apartment. Moving to the other end of the planet without any clue where I'll live past the first week? Scary thought. Scarier even than to figure out how to get all of my stuff packed up in cardboard boxes.
Here in Göttingen, I live above a pub. To get to my rathole apartment, one has to climb a very narrow spiral staircase... most of my furniture fits through there, but a sofa, an armchair and my fridge don't. So how did we get them in here in the first place? Easy, just tied them up with ropes and shoved them out of the window of the café on the first floor, dragged them up to the second floor and pulled them in through the window. I hope that getting them down again will be easier...

I also bought a neoprene shuttle bag for my notebook, only to realize that I'd probably need another one to take all my peripheral gear - mouse, external harddrive, digicam, power units... Cramming them into that bag too kinda defeats the purpose, I think. I also think I really have to start packing.

Tomorrow...

T minus 134 hours

Here we go, blog is up. I'm starting to get all excited - next Tuesday I will get on a plane from Frankfurt to Singapore, which is going to be my home for the next 4.5 months. I'm doing an exchange semester at the National University of Singapore, starting August 6th. Here in Göttingen, Germany, I study Social Anthropology and Comparative Religion Sciences at the Georg August Universität Göttingen. After my exchange semester in Singapore, I plan to do 2.5 months of volunteer work in Japan. I'm 24, and about to leave Europe for the first time in my life.

But first, lots of tedious paperwork. Argh, bureaucracy! The Uni here wants proof of me studying down there so I can be granted a lower semester fee, even though this exchange is based on a memorandum of understanding between the Department of Social Anthropology here and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in Singapore; and there's some legal trouble with my former landlord, who has been owing me and my former roommate money for over a year now... but thankfully, most other stuff (exams, anyone?) has already been sorted out, so apart from that stuff and getting all my crap moved from this apartment to some storage somewhere for the next 7 months, all that's left for me to do is - farewell parties!