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I'm about to do this! My lease just ended this month and my roommate moved out of town, so instead of dealing with finding a new place and all that, I decided to save and travel in Europe for the rest of this year. My flight leaves August 11th for Reykjavik for 6 days, and then to the UK and Continental Europe after that. I'll report back when it either succeeds or fails hilariously, assuming my tablet and phone don't get stolen/lost/destroyed between now and then. 
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Aug 3, 2014 00:36
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Hey, generally I only lurk on SA, but I've never written this story down before so I guess I'll post just this once. --- After my PhD supervisor was unexpectedly committed to a mental institution (no, seriously) I had a month or two to kill until he was expected to be back at work it actually took two years for him to partially recover. While aimlessly surfing the internet at my parents place where I was planning to live until then, I lucked upon a very cheap promotional one-way ticket from my home country to Kuala Lumpur and impulse-bought it, figuring I'd sort out the return later. I didn't really have any money saved, but I had a credit card that wasn't totally maxed out, so I vaguely thought I'd bum around Asia for a bit then fly home. In Chiang Mai, Thailand I met a guy from Seychelles (a country I'd never heard of -- a group of islands off the Somali coast). He wanted an IT system developed, which happened to overlap with my skillset quite well. We got on pretty well, and so the next month he flew me down there, where I lived and worked for the next six months. It's quite a nice spot -- this was my office view. I also managed to work in some travel in the area, climbing Kilimanjaro and spending some time down in rural South Africa on a safari lodge. When the contract was almost up I was considering going back home. Then I was contacted out of the blue by a Kenyan guy who was looking for a technical lead for a startup he was building in Nairobi. He'd been promised funding from a venture capital firm there, but only if he found a tech guy. It sounded like fun, so I flew over to the African mainland, where I lived in Nairobi for the next six months helping build out the system there. I managed to go spend some time in Tanzania/Zanzibar, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia and the UAE as well while I was in the area. Sadly the business kinda fizzled out due to lack of customers and bad focus -- turns out competing with booking.com is a tough gig. Who knew, right? With the startup not making enough to pay the rent and my savings and credit dried up, I decided to become a freelance developer, working online for whatever scraps I could find. As Kenya was getting a bit unstable, I decided to blow my last few dollars on a flight back to Thailand, where I had friends I could crash with until I had some money coming in. Luckily I managed to get a couple low-paying contract gigs almost immediately which was just enough to pay for a crummy room for a month. It took a few months before I had any reliable cashflow, but over the next year I slowly grew the contracting business to the point I'm now making $10-15k USD/mo -- these days I'm 100% out of debt with a decent sized savings account for the first time in my life. I gotta say, it's nice not to have to worry if I can afford to eat. Plus I've now visited pretty much every country in the region as well as New York for a bit, generally for free on various clients dime. And I met a pretty great (Australian) girl, we're planning to move to Europe next year once her contract for BigCo here is up. Berlin looks like a likely candidate. --- It'll soon be three years since I left home, and it seems to have worked out pretty well I guess, despite me not ever really knowing what I'm doing or thinking things through. I've been very lucky though, so ymmv 
Bieh fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 04:23
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Played some video games, met 2 kids on there and added them so we could play more often. Was unemployed and wasting my life. Ended up going to stay with them and their 2 parents for a month and some time. Greatest experience of my life. As of now I work 55 hours a week and make more money then all of my friends. I can't wait to go back this winter and see them again. (Russia).
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Aug 4, 2014 01:56
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I'm bored, so I'll write a real story. I quit my industrial designer job in the beginning of 2013 to backpack a year in Australia. I had a friend who had been there for a year already, but he had stayed in a small town in WA for this entire duration, working in a grape farm. So he basically hadn't seen rest of the country yet and hoped that if I'll come, we can travel around. So, when I arrived, he gave up the room he rented, so did one of his colleagues who wanted to join our adventure too. We rented a trailer in caravan park in Margaret River area, since they had to work until the end of the harvest (about a month). During this month, they worked and I failed to find any employment whatsoever. What little savings I brought with me were quickly gone, and credit card started taking hits. So, after a month of basically playing Red Alert 2 in a trailer and drinking cheap wine, we packed up and started 11 000 km trip from Perth all around the coast to Broome to Sydney via Townsville/Brisbane. Few stupid things happened: First, we had 2 cars, with me and friend in one and colleague in other one. That doubled the gas bill. We didn't have a van or trailer, just two cheap tents. We hoped to get some temporary farm work on the road to supply ourselves with gas & money, but everywhere we got to, the season was over. We bet a lot on Carnarvon (banana plantations) but most farms had simple signs out: "NO WORK, NO ENTRY". No dice. Since money was running out quickly, we dragged our asses into small mining town of Karratha in WA, basically driving on fumes. There was no way to go ahead or back, we decided this is where we get some work, whatever the cost. Backpackers have basically zero chance to get a piece of mining pie (even Australians with no connections do), but town had 2 constructions going on, which we heard employed backpackers. Well, we spend last 55 AUD to make "white cards", some kind of safety crap you need to be employed anywhere in this town. Resumes didn't work, every place had a pile already. Including construction sites. City was overwhelmed with cheap workforce. Even McDonald's didn't need anyone. Being europeans, we put hopes on internet and some local job agencies, which was also quite stupid, in retrospect. Things got so bad that my friend's colleague started shoplifting Coles Tuna cans from store, just to eat. We were kicked from local caravan park and slept in a bush behind Shell Roadhouse, while being scared of rangers of giving us a fine which would make situation even worse. Worst thing was having no shower nor gas to get around. What little we had, we used to get into town and out and walked rest of the time. Then we changed tactics and started combing the whole city. Printed a stack of resumes at local library and just started pounding doors. All doors, any place doing any business. Me and my friend decided to go together, while his former colleague said we were idiots and it's much simpler to find work alone. So he went solo. Miracles do happen and I got a call from a cleaning company I had forgot about. I went there, got hired and mentioned that my friend is also waiting outside and out of work. And he was employed too, as a cleaner. Things didn't go as well for my friend's colleague so after few weeks he just called his old employer back south, who loaned him some money to come back and work during next season. So he left and drove back to where we started. Working in Karratha was both quite horrible and awesome. We rented a room in 4-bedroom house, which was occupied by 12-or-so Asians, mostly South-Koreans. Two guys lived in a trailer in the back yard, one girl slept in kitchen. But the room even in those housing conditions had insane cost... Our work consisted mostly of cleaning multi-apartment hotel building in city centre and offices of various mining/transportation companies. The worst was cleaning the rooms of FIFO workers, rats, cockroaches, porn magazines and sweat everywhere. Since housing was provided by companies, inhabitants didn't really care how it looked nor took care of it. Bad cases were so-called "full cleans" where we had to completely clean a house that changed owner. There was always poo poo left behind we could take for ourselves, but how good or bad this job was, depended on previous owners. I don't want to talk poo poo about Aboriginals (we worked with few and they were awesome), but I wouldn't clean a house that abos have lived in, ever again... We also cleaned offices in Dampier Port Authority, which was considered good gig to have (long hours!), needed background checks and tons of typical Australian bureaucracy/safety bullshit and was given only to best of cleaners. Which we became very quickly, compared to the zoo we worked with. Workers came and went every fortnight or so, quickly enough to forget names. Our employer was very anti-french and refused to hire any. But town was flooded mostly with Estonians, South Koreans and French so soon he had no choice. And we learned why he hated them. We got a french guy who started a fight with boss on his first day. This was shortest employment I've ever seen. I did learn some swear words in French. Then we had a french guy who came begging for work for weeks, but wasn't hired because he had no driver's license and we used vans to get around. One day he came and did have driver's license. Boss hired him and gave him a van. After we drove to the site, it was clear that this guy has never, ever taken a single driving lesson, he barely escaped from 3 accidents on the way there. This wasn't a deciding factor, but it seemed like he also hadn't cleaned anything in his life. He broke a vacuum cleaner, then started washing windows in a hotel room using 2 buckets of water, (which he used to flood the balcony and 2 stories beneath) and a rag. Karratha is red. Any photo you find, red. It's because of heavy amount of iron being in the soil, and red dust covers everything. And this mistake of nature wiped balcony windows with the rag, then proceeded to use same rag on every surface in the room, painting whole hotel room red... It's not like he noticed it and stopped it neither. He just kept going until white walls in the room became red. Since we had 7 minutes per room, and he took 20 to totally ruin it, and it took 1.5 hours to fix it later... 2 days later we told boss that we refuse to work with this guy. And he got sacked. Later, we learned that he bought his driver's license online from Thailand. Later we had a french girl, who was actually pretty good worker. Work wasn't especially hard, but workdays stretched sometimes to 14-15 hours, with barely any time to sleep, let alone do anything else. So we didn't do much besides work and sitting at home. Asian housemates were quite okay, we actually hoped they - bunch of young people - would be a bit noisier and throw a party every now and then, but they didn't. They kept to their own, and if there was anything to complain about at all, it was single toilet shared between dozen people and the fact that they occupied kitchen 95% of the time, since all they ate (veggies, rice and fish) cooked super long. Pay was as awesome as it gets for a cleaner in inexcusably rich mining town where everything is priced 150...400% compared to the rest of the country. But high rent made sure we wouldn't get too rich. After 3 months we were out of debt, dead tired of this hellhole and had collected enough money to move on, we continued the trip. Rest of the year was rather uneventful. We drove 8000 km around the coast, had a brief stay in Brisbane and ended up in Sydney Inner West. I decided to try hand at my profession and got employed as a designer in a tiny printing company. Once again, my friend somehow got hired there too as general hand/forklift driver. So rest of the 6 months I had on my visa we worked there and after 2 weeks of stay in Bali, Indonesia went back home. It was really fun and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. With all the tough, panic-mode times and small victories I experienced, it was very emotional and awesome trip. I also met a ton of really cool people, from backpackers to Aussies I worked with in Sydney. Back home, I used my Australian savings to not go back to work for 5 months and tried hand at indie dev, producing Pall by the start of July, then went back to my old company, since paid apps don't seem to sell at all. (Sorry for all the horrible grammar) Woohoo fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Aug 4, 2014 |
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Aug 4, 2014 10:39
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