Matador Network's Blog, page 2140

Contraception fights climate change

Photo: Leigh Righton

The problem is simple: the world’s rising population is responsible, among other consequences, for more greenhouse gas emissions, the reduction of resources such as food and water, and greater deforestation. In other words, the bigger the families, the worst off we’re all going to be.

The point is not to ban people from having children, but to give every one the option to not have large families. In most of the developed world, women have access to contraception and have the possibility to terminate pregnancies, but there is still a lot of work to be done everywhere.

According to the Huffington Post, “in Pakistan, where just a third of married women use contraception, half of all pregnancies – 4.2 million each year – are unintended.” Giving every woman the possibility to control their pregnancies has been pinpointed as a crucial aspect of slowing down climate change.

International climate change funds could be allocated to creating family planning projects in areas of the world where contraception is not widely available, explains Laurie Goering for the Huffington Post. Financing such projects could not only help our planet, but could also greatly empower women all over the world.

So, on Valentine’s day, have protected sex and then congratulate yourself. You will have helped 7 billion people.

Business happens in Korean brothels

Photo: TomEats

SEOUL, South Korea — “It’s not fair!” complained a South Korean sex industry aficionado, a former “consultant” for a large call girl website. “The tax men are hurting business! Cracking down on company cards!”

The consultant, a 32-year-old, chiseled and rakish figure who, as a youngster, mingled in gambling dens and street gangs, is outraged over mounting government scrutiny into South Korea’s executive sleaze.

You see, just as companies stateside pick up the tab for employees’ lunch meetings, in Korea they subsidize business entertainment — which tends more toward hard core boozing and even the country’s sex trade (never mind that prostitution is illegal).

Not far from glitzy office towers of Seoul are the frenzied hangouts where business is really done: a cacophony of karaoke joints, shady neon-lit parlors, and cluttered barbecue restaurants full of drunken managers ordering their junior staff to pound shots.

To Koreans, the business districts of American cities appear staid, orderly and a bit dull. A shop-worn joke here has it that North America is a “boring heaven” while their country is an “exciting hell.”

No salesman (and the majority are men) gets far here unless he can sing mean, inebriated karaoke and then slug through negotiations the next morning with a thumping headache. South Koreans slam the world’s largest quantity of hard liquor, imbibing 11.2 shots of soju per week, more than twice the average Russian’s vodka consumption (although soju isn’t always as strong).

What happens when this macho after-hours culture goes too far, littering the company tab with payments to prostitutes and hostess clubs? “That’s the business model we depend on. When the Korean men are doing business together, they hang out at these places,” explained the sex industry consultant.

There’s a dark logic to the debauchery.

“When you’re a man and you do something dirty and sinful with your business partner around, you share your secrets, you share trust like brothers. You can always trust your new business partner.”

“At the highest end, people in this industry used to offer up failed celebrities, really sexy ones with killer bodies, as hostess girls for Korea’s richest men,” the consultant reminisced. (He spoke to GlobalPost on condition of anonymity, which is customary in South Korea.) “You know, the powerful men you read about in the news. Top tier. Only the wealthiest executives could afford it. But it’s getting harder to sell with the tax police all over it!”

South Korean civic groups and a few lawmakers have long pushed to clean up business and make it friendlier to women and immigrants. Last month, the government tax body finally put a number on the excess, reporting through a conservative lawmaker that $1 billion was spent on corporate credit cards on sleazy nighttime entertainment in 2013.

That’s a significant slice of the estimated $8.7 billion companies spent on all entertainment services last year, according to the National Tax Service. Entertainment expenses are tax-deductible up to a limit.

It’s a number that makes women’s groups uncomfortable, not only because of the ethical issues of tapping into prostitution for business deals, but because the glass ceiling stays abysmally low. “There is definitely a discriminatory and exclusionary element at play in that kind of sexual corporate entertainment culture,” said Shin Sang-ah, a consultant at the Seoul Women’s Workers Association, a nonprofit.

“Wining and dining clients or other forms of similar corporate entertainment generally involve male higher-ups in the corporate hierarchy,” she said. “And this goes hand in hand with the fact that Korean women are generally confined to less important roles within social organizations.”

Although prostitution is illegal, some 500,000 women continue to work in the sex industry in South Korea, reports the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, the body charged with protecting women’s rights. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the corporate entertainment report.

Of the total, businesses spent about $733 million on “room salons” — essentially premium hostess bars where young women flirt, drink, and sometimes leave the premises with their clients. In second place at $204 million were “danlanjujeom,” which in an oddity translates to “healthy family saloon.”

Those are slightly lower-level establishments that contract out work to entertainers, explained the consultant. Finally, there’s the $100 million spent at “yojeong,” old-style saloons where women serve you in traditional garb.

Paid sex in Korea is a complicated, compartmentalized business, the consultant explained. There are, for instance, four strata of the fabled room salon.

“Ten-pro” salons hold the most prestige as essentially the private dens of aspiring celebrities, who sometimes linger in Seoul’s finest hotels and bars, seeking a wealthy patron with the help of a trendy club. There are the “15% bars” where the establishment takes a 15 percent cut of the hostess’s earnings, followed by “full salons” where customers dish out for all services up front. The cheapest in the hierarchy, the “hardcore room salons,” can get you a lap dance, body shots, and maybe some action, he said.

Not all clients can dish out loads of cash, in which case they turn to an array of lower-priced hangouts you can read about it here, if you’re really curious.

Higher-end haunts can be exclusive, turning away people without invitations and foreigners, who tend to find their niche in US Army districts.

The government report added that the amount spent on sexual services has been declining over the past five years. But that doesn’t stop South Korea’s highly educated female professionals from crying foul.

“As long as this kind of executive-level sexual corporate entertainment culture is seen as the norm,” said a programmer at a multinational electronics company who asked not to be named, citing the ire of her employer, “it’s obviously assumed that women won’t be willing to participate, and that can definitely exclude them from certain opportunities.”

By: Geoffrey Cain, GlobalPost. Max Kim contributed reporting.

This article is syndicated from GlobalPost.

Finding balance after a back break

Author’s note: Dave and Deb Corbeil started their travel blog back in 2008, cataloging their travels around the world. The Canadian couple has kayaked through the Arctic and cycled the length of Africa, but this past November they faced their biggest challenge yet — while on an adventure trek through the jungles of Amazonian Peru, Dave took a fall that broke his back in two places. I was able to talk with the pair about their experience and how it changed their outlook on life, the future of their fast-paced lifestyle, and a message they’d like the travel community to know.

JK: Many have been keeping up on your blog, The PlanetD, but can you describe how the fall actually happened?

Dave: It came out of nowhere. We were on a cruise through the Amazon with International Expeditions, just taking it easy, birdwatching and photographing wildlife. The group had all gotten off the skiff boat to venture through the forest and get closer to local wildlife — this was around 10 am — and I didn’t have my flash with me. Deb and I discussed it for a while — should I bring it, should I not bring it — and I decided to go back to the boat to get it. My feet were incredibly muddy from that brief time off the boat, and by the second step on the stairs, my feet were flying forward in front of me. I was up in the air with my hands protecting my cameras, landing flat on my back, saving my cameras before I saved myself. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I broke both my L1 and L2 vertebrae. It felt unreal.

Deb: I heard his screams and just dropped everything and ran. I had never heard Dave yell like that before. It was petrifying.

JK: With time stopping dead in its tracks, what was the next step to getting “unstranded?”

Dave: The first thing I did — beside scream, of course — was try and move my toes. I could do that, so I was pretty sure I wasn’t paralyzed and that knowledge gave me a moment of clarity. After that, I just receded into the pain. Luckily, there was a nurse on board and she just took over. “Don’t move him, don’t move him!” I can picture her saying. She was fantastic.

Deb: Without her, I don’t know what we would’ve done — my head was all over the place and the guys on the boat certainly didn’t know how to help. The nurse directed them to help lift Dave onto a makeshift stretcher made of pillows, prepped him to move onto the riverboat, strapped him in, and iced his back. The rest was just waiting. They said it would take another 4 hours before they could get a plane to airlift us to Iquitos, and then once the plane finally arrived, the 30-minute flight turned into a six-hour ordeal, landing on the river, taking back off, landing near a small village, and finally taking a tuk tuk into town. It was 10 hours from the point Dave fell to get to the hospital in Iquitos. That day never ended.

JK: What sort of emotions were you going through while waiting to get to the hospital?

Deb: I was an emotional rollercoaster pretty much the entire time. I was dealing with insurance, and getting him home and talking with doctors — and I don’t speak Spanish, which I was kicking myself for. We did have an interpreter from International Expeditions, but I still didn’t fully know what was wrong with Dave. That first day was awful. We were worried at one point that there was internal bleeding and that he damaged his kidneys, too…there was just all this fear. I started feeling a little better once he got to the hospital and pumped full of painkillers, but even then we had to worry about getting home.

Dave: For me, there were plenty of points during this ordeal where I caught myself reevaluating life. What would my life be like as a paraplegic? If I do get out of this, how am I going to make my life better? All I had during that moment and for the whole next week, really, was time. It made me pretty introspective, seeing life through a brand new lens.

JK: During all this, it seems like you both managed to stay pretty level-headed. Dave, you even told Deb to start taking photos. Did you know it was going to be okay?

Deb: I didn’t even think of taking photos until we got Dave back to the main boat, about 45 minutes after the initial accident. Then we got into the room, got him iced, and that’s when Dave started getting more coherent. ”You better take photos!” he reminded me adamantly. And it was clear he was in a lot, a lot of pain, but it didn’t feel life-threatening at that moment. We had no choice but to wait, so I finally did get on my phone and started making updates and posting on Facebook. I remember adding to the photos: PS — Dave told me to take these!

Dave: Well, yeah, we knew we were gonna be there for hours, me just lying there and both of us waiting until we got to Iquitos. What else could we do? At that point, you just kinda have to accept the situation for what it is. But it wasn’t until we left the hospital in Iquitos a week later and got back to Canada that I was told I would make a full recovery, and it wasn’t until then that I allowed myself to believe that it would be okay.

JK: What was an episode of pain like, before and after getting to the hospital?

Dave: It’s hard to describe. It starts localized and then takes over your entire body. You feel like you’re going to die. That’s the only way to put it. I remember thinking “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to make it through this,” as I was laying there, sucking in gas fumes from the floor of that float plane.

Deb: You were just gray. I remember you kept saying, “I’m not gonna make it, I’m not gonna make it.” It was just this feeling of helplessness for me. All I could do was watch him suffer through the pain, with no painkillers that entire first day.

Dave: And then even during recovery in Iquitos the meds caused so many side effects it was like reliving it all over again. I even got a bleeding ulcer, which was insult to injury, and never once in Peru did they give me any meds to combat the side effects. By the time I had gotten to the hospital in Canada a week later, the pain had completely changed, but was still there. It was just a different kind of pain. But once in Canada, things did quickly start to get better.

JK: It’s been about 2 months now. How is the path to recovery holding up?

Dave: I’m finally off my painkillers now and I’m not perfect, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s sore, for sure, but the pain is not unbearable. Physiotherapy is helping quite a bit. I’m still hyper aware my back — if I lift something, I’m thinking about it. If I’m going up the stairs, I’m thinking about it. I’m not sure that will ever go away, but I’ve made great strides at improvement and I’m almost there. They said 3 months until full recovery, and so far so good.

JK: You guys are quite lucky, really.

Deb: Definitely. Dave was sitting up within a couple days of being in Canada and just a day after that he was taking his first step. We’re really lucky, actually. We couldn’t have asked for it to go any better. We just went out shopping the other day and we were both thinking, “Can you believe where we were two months ago?”

Dave: Yeah, the doctors said that if it had been an inch or so to the left, I would’ve become paraplegic. I would’ve hit the nerve around L1 and L2 and that would’ve been it. But instead, I just broke both of those vertebrae, and one is already completely healed and the other one is almost there. With that knowledge, the mental game is a lot easier.

JK: Has the support come out in droves? Fans sending fruit basket after fruit basket?

Dave: It’s been incredible. Wow, what a powerful community. It took this terrible ordeal to make us realize how great our circle of friends is in the travel industry and how much support we have. It’s really validated why we love the travel world and the people we’re surrounded with. We’ve gotten postcard after postcard from all over — it was really overwhelming in the best way. Even strangers from far and wide — from here in Canada to kindly strangers just dropping a line from Singapore. It was emotional and incredible.

Deb: It really made us realize the amazing friends we’ve made over the past few years. I’ve always thought that travelers are, by nature, just giving. It’s really validated that. We’ll spend hours reading our messages and I’ll cry and Dave will cry, and more flood in daily — it’s really opened our eyes. Things do happen for a reason, huh?

JK: Has this incident changed anything, like your definition of danger, or what you’re willing to do on your adventures?

Deb: This happened on such an easy trip, on a boat where there were fourteen-year-olds and eighty-year-olds. It was just a bird watching cruise! It could’ve happened at home and to anyone. We weren’t climbing a mountain or pulling sleds across the Arctic, you know?

Dave: No, we’re not going to let it. I’m not going to be constantly thinking “Oh, I could slip here” or “I don’t want to do that because of my back.” It wasn’t physically challenging or anything, so no. It’s not going to change how we travel, or at least what we do while we’re traveling. We want to slow down in general, but it hasn’t changed what we’re willing to do or what kind of challenges we’ll take.

JK: Slowing down? Where do you see The PlanetD in the coming months and years?

Deb: We were really focused on work last year. We had tunnel vision before this. It was like, “Wait a minute. Life is short. What are we doing?” This showed us that we need to stop and enjoy it and smell the roses. So from now on, we’re gonna slow down and go back to the way we used to travel, spending a month here, spending a month there. This last year, spending 2 weeks in one place was heavenly. If we go somewhere and we miss a shot because the weather sucks, now we’re gonna sit and wait. We’re gonna enjoy ourselves.

Dave: I think that’s a trap a lot of entrepreneurs fall into – they get so laser-focused on their business and neglect the rest of life. This incident made us stop and sit down and realize, “Hey, you know what? We can lead a life of balance, we can lead a life of fulfillment, and we can have both success in business and success in life. It’s just a matter of prioritizing and finding out what’s important and what you value.

JK: What do you say to those wanting to “be” you, especially now that you’ve seen both sides of this dramatic lifestyle?

Dave: Start out with an idea of balance. It’s easy to let one part of your life consume you. Work balance into your business plan and your goals and you can even be more successful.

Deb: Yeah, I’d say travel for the love of travel first. So many people now say, “I want to be a travel blogger,” and that’s great — but you need to do it for the love of travel, for the love of a destination. Be in the culture. Be in the moment. Fall in love with travel first before you try to make it a career. We traveled for a decade before we tried to make a go of it. Don’t fabricate it — let it come to you. Let your story happen; don’t force it.

Dave: Yeah, we traveled for a decade before we started blogging about it. It brought us together and ours is a story of our life. It’s not fabricated. Travel to us was about coming together and it just kind of happened. So yeah, let your story happen. If you try to make it happen, it’s not going to.

JK: If there was one lesson you learned from all of this, what would it be?

Deb: For me, it’s 100% be present in the moment. For the past year or two, we haven’t been as present as we should be. We’ve been letting business take over and looking at “elsewhere,” not really appreciating where we are. This incident has brought us back and reminded us of why we chose this life in the first place.

Dave: On a more practical note, get travel insurance! If you don’t travel with it, here’s a perfect example of why you should. They almost sent the army to rescue us; would we have been paying for that for the rest of our lives? And we work with AmEx credit cards, not AmEx travel insurance — so we’re not even paid to say that!

Canadian train plows through snow

While the rest of the world curses winter weather, Canada deals with it like a boss.

According to Global News, “over 100 centimeters of snow has covered New Brunswick in the past two weeks”, which explains the large snow drifts the Canadian National railway train featured in this video plows through with unbelievable ease. A surprising sight that shows that Canada handles blizzards like no other nation.

The man holding the video might have been a tad too close to the tracks as, when the train arrived besides him, he got covered with snow. He confessed to Global News: “I was thinking: ‘I’m going to get a little snow shower here’ […] but me and the camera survived.”

11 signs you're a Filipino traveler

Photo: whereisria

1. You have a cutout of someone’s foot in your wallet.

Someone back home wants you to buy him a pair of shoes as pasalubong. To avoid getting the wrong size, you had him trace his foot on a piece of paper and cut it out. The store employee gives you a weird look when you whip out that paper foot and press it against the back of the shoe you want to buy.

2. You know how to pack a balikbayan box.

It may not be the most glamorous way to go on transit, but your international travel isn’t complete without a balikbayan box. Through trial and error, you’ve learned to pack and seal the box without going over the allotted check-in weight. When you spot other Filipinos in airports, you can guess what items they’ve packed into their boxes, such as Nike shoes from outlet stores and hoards of imported chocolate.

3. You go crazy in US outlet stores.

Where else can you find your favorite brands such as Nike, Old Navy, Michael Kors, and Coach for ridiculously marked-down prices? Shopping is the number one priority on you itinerary and you can’t resist a good sale.

4. You spend on pasalubong.

You haven’t even left the Philippines yet and you already purchased packs of dried mangoes, “Pinoy Pride” shirts, and other pasalubong (gifts) for every single relative and friend you’re going to see abroad. While on vacation, you spend a few hours to a whole day just for pasalubong shopping for loved ones back home.

5. You convert everything to pesos…

Just to make absoutely sure you’re getting a good deal. And when it’s not, you complain that we can get it for a steal back in the Philippines.

6. You hoard souvenirs and freebies.

The hotel toiletries and complimentary coffee sachets go straight to your bag. As if outlet shopping wasn’t enough, you browse through every souvenir stall at tourist spots to see what you can buy for yourself and your friends. “Seven ‘I Love Las Vegas’ key chains for $10? I’ll take it!”

7. You cross the street too cautiously.

Because you’re so used to the Armageddon-like streets of Manila, you forget that crossing the street in first world countries like the US is not as life-threating as crossing EDSA.

8. You take pictures of everything. Everything.

Every statue, every garden, every dish you ate, every dish you wanted to eat, every character in Disneyland, and even the front signage of a place you didn’t actually enter, but just happened to pass by.

9. You start to miss rice.

After days of eating just pasta, croissants, noodles, or whatever dishes are native to the country you’re visiting, you begin to miss your favorite Filipino ulam with heaps of white rice. Is there a Filipino restaurant nearby?

10. You find the food portions ridiculously big.

When visiting non-Asian countries, you can’t really finish your food because you’re used to the Asian-sized portions back home. Then after a while, you stomach adjusts and you begin to pile on vacation weight.

11. You pepper your sentences with na lang, diba, ha, and nga.

You can’t help it. No matter how hard you try to speak in straight English, you unintentionally find yourself uttering untranslatable Filipino expressions. Diba?

Sail and kayak odyssey [vid]

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I love surfing. I love kayaking. And I love sailing. So, whenever the opportunity arises to combine the three — whether in my real-life adventures or vicariously through awesome videos like this — I can’t help but get all fired up.

This “project” (I guess that’s what we’re calling badass adventures now), called Sail 2 Surf, follows a group of paddlers as they cruise the gorgeous island chains of Washington, US and British Columbia, Canada in search of waves and adventure. Lucky bastards. Here’s the scoop:

In June 2014, a team of kayakers stepped aboard 34-foot trimaran, Lung-Ta, cast off from Orcas Island, WA and set off on the Sail 2 Surf project — a sailing and kayaking expedition with a focus on kayak surfing, adventure, and minimal-impact exploration.

If this doesn’t get you ready for spring paddling season (fast approaching), then I don’t know what will. Enjoy your daydream.

How to travel the world for life

BACK IN 2003, I left Ireland on this day with no return ticket, and 132 months / 574 weeks / over 4,000 days later, I’m still on the road with no home or place I can call a base. Everything I own in the world weighs 23kg/50lb and comes with me.

On my 8 year travel anniversary, I wrote my site’s most popular post ever by sharing the 29 most important life lessons I learned while travelling the world. And last year on my 10 year anniversary, I took those top-10 life lessons and presented them in a professionally-edited video to summarize my travels visually.

This year, I’m doing something different and sharing my most practical tips on how you can keep up long-term travel like I have, without winning the lottery (or having a mega savings). All throughout my travels — for over a decade — I’ve paid my way from money I earned while travelling.

SO, HOW DO I DO IT?

First, you don’t need to save up money for years before you can begin a life of travel. So many people make this mistake in mentality, and as a result they put off their travel goals for years unnecessarily. In fact, starting a travel lifestyle right now is well within the possibility of many people. I realize that there are exceptions, and some people might not want to travel long term like I do, so today I want to give you a heap of ideas for how to manage your own travel goals, whatever they may be.

I’ll tackle four key points:

1. How to lead a cheap travel lifestyle

2. How to score cheap flights

3. How to get the cheapest (and sometimes free) lodging

4. How to work while you travel

If you’re really serious about starting a travel lifestyle, I’ll also share the best links for further reading on travel hacking. To get you started, you can’t get better than checking out Nomadic Matt, since I learned a lot of the strategies I now use myself from his book How to travel the world on $50 a day.

HOW TO TRAVEL THE WORLD FOR CHEAP

Before we discuss how to travel cheaper, it’s very important to tackle how to live cheaper. This applies to you right now, even while you are settled.

If you have expensive habits now in your settled life, those habits will follow you into your travel lifestyle and rack up unnecessary expenses. It doesn’t need to be this way.

So how expensive is your current life? Before you start travelling, track your actual expenses now and see where they go. Do you eat out a lot? Spend a lot on fuel costs? Does most of your money go to car or home insurance payments?

The good news is that if you start travelling for the long-term, you can live cheaper in part because you’ll no longer need to spend hundreds of dollars of month to pay for your car, its insurance, its gas…and all the other major expenses that comes with leading a settled life. When you think about it, with all of these major expenses, leading a settled life is expensive!

But if you’re finding that the biggest sticker shock comes from your lifestyle habits, then you’ll have to make some tough choices.

Can you cut back on coffee, cigarettes, and beer in exchange for extra cash you can put towards train tickets to the distant corners of the world?

Not everyone can, or wants to. But if you can save just ten dollars a day by living a cheaper lifestyle…just 10 dollars a day!…that’s enough to pay the cost of your entire monthly rent for a hut on the beach in India or Thailand.

Think about that for a minute.

You might consider making other cheap lifestyle choices, like keeping a vegetarian diet and learning to cook from home. In a lot of countries, you can rely almost entirely on the use of public transport instead of a car, or get around on a bike. You can share accommodation costs by having roommates. You can choose to be happy with the current technology and clothes that you have instead of updating them every few months.

These changes can increase the amount of your expendable cash dramatically.

After you learn to decrease the cost of your life in general, this will absolutely spill over into savings for your travel life. Then, I recommend you:

Follow these 25 travel on the cheap tips from myself and Graham Hughes (who has visited every country on earth on a shoestring budget)

Get rid of all your stuff. Use sites like Ebay, Craigslist, Gumtree, go to second-hand shops, the options are endless. There is no physical item that you actually can’t live without unless it is the clothes on your back, food, or your means of earning money (for me, that’s my laptop). This will both give you a financial boost and allow you to travel with all your possessions and not need to pay for storage or rent back home.

Learn how to travel with everything you own carried along with you.

When eating in a country, don’t forget to try to get a place with a kitchen if you can (many youth hostels have one) and cook your meals. Otherwise, try to eat out at lunch time instead of dinner, since many places do lunch specials. Cities like Berlin and Paris have great “business lunch” options that offer several courses for just a few euro. Also, do indeed visit tourist sites, but leave the area when it’s time to eat, since you’ll be paying tourist rates. Find out in advance where the locals eat.

My number one biggest tip by far for how to travel for cheap is to learn the local language. This will save you heaps of money. I honestly feel this is one of the main reasons that I’ve been able to afford to travel so long – I’ve avoided paying the “English speaking tax,” and trust me, that tax exists pretty much everywhere that English is not the native language.

HOW TO FIND CHEAP AIRFARE

When your general lifestyle is less expensive, the next biggest expense people imagine is flights.

Flights, I’ll admit, can cost thousands of dollars. But if you know where to look, there are several ways to make these dramatically cheaper than you think. Here are some rules to live by when checking out flights.

1. Never go to the airline’s own website. Instead, use “meta-search engines” while check and compare the rates for multiple travel sites at once. Also, try to book tickets around 3 months in advance, and choose flexible criteria — especially for the exact day of travel. See what the cheapest day is during the week or month around when you can fly. You can save hundreds of dollars by flying even a single day earlier or later! And try multiple searches on several of the following websites until you get the best results:

www.skyscanner.com

www.momondo.com

www.kayak.com

www.expedia.com

www.adioso.com [This website uses natural language, so you can type “London to Southeast Asia mid May for 3 weeks” into the search box and Adioso suggests flights]
www.hipmunk.com [This site ranks flights by “Agony,” taking inconvenience into account]

2. For long-haul, cross continental flights, use flightfox.com. For $49 they can save hundreds or get you nice upgrades. Definitely worth it for many people. I got Lauren’s return flight (from US to Spain to live with me for 3 months, then from Ireland to US for Christmas) for $450/€330, because of some strange rule where we added an extra leg to Canada 2 days after she landed in DC that she didn’t even take. This website did the research for us in a way you wouldn’t get on the above meta-searches.

3. If your goal is to fly a lot, you can use round-the-world tickets, which can cost about €3,000+ depending on the number of continents you want to visit. You can book through airtreks.com or flightcentre.com, but it’s better if you can save miles through credit card sign-ups. This is more appropriate if you want to travel the world for a year and know where you want to go in advance. Using the above options and buying individual tickets still tends to work out cheaper most of the time though, and allows for more flexibility.

HOW TO FIND CHEAP OR FREE LODGING

For those of you travelling very fast and moving around once every few days, travel will be more expensive, but you can reduce costs by getting last-minute prices on hotels on sites like laterooms.com, lastminute.com, hoteltonight.com, priceline.com, hotwire.com (name your price — you won’t know where you’ll stay until you’ve paid).

I can understand why people think long term travel is not possible for them, when they think it’s a $1-200/night hotel stay, but the fact of the matter is that long term travellers do not tend to stay at hotels.

Instead, we:



Stay for free with Couchsurfing, servas (reference letter required, mostly US senior travellers), hospitality club, globalfreeloaders (I use Couchsurfing a lot for its search feature to find language learning partners too)

If you speak Esperanto, Pasportaservo.org is like the above sites with the only catch being that you communicate with your hosts in a language you can learn in a few weeks! (Here’s how well my girlfriend did with just an hour a day for 6 weeks)

Use wwoof.org (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms – about €20 per country membership – you work on a farm and get free accommodation, as well as the amazing experience)

House-sit at housecarers.com, mindmyhouse.com, caretaker.org — This is more suited to stays of a month or longer; you get free accommodation in exchange for keeping an eye on pets, gardens, and other chores.

Stay in youth hostels — as low as just $5/night in countries like Thailand, cheaper across Europe. Find your options on hostelworld.com or hostelbookers.com.

For stays of a few days or a few weeks, I highly recommend staying in a serviced apartment. For mid-range budgets this is my go-to choice. Find your home away from home on 9flats.com, airbnb.com, homeaway.com, roomorama.com, or wimdu.com.

Go camping! You are only paying for the space and can access water, electricity and other services as required in specialized campsites for a fraction of the cost of alternatives.

Here is more on how I find accommodation while travelling

HOW TO WORK WHILE TRAVELLING

Most people think they have to save their pennies for months or years in advance until they have “enough” money to travel and live off of for a while. Unfortunately, this can only last you so long (unless you have won the lottery, in which case send a donation my way!). The fact is that you can earn while on the road.

There are two ways to do this:

1) GET A JOB ON-LOCATION

If you are an EU citizen you can do this automatically in any other countries in the EU. In most other situations though, you need to obtain a visa in advance.

As an Irish citizen, I got a J1-visa to work in America twice when I was a student (this was part of the 6 months of travel I did before my 11-years-non-stop travel, so I am actually approaching 12 years depending on how you count it…) I applied for this through the Irish organization USIT. They also offer Irish people working visas in many other countries. Your country may have an equivalent service.

In most other situations, you may have to see in advance what your options may be. If you are a student, your university most likely offers study abroad options, and definitely use your network of friends and colleagues to see if any of your fellow students have experience working abroad.

If you are looking for a job on your own, it is actually usually much easier to get hired by a company before you travel, and then have that company arrange the visa. This was a possibility for me the first time I went to the US, because I worked as a summer school teacher for a university, which was experienced in hiring foreigners, so I actually didn’t need to arrange the working visa myself.

Finally, have a look at the country’s embassy website and see what they recommend for working visas.

WHAT WORK CAN YOU DO ON-LOCATION?

The easiest way by far that English speakers can work abroad is to do it as an English teacher. In countries were English teachers are in high demand, the school will arrange the visa and all logistics for you.

I’ve done lots of work as an ESL teacher myself, all based on an initial weekend affordable TEFL certificate I got from i-to-i, and then building upon my experience earned to get me higher paid jobs with time, eventually working for prominent schools like Berlitz and Wall Street Institute. I’ve also worked the following jobs on location, to give you an idea of your options (your options expand immensely if you learn the local language — don’t forget to sign-up to my newsletter for a week long crash course if you aren’t sure how):



Youth hostel receptionist

Store manager

Photographer

Basic office work

Engineer (what my undergraduate degree was in – in this case I worked as an intern)

Go Kart race controller

Computer repair / on-site tech support

Lots of English teaching

On-site translator

You may find other work depending on your work skills and the opportunities available.

2) GET A LOCATION-INDEPENDENT JOB

I worked on-location for my first years travel, but the catch was that my wages remained stagnant for all work other than teaching English, since I moved every few months and had to start over from scratch again.

That’s why the future of many jobs (not all of course) is that they can be based online, and you can take them with you around the world!

Here are a few ideas:

If you are good at languages, and willing to go through training for it, become a freelance location independent translator. I found my initial work on proz.com

Teach your native language online. You can become a teacher on italki for instance and take your students with you wherever you go. My girlfriend did this for her first months of travel with me, and was working full-time with the work she got.

Become an online coach – while I do this myself to help people expand the popularity of their websites and craft their language learning projects, there are many ways you can implement this. I once met someone who earned her living coaching people to give up smoking (her background was in psychology) over Skype!

Write an e-book or sell a course online. My site fi3m premium supports this completely free blog (no spammy irrelevant advertising anywhere here – that’s a really poor way to do anything but cover hosting costs) through a video course and resource database. I used to sell an e-book too. You can distribute this yourself if you put the time into creating a really high quality free site/Youtube channel/podcast or similar that sends traffic to it. You can also sell it directly on Amazon (self published) or through various other channels. Note that traditional publishing is not a good way to earn a living for most people – my book is an international best seller and this does not translate into money in my pocket because of traditional publishing logistics.

Take a skill that you have and see if it works online. Here is a list of 64 ideas to work online depending on the skill. You can also see if job openings are available through various online advertising boards, or a job outsourcing site like oDesk.

WHAT KIND OF WORKING VISA DO I NEED?

The question of how you manage the logistics of working online is tricky because there are no international laws that govern such things. What many of us do is simply set ourselves up legally and officially in our home country – so we have a bank, and pay taxes there.

Then we stay in a country on a tourist visa – a grey line depending on where you go. I actually have a business visa while I’m in America right now, since its immigration tends to be the most strict about what I can and can’t do here – this is despite the fact that I am not actually technically employed for any of my time here, but my book tour is business of sorts. In most countries though, a tourist visa is OK for online workers. (Disclaimer: Please don’t take what I’m saying here as legal advice – I accept no responsibility if you run into issues!)

You aren’t legally working in the eyes of many countries as you are not taking any money or employment from its citizens, only spending, as any tourist would. In case you are wondering, the “3 months” in my blog title comes from the 3 month visas I typically have as my limit in most places.

HOW DO I SET MYSELF UP AS A BUSINESS?

Whether you should operate as a freelancer or start your own business depends on too many factors for me to cover here, most important of which being the kind of work you’ll be doing, but you can contact a lawyer in your home country if you are unsure.

You can receive payments directly to your bank account (when I was a freelance translator, my clients were European and bank transfers within Europe are free – working with American clients is a pain in the ass to be honest because they are one of the few first world countries that still insist on printing your money on dead trees, i.e. snail-mailing checks/cheques).

Another solution is to set up a pro or business paypal account, but keep in mind that you do pay fees for many transactions and withdrawals.

WHEN EVERYTHING IS COMBINED — WORKING AND TRAVELLING LONG-TERM IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK

A really cool benefit of working location independently is that you can earn in a strong currency like the euro/dollar/pound and spend in a cheaper country where that money will take you really far. Leveraging currency differences is another thing that allows “technomads” to travel so extensively.

The combination of everything I’ve said in this post, namely

SPENDING less through a minimalistic lifestyle

Finding cheaper flights through a bit of research

Finding cheaper or free accommodation, especially through slower travel

Working online and earning in a stronger currency, while spending in a weaker one

Means that long-term travel is absolutely sustainable. I break some of these rules sometimes, like this year I’m travelling very fast on my book tour, and accommodation is much more expensive as a result, but flights are still cheap, we eat in as often as possible, we earn online, and we generally don’t spend much otherwise.

This kind of fast-travel wouldn’t be sustainable for me in the long-term, but we’ll be back to three month stays later this year, and back to saving plenty for intensive periods like this.

A good balance is the key, and this is precisely how I’ve been able to travel for 11 years straight. I hope that answers most of your questions, but if anything is missing, feel free to ask me in the comments below!

This article was originally published on Fluent in 3 Months and has been re-posted here with permission.

What your bartender wants to say

Photo: Cactus

Ah, the many thoughts running through a bartender’s head, most of which we reluctantly hold back in front of our guests…

1. What time do you get off?

“What time are you leaving?”
2. Can you start me a tab please?

“Is that a Titanium Black AMEX? Don’t be cheap.”

3. I’ll tip you next time.

“Too bad there won’t be a next time. I already know you aren’t coming back.”

4. It’s my BIRTHDAAAYY! I wanna free birthday shot.

“How about a barmat shot, that’s free.”

5. What do you like to make?

“Tips. All bartenders like to make tips. Now, what would you like to drink?”

6. Working in a club must me so much fun!

“Ya, cleaning up puke/broken glass while babysitting drunks is a blast.”

7. OMG, that bouncer is so rude. How dare he ask me to get off the bar?

“#1. You are a lawsuit waiting to happen. #2. Everyone can see your hello kitty underwear.”

8. When is the DJ going to play house?

“Looks like you’re SOL because this is a hip hop club.”

9. I just started dating this guy and he never answers my messages. I’ve left three voicemails, five snapchats, and seven DMs…

“OMG. Run buddy, run!”

10. I’m not that drunk.

“Dude, you’re cut off. You just chased your straw around the glass with your tongue.”

11. [Slurring] My drink is so weak.

“Just wait until I pour the next one.”

12. I lost my phone/purse/shoes/keys/wallet/scarf/umbrella/sunglasses…

“Come on! Keep track of your belongs. Drunk people love stealing anything and everything, including reserved signs to light-up ice buckets.”

13. Can I have a cranberry vodka?

“Sorry miss, we don’t carry cranberry flavoured vodka. Would you like to try a vodka cranberry? SMH.”

14. We need a picture.

“Maybe if I zoom in on their cleavage they’ll stop asking me.”

15. It’s my song!

“There’s no song playing…”

16. Do you know who I am?!

“Obviously I do not. You’re the guy asking me who you are.”

17. I don’t believe in tipping.

“I don’t believe in volunteering at a nightclub.”

18. Surprise me.

“Rocky Mountain Bear Fucker* it is. Maybe you’ll stop asking me to surprise you.”

*A Bear Fucker consists of equal parts Bacardi 151, Tequila, and Jack Daniel’s. Sounds tasty, right?!

How well do you know global booze?

Featured Photo by Mallix

Raising kids around the world

SOME global parenting styles might make American parents cringe, but others could definitely use a close study. Read on for a sampling of parenting lessons from around the world.

1. In Norway, kids nap outside even in sub-zero temperatures.

Photo: cglosli

In Norway, childhood is very institutionalized. When a kid turns 1 year old, he or she starts going to Barnehage (Norwegian for “children’s garden”), which is basically state-subsidized daycare. Parents pay a few hundred dollars a month and their kids are taken care of from 8 am to 5 pm. Toddlers spend a ton of time outside at Barnehage, even in extremely cold temperatures. It’s not uncommon to see kids bundled up outside during a Scandinavian winter, taking a nap in their strollers.

Even with the obvious benefits provided by the government in Norway, some parents complain about the lack of creativity in people’s approaches to parenting. One American mother adjusting to raising kids in Norway wrote, “There’s a sense that there’s just one right way to do things. And everyone does it that way. In America there are different parenting styles — co-sleeping, attachment parenting, etc. Here there is just one way, more or less: all kids go to bed at 7, all attend the same style of preschool, all wear boots, all eat the same lunch…that’s the Norwegian way.”

2. Vietnamese parents potty train their babies by 9 months.

Photo: ePi.Longo

Here’s a good one. In Vietnam, mom and dads teach their babies to pee at the sound of a whistle. Kind of like Pavlov with his salivating dogs. Except this is moms and dads with peeing babies. The Chinese do it too apparently. Parents start by noticing when their baby starts peeing and making a little whistle sound. Soon enough, the baby starts to associate the whistle with peeing and voila!

Think this sounds a little odd? Or a little like someone is conflating a kid with a pet Schnauzer? Well, researchers say Vietnamese babies are usually out of diapers by nine months. What do you think now?

3. Traditionally, Kisii people in Kenya avoid looking their babies in the eye.

Photo: love2dreamfish

Hat tip to Cracked for finding this one: Kisii, or Gussii, moms in Kenya carry their babies everywhere, but they don’t indulge a baby’s cooing. Rather when their babies start babbling, moms avert their eyes. It’s likely to sound harsh to a Western sensibility, but within the context of Kisii culture, it makes more sense. Eye contact is an act bestowed with a lot of power. It’s like saying, “you’re in charge,” which isn’t the message parents want to send their kids. Researchers say Kisii kids are less attention-seeking as a result, so that’s something.

4. Danish parents leave their kids on the curb while they go shopping.

Photo: Miss Copenhagen

In Denmark, writes Mei-Ling Hopgood in How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm, “children are frequently left outside to get frisk luft, or fresh air — something parents think is essential for health and hearty development — while caregivers dine and shop.”

As you might imagine, this idea sends shivers down the spines of many parents in the United States. In New York, a couple (one of whom was Danish) was arrested for leaving their child outside a BBQ restaurant while they went inside to eat. ”I was just in Denmark and that’s exactly what they do,” Mariom Adler, a New Yorker out walking with her 2 1/2-year-old son, told the New York Times. ”We would see babies all over unattended. We were stunned, frankly. But Denmark also struck us as exceptionally civilized.”

5. In the Polynesian Islands, children take care of children.

Photo: amhuxham

We’re not talking any old big brother babysitting little sister here. We’re talking organized kid collective.

Hopgood writes in her book that adults take the lead on caring for babies in Polynesia, but as soon as a child can walk, he or she is turned over to the care of other children. “Preschool-aged children learned to calm babies,” she wrote, “and toddlers became self-reliant because they were taught that that was the only way they could hang out with the big kids.”

Jane and James Ritchie, a husband and wife anthropology team, observed a similar phenomenon over decades in New Zealand and the Polynesian Islands. But they don’t think it would fly in the United States. “Indeed in Western societies, the degree of child caretaking that seems to apply in most of Polynesia would probably be regarded as child neglect and viewed with some horror,” they wrote in Growing Up in Polynesia.

6. Japanese parents let their kids go out by themselves.

Photo: W2 Beard & Shorty

Parents in Japan allow their kids a lot of independence after a certain age. It isn’t uncommon for 7-year-olds and even 4-year-olds to ride the subway by themselves.

Christine Gross-Loh, author of Parenting Without Borders, lives in Japan for part of each year, and when she’s there she lets her kids run errands without her, taking the subway and wandering around town as they may. But she wouldn’t dare do the same back in the United States. “If I let them out on their own like that in the US, I wouldn’t just get strange looks,” she told TED. “Somebody would call Child Protective Services.”

7. Spanish kids stay up la-ate!

Photo: Loli Jackson

Spanish families are focused on the social and interpersonal aspects of child development, according to Sara Harkness, a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.

The idea of a child going to bed at 6:30 pm is totally alien to Spanish parents, Harkness told TED. “They were horrified at the concept,” she said. “Their kids were going to bed at 10 pm.” so they could participate in family life in the evenings. The same is true in Argentina, according to Hopgood.

8. Aka pygmy fathers win the award.

For the Aka people in central Africa, the male and female roles are virtually interchangeable. While the women hunt, the men mind the children. And vice versa.

Therein lies the rub, according to Professor Barry Hewlett, an American anthropologist. “There’s a level of flexibility that’s virtually unknown in our society,” Hewlett told The Guardian. “Aka fathers will slip into roles usually occupied by mothers without a second thought and without, more importantly, any loss of status — there’s no stigma involved in the different jobs.”

This flexibility, apparently, extends to men suckling their children. Ever wonder why men have nipples? That’s why.

9. French kids eat everything.

Photo: Wellington College

Set mealtimes; no snacking whatsoever; the expectation that if you try something enough times, you’ll like it. These are among the “food rules” in France that are taken as given. The result is French kids who eat what adults eat, from foie gras to stinky cheese. Tell that to my nephew.

By: Emily Lodish, GlobalPost

This article is syndicated from GlobalPost.