Belgian blogger on the move, ESL teacher, wannabe professional photographer, and aspiring linguist crisscrossing through the seasons and the continents. I lived in the USA, Milan and Vietnam, and I have chosen New Zealand as my next photography playground.

Citizen of the world – Passionate about traveling, backpacking, WWOOFing, Couchsurfing, art, music, technology, cinema and photography. Oh and wine, I like wine. And cheese. I love napping, drinking sugarcane juice, walking barefoot, leather bags and wooden masks.

I’m still not too sure what the purpose or the aim of this blog are. It’s definitely a way for me to empty my thoughts on random things mostly fueled by my experiences living abroad and traveling. Occasionally I might write a more personal article on some situation or feeling I want to share without, however, turning this blog into an e-diary, splashed with whiny posts about my moods, my relationships or the dark aspects of being an expat. Nah, that’s boring.

It’s interesting for me to read my old posts and to let me surprise myself when I notice how much my writing and photography style have changed over the years. And then I remember what influenced me at that particular time and how it shaped my writing, from a stream of consciousness to carefully matured articles to almost tourism-oriented “How to” articles.

I also like sharing with my family and friends pictures and stories from afar and I’m sure they must enjoy a bit of exoticism on a rainy day. Finally, if someone benefits from my good and bad travel experiences in the process, I call it a win.

What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? [Students] come to me and say “Well, we’re getting out of college and we haven’t the faintest idea what we want to do.” So I always ask the question: “What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?”

[…] Crowds of students say “Well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers”, but as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way. Or another person says “Well, I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses”. I said: “You want to teach in a riding school?” Let’s go through with it. “What do you want to do?”

[…]  Forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, […] you could eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much.  […] But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like, in order to go on spending things you don’t like, doing things you don’t like and to teach our children to follow in the same track.

And so, therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: What do I desire? 

Alan Watts