[travel] Standard of living

As of today I've been traveling for three months. I've got about a month and a half left. There's still plenty more to see, but I will be very excited to return home and begin a new phase of my life when I get to that point. I'm looking forward to traveling in different ways (mentally, socially etc) when I return. I did some quick financial checks, and I'm amused to note that my cost of living now is about the same as it was during my final year of employment back home. If I didn't have such an aggressive country-hopping travel schedule (I'm currently on my seventeenth flight) they probably would have been half as much.

Amusingly, sometimes cheaper options are better. For example, most hostels have social lounges and kitchens, which make it easy to meet other travellers. I value social connections over mints on my bed pillow, so the cheaper places actually give me more value. There's actually a trend afoot to create more boutique hostels where competitive advantage comes from creating an environment that fosters community, and this trend is big enough to have been the subject of a recent New York Times article.

I'm also going to experiment with yet another option that might be even cheaper and better for my goals – couchsurfing.com. Couchsurfing is a brilliant nonproofit designed to help people of different cultures get to know one another as well as find budget travellers couches to sleep on. While the personal connections end of Craigslist is the Wild West, Couchsurfing puts numerous reputation mechanisms in place to foster trust between surfer and surfee. I'm going to try it in Estonia and Poland and see how it goes.

[travel] Danang mystical cave

I've posted a few older photos from Vietnam. Here are some pictures from a striking cave temple, where burning incense and sun from a natural air shaft have combined to create incredible effects.







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[travel] Tell me more about the dead white people

My college humanities courses tended to avoid the canon of dead white people at all costs, instead focusing on alternative voices, indigenous cultures, oppressed peoples and the like. Some of it was very interesting, some of it wasn't. However, after a visit to the stunning Athens Archaeological museum, which showed me firsthand the achievement's of Athens' Golden Age, I want to learn more about the intellectual culture that spawned the world's first democracy, a rich theatrical tradition, and numerous other achievements. To those of you who sought out the traditional classics, I ask what you would recommend, keeping in mind that I'm on the road so online material is preferred. I assume it's all well out of copyright, even the translations.