Leaving Vancouver and North America
After another relaxing two weeks in Vancouver (and attending Sasquatch), it’s time to leave. Here’s the last sunset I watched from the beach. If you can believe it, the weather in Vancouver was 99% rain free!
Schools Out for Summer
During my downtime I’ve enrolled in the Economics of Banking and Money on Coursera. I never thought I would find learning this stuff so much fun! To supplement the course material, I’ve been listening to the following podcasts too:
This is the first MOOC I’ve taken and I really enjoy the format. It could be the fact that I’m older and have already been established in a career for a while that my approach to learning is different. School always seemed to be about grades to me growing up. With this course, I’m more focused on learning and developing an intuition for the subject.
From this course I’ve learned that the banking and money system is a lot more complicated than I thought. I also now feel that the system itself isn’t altogether evil, it’s just trying to facilitate trade the best that it can. I’m still not confident in my ability to summarize what I’ve learnt so far, but I think I’m going to come out of this much more empowered.
Ship Happens
Today I finally start my voyage on a container ship! You can track where I am on this Facebook for ships website. If you search for the name “Independent Accord” in your favourite online search website you’ll see there are dozens of websites that have databases of ships. The websites are pretty well done too. I had no idea this shipping world can be so interesting. I’m sure the captain and crew are going to be sick of my questions over the next 11 days.
If you’re interested, here’s that I booked my travel through. If you’re nostalgic for the 90’s you’ll enjoy it a lot.
Map Reduce
Since I have all this time on my hands, I’ve started journalling the places that I’m staying (and coffee shops I leech Internet off of) in this online map. It’s work in progress and will be fleshed out more as I go.
Back to Life, Back to Reality
One question I’ve been getting asked frequently is “when are you coming back to reality?”. I find it an odd question. This is reality. There’s nothing to get back to (unless I could travel in time). Sure, I’ll be figuring out what to do work wise. Not sure how that’s coming “back” to reality though. I think we’re living in an era where social norms are shifting all over the place. Hopes and aspirations appear to be more varied than before. One persons normality is another persons exceptionality. So when I hear this question my interpretation is “when are you coming back to the lifestyle of yours that I consider normal?”.
Summary
I’m starting to feel the career break settling in. I’ve slowed things down a lot. My favourite thing to do now is leave my phone behind and go for a wander. Writing blog posts like this is much more fulfilling than a series of micro-blogs (aka tweets) that lack context, albeit they are more timely.
See you on the other side!