I actually wrote this post last year in 2019 but put off publishing it with the idea that I’d somehow make it better. I’ve touched it up a bit but nothing has really changed in this retrospective that celebrates, commemorates, and generally marks a decade of my travels around the world, even though the last five have been mostly based in China.
January 1, 2020 marked the eleventh anniversary of my vagabonding lifestyle. My first journey was across the Atlantic to Europe, a place that many North Americans dream of travelling through, and I decided I wanted to give it a go. I stopped in London for a few days in order to get my bearings and see what I could do.
The times were a bit different than they are now as a series of events unfolded in such a way that I simply wanted to get out of my hometown, literally. I had made plans beforehand to go to Europe for the summer but, sadly, the airline went bankrupt (it was Zoom Airlines) and it would take a few months before they’d refund my money. Unemployed, single, and looking to move, it would take a few more months before I actually got my act together and got on the move.
On the plus side, I did have about money in the bank. Freshly graduated from an MA in Classics, I was doing what so many other people were doing: looking for work. This was in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis that gripped the world (and cost me my investment account) and I was only faintly aware that I could teach English overseas (more commonly known as teaching ESL or English as a Second Language.)
I was also aware of the stigma attached to such a job, specifically, that it was a “career break” or a “gap year” job, not a professional career or anything of the sort. In other words, it was something people did for fun while they figured what the next step would be. But to me, teaching ESL hit two birds with one stone: money, and travel.
At any rate, by the end of 2008 I had severed most of my commitments and wasn’t looking for any new ones. I wanted to move.
The job I did have lined up was in South Korea, teaching ESL as a part of the South Korean government’s EPIK program. It was your run-of-the-mill, fresh-out-of-university McJob that had attracted many job-seekers from around the world much like me, many of them looking for a change from where they had been prior to the 2008 events.
But it was more than that.
My hometown of Winnipeg just wasn’t big enough for my ambitions any more. At the time I left, I had been part of a Ukrainian punk band and we had just recorded our first full-length album. The album, however, was taking a long time to finish mostly due to time and money constraints and it didn’t look like it was going to be released any time soon. Further, any chance of a “tour” was pretty much out of the question. The rest of the guys in the band were either in school in more practical fields or already had jobs and weren’t about to leave those any time soon.
I, on the other hand, was just about to finish my MA and had little else lined up other than the temp job I had before. It was similar to the situation I found myself in after I’d finished my MA a few years prior. However, unlike the time after my BA, I wasn’t interested in doing any more schooling. I wanted to get going. I was already having doubts about completing my Master’s degree and really didn’t want to even think about enduring any more homework or assigned readings.
Another factor was that I’d studied the Classics, that is, the history of Ancient Greece and Rome, but had yet to visit those places. I wanted to go see some of these places already rather than just study them. I wanted to know what they were like today.
And, of course, there was a break up, which was really kind of the kick that got the ball rolling. I’d been dating this girl for 3.5 years and she was, by all admission, much more organized and focused on her academic career path than I ever was. She was going off to the UK to do her Master’s degree (which she actually researched and we even took a trip together a few months earlier to see her potential university) and I, well, I had no idea. The whole filmmaker-musician-Classics degree didn’t really bode well for a job transfer to the UK. So, as young couples often do, we broke up, a statement that kind of hides the major changes that often occur in times like those.
So, all that being said and done, there really wasn’t anything in Winnipeg that would’ve made me stay. I wanted to go, I wanted to move and, given the circumstances, I finally could get going. This time I wasn’t going to let anything stop me, bankrupt airline, job, breakup or whatever.
I mentioned the time just after my BA was a time I could’ve gone but there were things that held me back: the girl I ended up dating for 3.5 years, a band, oh, and a little tussle at a festival that made me reconsider my plans. I should point out, however, that after I finished my BA, my Mother and I did travel to Greece as a part of a tour group. On that same trip we met up with one of my cousins who had been studying in Malaysia at that time. Yet, despite all of this, I still couldn’t figure out how to make travelling work out for me. As a result, I stayed in Winnipeg, got a job, and then signed up for a Master’s degree in an effort to “make it work” in Winnipeg.
But that was then, 2008 would be different.
And so, given the opportunity, I went.
I booked my ticket for January 1, 2009 and told myself that regardless of anything else, I was going to go.
I have very few photos of that trip mainly because I wanted to keep moving. There was so much I was trying to see (the world) that the camera just wasn’t good enough to take it all in. Oh, and I may have been drunk a lot of the time, like all those stories you hear of people going to university for the first time. I don’t think I went to bed sober once in my trip to Europe. That being said, if I were to do it again, I’d probably try to drink less. The drinking did catch up with me in South Korea when I ended up falling down a flight of stairs and hurt myself pretty badly. That was five weeks into my new job in South Korea. Oops.
The other regret would’ve been that I worked more, in general, wherever I went. I should’ve picked up job at pubs or tourist spots along the way, but I was afraid. I was afraid of the authorities, what if they find out I was making money, what would they do? Little did I know that the world practically lives on cheap, un-official labour and, what’s more, making $10 an hour at a pub a few hours a week is NOT considered “making money”. Sure, by definition it is, but not when you start adding up your costs associated with working in a foreign country, it’s not really money.
So that’s what got me going, but what has kept me moving?
Every time I’ve travelled, it’s started with a question. And that question usually went something like this:
- I wonder what it’s like over there? OR
- I wonder if I could…
…and fill in the blank with some idea. Some of them included:
- Could I make make $10,000 overseas?
- If I can work on a farm in Canada, could I do this in other countries?
- Can I save money while travelling?
- Can I travel to every continent?
- Can I live on each continent and open a bank account in each place?
- Could I busk around the world?
There were other questions, too, such as:
- How do people work in other parts of the world?
- Do they like their jobs?
- Do Ukrainians really make up a large portion of the grape harvest in France? (This spurred my interest only because a guy I know, who had never travelled before, countered my plan to work the grape harvest by saying that it was overrun by run cheap labour from Eastern Europe. He wasn’t wrong, but he also wasn’t entirely correct because the vineyards needed labourers in general. It was the fact that they could treat the unofficial immigrants like shit and give them bad working conditions that sort of meant only desperate people worked these jobs.)
- How different is the world “over there”, wherever “there” is?
In general, I wanted to know how people lived in other parts of the world, not just see the sights and say I’d been there.
And there were simpler, more personal, questions, such as:
- Can I do this?
- Am I interested in doing this? (I already knew I wasn’t interested in staying in my hometown, regardless of how offended people get when I say that.)
- How will I pay for all of this (and what about those “authorities”)?
- Are hostels the party palaces and fuckfests or the slaughterhouses that so many of the movies and stories make them out to be?
And so on.
You can read about my early travels under the post 48 cities, 16 countries.
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But then nobody told me what would happen after my first solo journey abroad.
The “travel bug”, you see, isn’t physical, it’s quite metaphorical. Once I returned to Winnipeg I was constantly confronted by the same question: what now? The questions kept coming:
- What was the homeland of my grandparents like?
- Could I really learn to speak another language?
- Which country pays the most for the skills that I have? (Which is, basically, teaching English.)
- Are there any jobs other than teaching English? (Yes, but many of them involve working in offices which makes me want to vomit.)
- Can I actually live somewhere else for more than just three months?!
Yet, back in Winnipeg, the question was the same: So what’s next? As if to say, well, you travelled, now find a job and move out of your parents house already.
It would just so happen that I would have a niggling thought at the back of my mind since South Korea, What about Ukraine? And then, when I went to work for my Uncle the first time, it set in motion yet another idea that I just had to pursue.
And that’s how I got started travelling.