My decision to go WWOOFing in Norway be like:
| Table 2. Methods of traveling as a debbie | |||
| Details | |||
| Serendipity | Initiative | ||
| Big Picture | Serendipity | Lackadaisical | debbie wuz here ♥ |
| Initiative | ??? | Micro-Managey | |
Given the assertion that being in Toronto is the gift-wrap to the gift that is my trip to Hong Kong, it must follow that Hong Kong is the gift wrapping to … two China mini-trips??
These were also trips about being with the people we went with rather than where we went so, again, I will spare you from the interpersonal details. But in this case, where we went inspired some serious inquisition on what I consider reality.
So bring your Tempo tissues and come along!
I haven’t gotten around to finishing even half of my Europe 2017 retroactive posts, and here I am with another trip in my past to mull over. Yet gratitude is a common theme in my life, and I never want to squander this blessing by failing to recognizing it.
So, I understand that Time is writing history faster than we can record it, but why my life is happening faster than my mind can reflect on it is surely not Time’s fault. My life can hardly be considered fast-paced– and trust me I have an inkling of what fast-paced really is after visiting Hong Kong.
…And with that wonderful segue, I’ll elaborate on my Hong Kong and China trip for a bit before resuming with Europe/Scandinavia posts. (How do people deal with reflection backlog anyway??)
The Signpost in the Shade is a pair of paintings painted for a very special pair of people in our lives on the occasion of their wedding.
Storytellers as they are, The Signpost in the Shade, is a story written by the bride for the groom on his birthday, about a month before they got engaged.
The Tale of Three Trees was passed down to me orally, as folktales are, while roaming through the streets of GuangZhou last year. The storyteller loved and cherished this tale from childhood. The simplistic yet deep-reaching truth of the story had inspired her to write her own.
8 months laters, by the rarest of chances, that this book caught our eyes while we were visiting a flea market in Stockholm. We only saw it fitting to bring this story back to the storyteller, now a bride, as she goes forth to build a new home (and joint library collection) with her groom.
As this tale has and continues to travel with us wherever we go since that night in GuangZhou.
We hope this book, having traveled from Stockholm to Toronto, will find its resting place in Hong Kong.
… But not before adding a few words of our own 😉
Gelato is cheaper than a bus ticket here; so naturally, I had gelato everyday and walked everywhere.
After the past couple days of terrifying experiences, I had already decided on the train on my way to Innsbruck that my two days in Innsbruck will be chill. I will tone down the walking, not try any mountains, and just enjoy the city. I mostly followed through with that, so that translates to a pretty boring blog post. (Poor you.)
“Shadow work is all the unpaid for labour done in a wage-based economy.”
Shadow work includes: commuting to work, doing the laundry, figuring out how to use self-checkout at the grocery store…
All this unaccounted for labour adds mental strain, called decision fatigue, to our already very exhaustive mental energy. Life hacks that limit shadow work are often circulated. For example, certain “successful people” wear the same thing every day to reduce the shadow work required to decide what to wear every morning.
While life hacks help you minimize shadow work, what if you can make shadow work work for you? What if there is a way to profit from it?
All this is basically a segue for me to show you some interesting money-earning and money-saving apps.
The process of mountain hiking is conducive to becoming a metaphor of journey, spirituality, and life. I mean, it literally has a rising action, a climax, and falling action. For the duration of the hike, I can self-indulge and romanticize myself (or my party) as a main character(s) in some heroic journey. Hiking is a celebration of life as a process rather than a destination; and that’s a much needed for a soul that’s trapped in a “destination”-oriented mind like mine.
While hiking, I need to be hyper-aware of time and space for mundane things like daylight, my own safety, and such. Yet for the same reason, the fact that a hike occurs within the time span of a really long conversation, puts the mind in a space where internal dialogues can fester and run (read:walk) their course. Given that long internal dialogues monologues are prone to recursive thinking (…at least mine are?), it follows that the activity of hiking is conducive to forming nested micro-metaphors within the broader “hiking metaphor” as a whole.
But–and forgive me for being trite–isn’t the phenomenon that hiking is fertile with nested metaphors, itself a metaphor for life? After all, any metaphor about life is just a subset of life that is modular enough for the human mind to appreciate the parallel. Every metaphor about life is nested in life. So it really shouldn’t be a surprise that a powerful metaphor of life, like hiking, is a Russian doll of nested-metaphors.
I’m convinced that the hike on this day is somehow a metaphor for all my other days. This is my absolute favourite “story” to tell about my trip because the things that happen in a certain sequence within a certain time. On a deeper note, I love telling it because I feel like the story hasn’t ended yet. I feel like this day had more subtle metaphors I haven’t fully teased out, and perhaps symbolism that I don’t yet know the meaning of.
It’s a new day…… and you know what that means! Another chance to tackle Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Mittenwald!
There’s really no reason why I should be so determined to do this. It’s not supposed to be a hard hike or anything. Somehow having it denied from me yesterday, made me want it more today. Also, having it denied from me yesterday made me want to make it longer today. I’m convinced that irrationality like this is what makes me human. I’ve learned to live and breathe it.
Between the conference and WWOOFing in Norway, I had a little less than a week of alone travel time. The morning after the conference, I took the first train I could out of Munich (marked 1 on map below) to the Alps on the German-Austrian border (3 on map). For (my own) reference, I labelled Starnberg (2), because that’s where my professor took us that day we skipped part of the conference together. A couple days later, I would take the train to the end of the line at Innsbruck, Austria (4).
Specifically, the town I visited is Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which, according to my research is a great skiing place in the winter and a great hiking place in the summer. I had already picked out several hiking routes to take. I had two goals for the 3 days I will be here:
But, aware that I am completely at the mercy of the universe and such (in terms of the weather, health etc.)…
I’ve learned that anytime I refer to a desire as “my goal”, it’s really just an arrogant way of saying “my request to the universe”.
We will revisit these goals later.