The flight from Doha to New Delhi was only 3.5 hours, so I got in around 3:30am. I had the address to where I was going. The prepaid airport taxi service, run by the police was nice. You tell them where you're going, they give you a price, a the taxi takes you. A good idea, especially in a country where taxi drivers are notorious for trying to gouge tourists. At first the taxi driver seemed to know where he was going, but after a while, he started to look a little lost. As it turns out, an address in New Delhi doesn't seem to mean a whole lot. It can get you to the right area of town, but after that you seem to need to know where you're going to get there. To add ... read more

As I left Barcelona and Europe behind, I began the Asian leg of my trip around the world. I flew into Doha, Qatar at around midnight to a temperature of 37ºC and 75% humidity. I never knew that it could be hot outside at midnight. The airport was nice and air-conditioned, almost too much so. It seems the hotter the climate, the colder they like the air-conditioning. Either that or it's just so bloody hot outside it feels like it's a lot colder. After waiting in line for an hour or so, I finally got into the departure/transfer lounge to wait out my 22 hour layover. After getting a bit of sleep, I decided to pay the $30 visa a fee and explore Doha. I left the airport at 7am, to a warm, but bearable 35ºC. ... read more

Welcome back to my continuing adventures in sunny Spain! So I started out in Barcelona, had a blast for a few days, and then I decided to take a 12 hour bus ride down to Granada, in Andalusia, in the south. 12 hours seems like a long time, but when you spend half of it sleeping, or trying to sleep, it goes by pretty quick. Even if it hadn't gone by quick, Granada would have been worth the wait. I spent 3 days in Granada and saw maybe 1 or 2 clouds the entire time. The weather was perfect, though a trifle warm my last day when it reached 40ºC, luckily it was a dry heat. I later on my travels discovered what a somewhat humid 45ºC day felt like, so looking back on it, 40ºC ... read more

Welcome back to to my travel blog. It's been a while since I've written, so I think it's about time to let you know what I've been up to. I think the last time I wrote, I was on my way to Spain. I started off in Barcelona, which is a fantastic place, and spent some quality time with my good friend Borja. I spent the first couple of days staying in a hostel, right on the beach and became a tourist for a change. It was the first time I really felt like a tourist, since leaving Edinburgh. Not that it's a particularly bad thing to feel like a tourist, just different. I went on a walking tour of the city centre, saw some nice buildings, learned some Catalan history from a South African, and ... read more

After another long train ride from Moscow, I arrived in Helsinki. As a tourist, there isn't a whole lot of exciting things to see, but I think it would be a fantastic city to live in. There are parks everywhere, it's on the coast, the city provides great wi-fi around the city centre (I never had a problem connecting outside anywhere in the city centre, and for a city with a little over a million in greater Helsinki, the city never felt close to that size. Public transportation is some of the best I've come across, though a little pricey as is everything else. They have buses, trams, commuter trains and a metro, so even at rush hour it was never all that crowded. I only went out one night in Helsinki, but the night-life was ... read more

Greeting from Moscow! I think it's safe to say my first couchsurfing experience was a good one. Evgeniy, my host, was fantastic. An experience tourists couldn't get. Over the course of my stay he introduced me to Russian food. We ate dried fish and beer the first night I was in Moscow, which is definitely not the cleanest snack, but quite tasty, if you're fine with ripping the fish head off, gutting it with your fingers! The fish is a little salty by itself but combined with a few beers, it's pretty tasty. He also made several different Russian soups during my stay, and gave me a recipe. Friday night we had Russian potatoes, fish and pickles while doing several shots of vodka, and Saturday we had pilmeni, a Russian dish, dumplings which are pretty much ... read more

In case you were wondering, I did make my flight to Tallinn. The plane landed in Riga with about 5 minutes to spare, but since I wasn’t the only one needing to catch the flight, they held the plane for a few extra minutes so we could all make it. Tallinn, for those of you who are unaware is the small (twice the size of Saskatoon) capital city of Estonia, a small Baltic country, once part of the Soviet Union. It’s a fantastic city, with a lovely old city centre, and I recommend it as a stop to anyone who plans on traveling in this area of the world. The weather has been fantastic, sunny and +30 until yesterday. I am lucky enough to have met the lovely Maarja, from Tallinn, on my previous travels, so ... read more

Well, week 1 of my adventures have turned out well so far. I thoughly enjoyed my week with the EUMS tour. It started off with, well, with what I can only describe as an explosion of good times. I guess that’s what happens when you let 3 busloads of university students bring their own booze onto an overnight ferry. As my memory of the later part of the ride is somewhat cloudy, I can’t be certain as to what might have happened. A group of us decided at around 6 that we would do a centurion outside on the deck. I’m quite proud to say that all of us who started did end up finishing said centurion. As luck might have it, I still had a few beers left over, and finished them off, not too ... read more

Greetings from Edinburgh, one last time. I leave for Brugge tomorrow, and so I felt that I should write once more before I leave Auld Reekie. My year-long stay has been a memorable one. I'll miss the city and the people I've met here. I'll miss the banter in the pub with the fantastic ales and whiskies. I'll miss the Ceilidh's and the kilts, though I'm sure I'll get myself a kilt one day. I'll miss wandering the streets of Old Town and Edinburgh Castle. The weather, well the weather is one thing I won't miss too much. I didn't get out of Edinburgh and see the highlands and the rest of the UK as much as I had hoped I would, but I guess it gives me an excuse to come back one day. And ... read more

Welcome, folks from near and far, to my travel blog. I'm not much of a writer, but since I wil be embarking on a year-long trip into the unknown, I thought I should at least make an attempt to write about my travels. I've been away from Saskatoon for a year now and have had an exciting time living in a new country and meeting new friends from around the world. I tried to write up a short summary of my life over the past year, but I lost my internet connection and ended up losing everything I had written. It ended up not being brief, and I don't want to rewrite for 2 hours, so here's a shorter summary. I've been in Edinburgh for a year and in that time, I've done a little traveling ... read more