Author: Daniel

ExPat Life

Daniel 20 Comments

[This is a guest post from Shawn Wall, my errant climbing partner. Shawn left Colorado to do some travel after graduating university at the end of 2015, and he never came home. He now lives in Budapest, Hungary, with his girlfriend. I spent a month visiting them in October 2016. I asked him to write a little bit on his experiences living as an expat in a foreign country.

You can find his personal travel blog, The WanderinGinger, at http://wanderingingertravels.blogspot.com/]

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February 22, 2017.

Today marks three years since when I first ran away from home to a magical place called New Zealand. I wanted to escape the troubles of day to day life and just be free from everything. So I left. I was running away from death, pain, sadness, confusion and everything that I knew and called home. At least, that is what I thought I was doing. Parts of that may be true, I was running away, but whenever you run away you run towards something else. I was running straight towards a whole new path of life.

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Nepal 74: The Ordinary Citizen

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Annapurna Trekking Regions

As it happened, the daylight never really came.

The morning was cloudy and subtle—no glorious beams of first light, no alpenglow or similar. Just a gradual lightening of the sky. Revelation is for the movies. That’s rarely how real life works.

Still, even on a cloudy day the Himalaya are a sight to be seen. Dhalaguiri was largely shrouded in clouds, but the Annapurna Massif revealed itself several times—although never long enough for me to snap a great picture. Hundreds of people swarmed the hill, taking selfies and shooting videos. It almost felt obscene.

Still, I took my photos.

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Fake News in Former Yugoslavia

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My traveling partner Ollie and I arrived in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on a bus from Sarajevo, where we’d spent a few days learning the history of the Siege of Sarajevo—the longest city siege in the history of modern warfare. Our friends in Sarajevo told us NATO forces broke the Serbian siege, saved the city, and the lives of every Bosnian living there. Before that, we’d been in Belgrade, Serbia, where a huge banner flying in front of parliament memorialized fallen Serbian soldiers as “Victims of NATO Aggression.”

Same story, two sides.

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