I guess it’s still not too late to talk about New Year’s resolutions.
I bet the list of resolutions for most people looks like this:
More exercise + eat more healthy
Read 52 books
Better stay in touch with friends and family
Sign me up for all of the above - I will do my best to chase those goals. (For the record: I intend to run a half marathon this year. So there is that.)
But probably my biggest goal of all will be to resist the temptation to make really big changes.
Excuse me?
I lost count how many times I moved in my life since I was 18.
In the past, I felt to urge to move on, whenever life felt to easy and comfortable.
Right now, life is very comfortable and easy. I live in one of the best cities on the planet, I have the best friends anyone could imagine, I really love my job, I can afford to travel to all the places I want to see. And since the beginning of last year I am a permanent resident, so I can essentially stick around as long as I want (Yay!)
But still, from time to time, my google searches look like this:
(Replace Taipei with Hongkong/Shanghai/Tokyo for my other searches).
I guess there is nothing wrong with dreaming about foreign and exotic places, right?
But for this year and most likely for a lot of years to come, my new year’s resolution will be to ignore the urge to move on to something completely unknown, uncomfortable and new.
I am almost certain, that some day I will live and work in one of the cities mentioned above, but for now, I will stay here, in this perfectly comfortable and happy place - and I will enjoy every moment of it.
That said: one of my actual New Year’s resolutions is to learn a bit of Mandarin - anyone interested in joining me on this endeavour?
On sunny and rainy days, with friends and by myself.
Every visit is different, but always fantastic.
It’s the best place to put my mind at ease, to listen to podcasts, to sit in the shade of redwoods for a picknick, and to experience the great nature of the Bay Area.
Best of all, it is only a 30 min drive from my house.
People always ask me: “living abroad, what are you missing from home?”.
The answer is easy. Friends and family. Nothing else really matters.
Whenever I get a homesick, I just skype with friends, watch a german TV show, prepare a traditional dish, look at a few old photographs and that usually helps 99% of the times.
Bottom line: if everything is good with your friends and family, it’s very easy to forget that you live 6000 miles away from home.
However, if things are going not so well, things are completely different.
You suddenly start questioning, if you made the right choice, moving away from your loved ones.
It’s then very hard to resist to board the next plane back home, leave everything behind.
Our modern life, with all it’s amazing opportunities, sometimes I wish that everything would be just much simpler.
Since I was a small child, I was fascinated by trains. Always enjoyed traveling long distances on a train, looking out of the window, watching the scenery fly by.
The last years, I discovered myself so many times browsing the Amtrak website, checking out the different routes from the Bay Area, looking up schedules, ticket prices, but I never made the final step. Those schedules just looked ridiculous - 14 hours to Santa Barbara, 24 hours to Seattle? Come on, who would do that? - you can travel the same distance in 2h on a plane.
On the other hand, the extreme slowness was probably the compelling aspect - a complete contrast to the usual craziness, time pressure, meetings, deadlines…
Last saturday, I finally decided to give this a try and bought a last minute ticket from San Jose to Seattle, in the “Coast Starlight”, in a sleeper car. Let’s don’t talk about the sticker price (about 4x the price of my flight back from Seattle to the Bay Area :)), but I wanted to get the full experience. Sleeper car, the special panorama “parlour car”, meals in the dining car…
So here we go. 8:30 PM, San Jose Diridon Station.
After a quick “check-in” into my room, I went straight to the dining car, to catch a late-night dinner. One thing I realized right away: if you prefer to eat in solitude, then the Amtrak is nothing for you. There is communal seating for all meals and so you will end up chatting with lots of different people throughout the trip. Well, with most of them (some folks, like the grumpy russian guy at lunch just prefer to eat in complete silence). I would say, it is part of the experience and it was fun for me.
The food. If you read the menu, all the dishes actually sound really awesome, in reality most of the dishes were rather bland. Still way better than your average airplane meal, but I wouldn’t come back because of the meals.
When I came back from dinner, the steward of our sleeper car had already turned my room into a bedroom for the night. It seems like each sleeper car has their own dedicated steward. Super nice people who are always around, for a chat, for questions on the trip, and who usually keep an eye on your belongings, while you spend some time somewhere else in the train.
Like in the movie theater, or in the “Parlour Car” (built in 1955) - my favorite part of the train. Super comfortable chairs, a bar close by - perfect to enjoy the ever-changing scenery.
But that had to wait until the next morning. First a night in the sleeper car. Really long stops along the way (< 1h in Sacramento?), no surprise it takes 24h to go up to Seattle.
But the bed was surprisingly comfortable, I probably slept more than 6 hours. And the next morning, views like this awaited me:
Mt Shasta, absolutely fantastic.
And the landscape kept on changing, the further we kept on traveling up north.
And when we arrived in Seattle, after 24h on the train, I was actually actually kind of sad to leave my tiny room.
It had been an absolutely fantastic journey. Long, slow, but never boring.
A beautiful evening in Seattle.
The next morning, I was back in reality, heading to the airport, Memorial Day travel craziness, but the memories of my trip on the “Coastal Starlight” will stay.
