Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Being on the road, the traveler often comes across situations where his own decision-making. And when the wrong decision is taken, the cost is unbelievably high in monetary terms (not to mention damages to self-confidence)...but it is those wrong decisions that tend to be, ultimately, the most memorable ones. And the same wrong decisions, by pure "virtue" of their being incredibly BAD decisions, lead to the greatest adventures ...but at the end, with the wallet all beat up, the traveler has to realize where is that fine line between "adventure at all costs" and "sound financing while on the road." Yesterday was that sort of day. The traveler planned to travel from Pristina, Kosovo to Dubrovnik, Croatia by transferring once at Podgorica, Montenegro. When the bus from Pristina arrived in Podgorica at 2am local time, the traveler, to his dismay, realized that the daily bus between Podgorica and Dubrovnik, becomes once every two days during winter times, a...

When I first arrived in America as a young 12-year-old boy, my family lived in a mostly immigrant neighborhood in southern part of Boston. The neighborhood school was filled with immigrants from Eastern Europe, especially the Balkan countries of Albania, Bosnia, and Serbia. As fellow students of ESL classes, I spent years with them, earning American culture, English language, and talking about the homelands we left behind. And talked we always had about our homelands, with bit nostalgia, and plenty of gratefulness that we all got out. Once the Albanian told me about the view of America people had back home. He said with a certain degree of cynicism, “back there, everyone thought America is a land where money grows on trees and the roads are paved with gold...I mean, literally.” The naiveté of the comment had such a huge impact on me that six years later, it became the first sentence of a college application essay that got me into Yale. The optimism with which new immigrants appro...

Being used to the heavy Xmas decorations and cheesy seasonal songs being blasted everywhere, the traveler feels a little empty moving through Turkey and Greece in the past couple of days. Over in Istanbul, it was just another day at work, everything operated as if nothing special is happening, save for extra-busy working conditions dealing with hordes of (mostly Asian) tourists. Over in Athens, the main sights are closed for the two-day Xmas holidays, but as for everything else, the cafes, the souvenir shops, and indeed the daily routines of the common people, operated in completely normal ways. Yes, in this corner of the world, there was absolutely no catering to the Xmas celebrations happening elsewhere. No Xmas songs, no Xmas lights, not even a word of "Merry Xmas" from the locals. The reason seems rather plain and simple: Muslim Turks (obviously) do not celebrate Xmas, and for the Orthodox Greeks, their Xmas falls on Jan 7th (a fact that I did not know until I was tol...