Houston - We've got Takeoff

G'afternoon ladies and gents. Thanks for tuning into what will probably be a short-lived but hopefully entertaining ride in my attempt to write jot out my stream of consciousness. I made this as a medium for me to brain vomit, keep people up to date, and maybe even offer information that y'all may find valuable in one way or another. You may like it, you may hate it, but I'm just writing it the way I would for myself.

Circa March 2021 when we were all stocking up on toilet paper from Costco, I caught up with an old work friend who told me he was in Mexico and had been there for a few months. This got the gears spinning and a week later I found myself on a flight to Cancun. After 4 months of tequila-soaked degeneracy with a stint in Costa Rica, I returned to Toronto at the end of summer 21'. After that I realized that living abroad was not nearly as difficult as I had made it out to be in my head. All you need is a plane ticket and an Airbnb and you're laughing. So after that, I hit up Portugal, Italy, Canary Islands, Mexico again, Argentina and Peru. Check out the link for a montage I made of the past year of my life:

Annual Report FY 2022

One of the most common questions people have asked is where I stay in all these places. The best way to go about this is to go on Airbnb (property rental site) and message the host asking if they would be open to doing an offline deal meaning sending them money via a money transfer service like Paypal (worst) or Wise (best) as opposed to booking through the app. Airbnb hosts pay 15-20% on their total revenues so why wouldn't they be open to doing it in a way where they don't have to kick back part of it to house? The only obstacle to doing this is that the Airbnb chat blurs out any phone numbers or emails if you try to send it in the app without having booked the place already so you need to get creative in typing out your contact info (phone # or email) to get in touch with the host off the app and converse there (msg me if you want ideas). Sometimes I had to message 3 hosts, sometimes 10, but I always found someone who was down to deal. Because the hosts don't have to pay Airbnb if I send them money directly, they can offer a wayyyy better price. Usually it was around a 33% discount from the Airbnb price. It's a win-win so it's always worth trying whether you're going somewhere for just a weekend or a whole month.

With summer around the corner and COVID in the rear view mirror, everyone's flocking to Europe including yours truly. I'm about to leave to London for a few days before heading down to the land of tapas and gazpacho in (hopefully) sunny Barcelona for at least a month. I've never had a problem booking a place until Barca because when I looked at the prices I thought I was on the luxury properties site by accident. Turns out it was the right Airbnb site but demand and inflation made rent prices skyrocket. I ended up having to book through the app out of desperation and spent a lot more than I planned to. Still, if you're doing something new and won't be easily accessible later on in your life, my take is that it's always worth splurging assuming you already have a safety net in place. One of my best travel buddies Jack has a newsletter and he just wrote a great post about the importance of spending money as opposed to saving it (link below). @JackRaines feel free to send over a royalty check for the S/O.

Why Barca? Well I initially wanted to go to a southern beach town in Spain because I thought Barcelona was too international but after consulting a few well-travelled buddies who know that I am quite the nighttime fun enthusiast and adult beverage connoisseur, I came to the conclusion that Barca was the best option by far.

Another reason is the language. Spanish and I have had a love-hate relationship the past year. When I first went to Mexico I came ready to become fluent. I told every waiter, bartender and barber I came into contact with to speak with me in Spanish. It helped a lot and by the end of my stay I was spitting (conversational) Spanish left, right and center. I had the chance to practice it in the Canaries a few months later but that passion to continue improving had died down. Then Mexico came around again and I was putting it to work again because it was tourist season and people (girls) are more fond of gringos who can bust out more than just "Holaaaaa Senorita". Next was Argentina where I thought I'd get by no problem but apparently some idiot in their history decided that the letter 'Y' would get pronounced as 'J' so "Yo" in Spanish (meaning "I") would get pronounced "Jo". It makes any word with the letter Y sound confusing af. Not to mention they speak lightning fast so living there was like trying to watch a Spanish movie at 3x speed sans subtitles while hammered. No bueno. Then a friend of mine showed me a blog post from Tim Ferriss (popular blogger + author) about learning any language in 3 months. My first thought was oh it's just another guy trying to promote his language course. But it wasn't that at all. The premise of the post is that all you need to know to speak a language conversationally are the most common 300-500 words and if you can learn to conjugate future and past tenses as well, you'll be set.

"The first 25 most commonly written words in the English language make up about 1/3 of all printed material in English. The first 100 comprise 1/2 of all written material, and the first 300 make up about 65% percent of all written material in English."

Who can't learn 300 words? If you've ever had a burning desire to learn a language, but were turned off by the approach that most books/courses offer, check out Tim's post below:

Before I let you go. This past weekend I got my motorcycle license (M1). I don't own one, know anyone who does, or have ever ridden one. But now I have to do a road test within 3 months so if you know someone who would be willing to show me the ropes and practice with their bike a few times just shoot me a message. In the meantime, I'll rent a Vespa or something a few times in Europe to get the feel for it. Wish me luck.

I'm going to try to pump these out once a week or so depending on how many neurons are still firing by the end of the weekend and how interesting my week was to write about. If you're reading this, you're probably a friend so if we have mutual friends or relatives that you think would be interested in reading as well, feel free to share the link with them:

Till next week

Pce