Hey oh Steemians!
How does one properly sum up four weeks with few words and two pictures? Not at all. Since I feel like I owe you, I’ll let you partake in those past weeks. Friendly disclaimer: this one is long.
Petronas Towers.
First and foremost you may know, what we’ve been doing all the time: stare at crypto charts. Apart from this we also went to a crypto event, worked out a lot, explored KL a bit and went on hikes.
The Food
I’ll start where the posting ended. I talked to people and some reached out to me with helpful tips, like ordering groceries. Goods like water, fruits, vegetables and meat we got from our local shop around the corner.
...and then he just chopped it into pieces instead of separating bones n meat.
Other goods like milk, butter (i.e. western food) needed to be bought at rather fancy places, because at cheap stores they’re likely to be full of all the nasty ingredients. Honestly, if a packet of milk states ‘contains milk’ I won’t buy it. They put claims on their packages I’m sure are forbidden in the EU.
Yes, those eggs fix your eyes and therefore cost twice the price!
In the end it was still the cheapest, healthiest and bodily most comfortable month.
Also, we found a German restaurant named Brotzeit to get some of the beloved homelike cuisine. :)
Wiener Schnitzel, Weißwürscht, Frühstücksjaus'n and some nice Schweinsmedallions.
Plus I figured out which tremendous amounts of food I can eat without gaining weight, for what some people might hate me. On the other hand I have a hard time gaining muscles though.
Stellar Lumens Crypto Meetup
Towards the end of april we got in touch with the Malaysian crypto community at a meetup hosted by Stellar Lumens in Kuala Lumpur.
At the entry we received an airdrop of 30 XLM and a free drink.
They made an effort to buy people into their products, made different promotions and even had crypto cookies.
When Binance? When moon? When lambo? That's what the cards say.
Funny thing is: there we met an Austrian digital nomad from our area who used to live in Bali before he came to KL.
Sadly the actual talks of NEM, EOS, WAN, XCZ and Bittap were hardly understandable because of the bad sound equipment and having the talks right next to the social area.
All stereotypes were to be found there, of which some reduced my faith in crypto and others made me realise once again how important it is to distinguish between frauds/made-to-fail-projects and the ones with potential.
Trading
As stated above we invested lots of time into learning and executing the art of trading. After hours of reading the free material on Investopedia and Babypips for hours, we ultimately got ourselves a course from ChartGuys.
The course of recordings I watched wasn’t the holy grail, but sure helped. Anyway I can really recommend their daily market updates on YouTube as it’s FUD-/FOMO-free and ChartManDan is a one of a kind fine guy.
Although it magically worked out for me I decided to step back because of several reasons. Investing still is interesting, but day and swing trading sure isn’t for now.
Oh, right! Kuala Lumpur!
On our way to Kuala Lumpur some traveler told us it was rather a car city and we didn’t really know what to expect. Now we know: it’s hard to come around by foot because you sometimes need to walk a long and rather complicated way to get to a place nearby.
Public transport like the self-driving trains are an option, but not too convenient to get to your destination. Although I like green transport, we usually ended up using Grab taxis. That’s when having groceries delivered started to make sense.
Heli Lounge Bar
Sky Lounge. One third of the ladies are prostitutes again. Illegally.
It’s as much of a city as possible. In the center skyscrapers reach into the clouds, malls are shoulder to shoulder and it naturally has a wild gap between rich and poor. Order a Grab for 1 € to get your coffee for 3 € in the mall or your 8 € beer on a rooftop bar. Sounds perverse? My thoughts exactly. So it’s basically the same craze as everywhere else.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy to be on the ‘rich’ side here, but I don’t approve this imbalance in the world. On the bright side, along with wealth, development and education comes actual trash management and cleanliness in general. Also different cultures live seemingly peaceful amongst each other and many things work better than in the SEA average I have seen so far.
Little India
Despite the many cars it was fairly quiet and the quality of air was ok, since it rained (or should I say poured?) every single day! Furthermore the city is surrounded by forests and also has quite some forest reserves in the urban area, like Bukit Gasing right here:
And at times it even felt as if it wanted to be like Singapore. Self-driving trains, a beautiful skyline and a light show like the one at Marina Bay Sands but like, you know, the younger sibling version. :)
To be honest, there's more than just this. Unlucky shot.
When I was first awoken by Muezzin’s sweet Azan from the three mosques surrounding our building I was annoyed. Same thing happened when I lay at the pool and got the full surround action. Then I just chose to like it and was cool with it. In fact I also started to like that alcohol is less of a thing in muslim countries.
As with everything in life there is always good and bad and you get to choose what you focus on.
Hiking
Throughout our stay we hiked different paths of which all had one thing in common: They left us all soaked with sweat. :D Two times we actually were in the city, but as I said above, it’s a forest reserve area. The place named Bukit Gasing and is well maintained by a local community of volunteers; it’s literally trash free. Oh and there live plenty of monkeys, snakes, lizards and whatsoever.
Well, it's in the urban area.
Another one was at the edge of town and was also really clean. We saw several folks walking it with garbage bags, collecting trash. One time a guy angrily called after me and asked if I left my garbage behind. I said no and wasn’t even mad. In fact I was totally happy that they care.
Sightseeing
Well, by now that’s really a thing you can make me commit suicide by mentioning it. There’s so much to do, see and learn in foreign countries and sights are mostly just...just don’t get me started. Still we felt obliged to check some out and were very selective.
So I drove to the royal palace to figure out you can stand in front of the gates and look at it from this distance:
Shortly before leaving KL we also made our way to the Batu Caves, which was actually pretty impressive. The statue in front is even bigger than me (I’m 1,86 m - for scale). After you climbed the 272 steps and dodged the monkey thieves you stand in a giant cave that has a hindu temple in it.
You get to chance to spot some monkey chewing on human plastic garbage; the natural cycle is wonderful. Or you just see them snacking their stolen goods.
The knowledge of recycling plastic is then passed on to the younger generation of primates.
One day I drove to the botanical garden and in fact that’s a place I really like. Sadly my timing was bad, I didn’t bring my raincoat and therefore spent most time beneath a roof. There I took a picture I personally like a lot. Not the perspective, but that you see Buddhist monks, Malay and Chinese people in the left, a Muslim family in the back, kids riding bikes, Hindu families in the right. All exemplarily living with one another
And all of them are connected through one special thing: The free Wi-Fi hotspot. OK, I agree. that was a vibe killer. I’m actually serious and think it’s a cool thing to have this society work with several different cultures!
Summed up I’d say I had a great time in Kuala Lumpur. It was also sorrowful for like two weeks, but hey, that’s only half of the stay. The other half was great and bad times lead to better results in the end! :)
The Inside Travels
And this is the honey for all of you who read until here.
Initially I had planned to write plenty posts over the course of the past weeks and material for them sure wasn’t the problem. However you have to be rather introspective at times.
Now, obviously the blog is rather superficial and albeit the ‘Inside Travels’ exist, they are merely an insight. It’s mostly cut to the core. Since only a fraction of the experiences makes it to the posts, it may be difficult to spot the coherency at times.
In Vietnam I started a daily series for an important finding for myself and want to briefly complete it right now: Death (when only met and not went along with) is a great teacher; if you look him in the eye, he’ll tell you a lot about yourself. He’ll show you, what’s really important for you and blow away those painstakingly constructed ideas of yours like dust from an old painting. What’s left behind is a clear and honest picture of your own nature. While you sit there at your personal rock bottom, he just takes your hand and shows you your meaning of life.
Back in ‘everyday life’ I find myself on a path, I suddenly can no longer identify as my own. Previous standardized and desirable goals I can’t recognize as mine anymore. “F that. Gonna come back in a bit.” It doesn’t. The big “why” in my life just bursted. And I am grateful for that.
I mean I didn’t want to talk to anybody for about two weeks, stopped blogging and kinda stagnated. That wasn’t too funny, but Newton’s first law of motion then made sense here: “In an inertial frame of reference, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.” So I put some force on that object of mine and did more sports. Started doing more of what I like.
Recently a friend told me “That’s not you.” and was pointing at my blog. It would give a wrong impression of me and it’s unfair for everyone who doesn’t know me personally. Sadly, she’s right. The last attempt of writing a rather unauthentic blog post ended with me staring at a blank page for hours.
So I guess my inside is so done with my bullshit it barely lets me take another step in the wrong direction. Every other day I just did things of which I thought have been expected from me, although I had the freedom to do whatever I want. As a product of this I gradually like less of what I do. I thought back to why I initially started to save for traveling: foreign countries, cultures, people, ideas and finding out, what I like. Not friggin sights. Sadly even living as a digital nomad doesn’t even fit my ways right now. I actually want to be away from tech for a while.
Alright, what were those important things I was shown? First and foremost: family and friends. I realized how little time and attention they’ve got from me in the past few years. Since I am rich in ‘time’ right now, I decided to give some to them. For this reason I’m going to visit my family for two months starting in june.
Apart from that it were authenticity and joy. Throughout my travels I was able to see so many facets of humans, the human nature and the products of said, that I inevitably had to question a lot. And I even only saw a small part aside europe, man. A few possible ways of development of human civilization don’t look too bright to be honest. That made apparent how unimportant or even harmful some parts of modern society are. I don’t want to be the part of society, that unintentionally kills our civilization and the planet itself.
I have therefore decided to join Scientology. No, I’m just kidding. I am therefore leaving immediately for Nepal, where I intend to live as a goat. Then I’m going on a hunger strike to prove a point. I am still kidding. What I actually really do is a Vipassana meditation a friend once recommended. I don’t actually expect too much from it. Just challenging myself and force me to spend some time with myself. Starting on 23rd of may going on for 10 days. No tech, no social contacts, no speech, no gestures, NO communication, no nothing. Cross your fingers for me. ;D
That’s the first action to figure myself out more and learn how I can contribute to a better world.
Griaß eich!
Wie fasst man vier Wochen ordentlich in wenige Worte und 2 Bilder? Gar nicht. Nachdem ich euch was schuldig bin, lass ich euch mal teilhaben. Es sei gesagt: der is lang.
Petronas Towers.
Zuallererst dürft ihr natürlich wissen, was wir die meiste Zeit gemacht haben: Krypto Charts angestarrt.
Davon abgesehen waren wir auch auf einem Krypto-Event, haben viel trainiert, Kuala Lumpur ein wenig erkundet und sind wandern gegangen.
Omnoms
I beginne da, wo ich aufgehört habe. Beim Essen. Ich hab mit einigen Leuten gesprochen und manche kamen auch mit Tipps (wie zB das Bestellen von Lebensmitteln) auf mich zu. Dinge wie Wasser, Früchte, Gemüse und Fleisch bekamen wir vom Geschäft an der Ecke.
...und dann hat er's einfach zerhackt, anstatt es zu zerlegen.
Andere Dinge wie Milch, Butter (und so westliches Zeug) mussten in teuren Läden gekauft werden, da es in den billigen Läden schlichtweg ungesunden Müll gab. Ernsthaft, wenn auf einer Milchpackung “enthält Milch” und eine Menge Inhaltsstoffe stehen, kauf ich die nicht. Auf den Lebensmitteln stehen oft auch Behauptungen, die in der EU wohl verboten sind.
Ja, die Eier heilen deine Augen - deshalb sind sie doppelt so teuer!
Am Ende war es dann doch der günstigste, gesündeste und körperlich wohligste aller Monate.
Zudem fanden wir ein deutsches Restaurant namens Brotzeit, in dem wir uns mit der geliebten heimischen Küche laben konn