Week Sauce: New Is The New Old

Posted: January 16th, 2010 | Author: Shawn | Filed under: week sauce | 12 Comments »

It’s less than two weeks before I finish flushing my worldly possessions and leave for an open ended life of travel. So naturally I had a cup of tea last night and entirely scratched my travel plans. Now I have all brand new travel plans! Why? Meh, who knows, I have issues probably. You have to  be versatile as a traveller so it’s good to mix things up once in a while. Keeps your scrotum taut, or some such.

This week in the Sauce™ I’d like to share a few sweet new travel blogs that I found. Plus great articles from some familiar favourites, some good phonetography shots, and I’ll sum up my new travel plans.

For whatever reason, this week brought some awesome new travel blogs to my attention. By, “new” I mean, “new to me” not necessarily newly created. With 4 out of 5 of these being written by women I wonder if there’s any data showing which gender is prevalent in travel blogging. Anyways, check these puppies out!

• The Adventures of D
• The Aussie Nomad
• Heels and Wheels (oh yea, Vote For Bobbi!)
• The Jungle Princess
• Jasmine Wanders

There’s a succinct piece up on Monkey Brewster about why us independent travel bloggers do what we do, and why many of us dig the, “I got friends in low places” approach. Speaking of travel blogging, I’ll be attending TBEX 2010 in NYC after all. Holler at me if you’ll be there also!

Yet again Forks and Jets have inspired me. This time their great post on The B’s Knees pegged Barcelona strongly on my todo list. Also in the inspiration department there is a fantastic lowdown on New Zealand over on The Road Forks — required reading if you ever intend to visit the big NZ.

Okay, so my new travel plans. I was going to head to Japan on Feb 3rd and then meander throughout Asia from there. Nice plan, and I think I will pick it up again around July-ish. In the past couple weeks a few things have pulled me another direction though. A lot of inspiration from certain writers to visit Cuba this year (which I’ve mentioned in previous posts), plus the Haiti earthquakes brought an issue I have to the forefront. I used to be proud that I had an Occupational First Aid 3 certification. It was a practical skill that was genuinely useful in all manner of situations. However, after years in my corporate carpet box, I no longer have that certification. So when looking into volunteering in Haiti it was really discouraging that my only useful skills were being hella good at video games and having a penchant for project management. I want to volunteer to do some rebuilding in Haiti, but first I am going to get my first aid certifications again. In order to do that I’m trading some home renovation skills for a place to sleep in Victoria, BC for the month of February. That gives me the time and place to get re-certified. From there I’ll try and get setup with a volunteer scheme in Haiti. Then I’ll also be regionally situated to check out Cuba. Perhaps throw some Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico into the mix. I’ll head north when it starts to get really hot in June, attend TBEX in New York, then perhaps pick up the Japan plan. I dig my new plan, but we’ll see how it unfolds. The only guaranteed part is that with no commitments I’m as prone to changing my mind as a Bangkok whore on an aircraft carrier.

Enough yapping, here’s some of the pictures I took with my phone while minding my own business around Montreal this week.

I must say that I admire the Montreal bike commuters who keep at it throughout the winter. Drivers here are not exactly bike friendly, then add to that the slippery sides of the road and the cold and you have one seriously dedicated cyclist.

My phone does an especially craptacular job of catching snowflakes. They were everywhere and as huge as corn flakes, but it’s not like you could tell from this photo. The size of the snowflakes is perhaps my favourite thing about Montreal.

Montreal has a seemingly large population of creepy fur guys. Or at least I have a very keen eye for spotting them. This guy is a perfect example, so I had to take a pic. He’s walking at about quarter normal walking speed, high out of his mind, with the proverbial fur guy leather pants, and he has no clue where he is going. The only thing unusual about this one is that he isn’t chain smoking like a bingo caller on welfare Wednesday. I won’t rant on here about wearing fur. However, the other day while riding in a taxi from the Montreal airport, I saw this huge, obnoxious billboard that said, “Fur, the most environmental choice!” What the hell?

These are the stairs at my local bank. So you take stairs halfway up then take escalators the other halfway up. There’s no “all stairs” or “all escalators” option. So while this is strange in itself, the whole fiasco also blocks the main thoroughfare of the building. Most people need to walk over or around this mess to get where they need to go. I’d definitely fire the traffic flow wizard who came up with that one.

Anyways, have a good day! Holler at me if you have something cool I should look at for next week’s round up. Thanks!

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// shawn

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