Hello friends,
Today is my birthday! I’m turning 37. Since I already went through my quarter-life crisis when I turned 35, this year’s incremental upgrade doesn’t make me feel like I’ve suddenly become old. On the contrary, I feel like I’ve figured out how to live a good life, how to focus on what matters, and how to enjoy the time I have with the people I love. What more could I wish for?
Anyway, enough about me and my ongoing battle with entropy. Let’s focus on… more of me!
This post is a little different. I won’t be sharing all of that week’s comics because some of them are from my recent trip to the UK, and those will get their own post. Instead, you’re in for plenty of thoughts on courage, packing, and, of course, cats.
Enjoy!
Monday
Keeping up a long-distance friendship requires sacrifices. Mine is spending the last 30 minutes of Cecilia’s and my regular FaceTime session in agony because I drank way too much water while we were talking.
Tuesday
It took me quite a long time to realise that I tend to get hangry. Once I noticed it, the fallout was reduced significantly, and I’d consider it a solved problem now. But it’s funny how we sometimes don’t reflect enough on the connection between our bodies and our moods, and end up spending years running around grumpy simply because we haven’t eaten and never made that link.
(I really can’t complain about too many meetings, though. We have a very strict “Let’s not fill everyone’s days with something that could just as well be a non-synchronous Slack thread” policy. So when a meeting runs longer than planned, it’s usually for good reason.)
Wednesday
Hamburg is considering a bid to host the Olympic Games, and the citizens have been voting on it. It’s been a recurring topic in my group of friends over the past couple of months, and we’re more or less evenly split on the issue.
I understand and respect the “no” votes, but I’ve decided I’d rather see us try our best and possibly fail than not try at all. It’s the more optimistic perspective, and I want to see my city as one that’s brave enough to take that chance.
The Lambert & Friends concert was great! Anna was shocked that I broke the rules and smuggled in outside food, but she was still very happy to have something to snack on.
Thursday
If you’re ever at RANG RANG in Hamburg, try the Kimchi Shakshouka. I could eat it every single day. The flavours are incredible, with just the right amount of spice.
Packing is the worst. I’m not even bad at it, it just isn’t fun. It’s like a puzzle where the result will never be perfect, and you just have to live with the compromises. Especially when you’re flying with only carry-on luggage.
This trip made me realise I need a bigger backpack. Anna has one of those trekking backpacks, and I’m thinking of getting one too. Or maybe I should invest in a small carry-on suitcase? I’m still undecided. If you have an opinion, please let me know!
Leaving the cats alone for several days will probably always be hard for me. They’re my babies, and Gigabyte especially is very attached to me. She doesn’t let anybody else pet her the way she lets me. But I’ve accepted that leaving them in the care of a pet sitter for a couple of days is better than not allowing myself a life that includes travel.
I packed for my trip to the UK knowing it was the longest holiday I’d taken in years. And the cats survived and are absolutely fine. I’ll learn from this and hopefully won’t feel quite so guilty next time… perhaps.
I’ll wrap up this week on Thursday, since the following Friday was the first day of my trip to the UK, and I want to keep all those comics in one post. That’s coming up soon, so… stay tuned? Like and subscribe? Don’t change the channel? Do whatever you want; I’m not your real dad.
More thoughts on packing for travel
I bought The North Face Base Camp Voyager backpack a couple of months ago. It’s huge and does everything it’s supposed to do, except hold enough for more than a week. Even a week is pushing it, if I’m honest. As soon as I want to pack anything beyond seven T-shirts, underwear, and pairs of socks, it starts to feel very cramped.
Our trip to the UK was 11 days long, and I had to accept that there was no way I could bring enough clothes to last the whole time. We didn’t want to check in any luggage, and on top of that we had 12°C in Scotland and up to 31°C in London. So somehow I had to pack for winter and summer at the same time. That part was specific to this trip, but the feeling wasn’t. Packing always seems to become an attempt to prepare for every possible version of myself: too cold, too warm, slightly overdressed, definitely underprepared.
I’d actually bought packing cubes the year before. People had recommended them to me as if they were the second coming of Jesus, but they were just… alright? Sure, they compressed everything a little and helped keep my boxers neatly sorted, but I still wasn’t convinced my previous method of just shoving everything straight into a backpack had been all that much worse. Especially because the packing cubes themselves took up space, obviously. But I’m used to them now, and everything looks tidy. That’s at least something!
My main struggle is all those weird little bathroom things I need, though. Call me metrosexual — a term that somehow isn’t in use anymore, wonder why — but I use a lot of products. Some for my hair, a few for my skin, a bit of sunscreen, stuff to shower with, toothpaste, deodorant, a spray that makes my eyes less dry, and preferably a perfume. Flying just turns all of this into an especially annoying ritual, because I’m not allowed to take everything as-is on a plane. So I have to use little empty 100ml bottles and a random assortment of tiny containers, then refill everything into those. I don’t want to say a bit of terrorism is worth not having to go through this, but… should we at least consider it?!
At least my tech stack is streamlined enough not to be a burden anymore. For this trip I took my iPhone, a Kindle, and an 11” iPad Pro. The first two are self-explanatory. The last one was only there so I could dump the photos from my camera onto it and review them. I could probably do that on my iPhone just as well, and I should probably consider leaving the iPad at home next time. But it did let me write last week’s newsletter on the train from Edinburgh to London…
Anyway, I’ll keep tinkering with my system. If you have any tips, let me know. I’m always open to improving my travel experience.
Thanks for reading!
Marcel
😚
