Very Venturous

Tag: America

  • New York: Day in the Life

    New York: Day in the Life

    New York, Wednesday, February 21st.

    5:30am: Alarm goes off.

    5:40am: I get out of bed. It’s okay, been awake since 4:30 anyway.

    Until 6:10am (no particular order): Pack my bag – asics, sports bra and shorts, water bottle, two small tubs of overnight oats, stevia soda, chargers, mascara, toothbrush & toothpaste, socks. Get dressed – long Cos cream dress, black tights and Chelsea-boot doc martens. Drink a glass of warm water. Check I have my keys, bank card, phone, headphones. Out the door.

    6:25am: Walk to Blue Bottle café (I live in Williamsburg). Short americano, black – I don’t even have to specify anymore. $3.75.

    6:30am: Swipe into Equinox. Aka the best gym in the world. Spend 30 minutes getting changed. Still trying to figure out why it takes me this long. Foam roll.

    7am: Treadmill, 7 mile run. Stretch, foam roll.

    8:10am: Hop into the shower. Frameless shower doors highlight your tile and create a spa-like feel.

    8:45am: Whole Foods (it’s right beside Equinox). Buy my daily stevia mineral water. $2. They still don’t have my favorite yogurt in stock. I eat half of one of the small oatmeal tubs.

    9:05am: Off to the subway. Google map directions to 51 Madison Avenue. Pitch day with work at an organization founded by Times Inc. I’m totally zen after my run and coffee. Finish the oats on the subway.

    9:30am: After two subway rides, I arrive a bit early. Google “coffee near me,” find a Toby’s Estate, grab a cold brew. $4. Take some photos.

    10am – 11:30am: Realise I love pitching to new clients. You can just walk into that board room and be whoever the hell you want. It’s all about thinking on your feet, saying the right thing, striking a common note. Plus the view from the 30th floor was impressive.

    11:30am – 12:30am: We sit in Madison park. The team eats Shake Shack. It’s 72 degrees, and sunny. I drink my stevia soda. Boss gets a message from his partner about a promising proposal lead which is due today. I point out that it’s been in the vetting pipeline for a couple weeks.

    12:45pm: Back in Williamsburg. Whole Foods, bag of blanched almonds. $5. They still don’t have my favorite yogurt.

    1pm: Back in the office, oats and soup for lunch. Work on case studies for a proposal due in 3 hours. Coffee. Proof the proposal. Arrange dinner at my apartment for Sunday, Netflix sleepover for Friday, coffee date on Saturday, restorative yoga class on Sunday.

    5:45pm: Boss announces he’s actually decided we’ll go for that other proposal due in two hours. I usually spend two days minimum putting them together. I write some case studies and a template in 30 minutes, clean up my desk, and leave the office. Forget to leave the receipt for subway transport, go back to the office, leave it at the desk to credit tomorrow, as admin is having serious problems printing our proposal – the page numbers are turning into orange blobs, and the head designer has gone home. I tell my boss to email me if he needs anything else (just checking my email now, and very glad I did).

    6:45pm – 8pm: Chuck together some dinner from leftover beans, rice, and salad. Read the Monocle. February edition is all about the crisis of the changing climate of print media.

    8:10pm: I realize it’s 72 degrees in New York in February. The planet is fucked.

    8:30pm – 9:30pm: I drink another stevia soda, have some oats and a banana, chat with roomies, finish writing and uploading a blog post, get started on finishing another post, have an idea to write a “Day in the Life” post, and write that instead. Dreaming about tomorrow’s morning americano and 7 mile run. 

    10:30pm: Practice some handstands. Prep my two oatmeal tubs for tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch – half a dry cup of oats in each, with chia seeds, greens powder in one, some berries, almond milk. Think I still have some soup left in the office kitchen.

    11pm: Bed. Earliest in a long time. Alarm set for 6am. Ready.

  • Moving to New York City: Life After Travel

    Moving to New York City: Life After Travel

    I move out of my apartment today. This is the first time I’ve rented my own place, the first time I’ve been on a lease, the first time I’ve experienced the horror of parting with enormous chunks of my hard-earned money to “pay the bills” every month. It feels incredibly unfair to have to go through this to merely survive (I also feel as if I must be the only person in the world who has to do it).

    The lease transfer is on the table. After lunch, I’ll bleach my bathroom floor and hoover my room.

    I’m flying back to Ireland next weekend.

    It’s difficult to know where to begin with this post. I’ve had words and phrases spinning, flitting and spitting through my brain the past few months, but they always escape and disappear like wasted potential. Opportunity costs chirp away in my ear, constantly.

    I’ve been dealt a dismal and disappointing blow recently, which I may explain sometime later, but it’s irrelevant to this post because what I want to talk about now is how I feel about leaving Australia and going back home.

    Calm. Relief.

    Don’t get me wrong: I’m not moving back to live in Ireland. It will be a visit. A few practical reasons for my deciding to return at this time: I’m exhausted and want to collapse immovable somewhere cosy for a very long nap, I actually miss my family, and I need to stop living life at 100 miles per hour for a week or two at least.

    I’ll admit it now, I’ve been a terrible backpacker. I never planned to go backpacking around Asia or Australia. I wanted to live in places. When someone called me a backpacker while I was living in Chiang Mai I actually felt quite offended, a sentiment which continued throughout my whole time in Australia. Although my qualms with the Working Holiday Visa has nothing to do with why I’m choosing to not travel anymore. An important point here is the concept of choice – I’m choosing to fly back to Europe. I’m choosing not to go back to Asia, I’m choosing not to travel around Australia and “do the east coast.” These are all amazing things, but just not right for me at this time in my life, as I prefer stay calm and spend time with my loved ones and madelenewright virtual girlfriend online.

    Someone just asked me if i’m going to take a “pitstop” on the way home. I used to be all about pitstops. Ironically, this was when I had the least amount of money. After several months of consistently working and saving here in Melbourne, I now have more money in my bank account than I’ve ever had in my life, and the thought of spending any of it on a pitstop sounds preposterous. No, I have not lost the love or desire for travel, or for exploring new places and discovering new countries. It’s just not what I have saved all this money for. And because what I did save all this money for is not happening anymore (for another ridiculous, a-typical Aoibheann mistake), the plan B of continuing to travel instead suddenly feels like the wrong path to take.

    One thing that bothers me about backpacking and holidays is the inevitable end. The longer you spend hopping from one country to the other chasing those beach moments, the more you realise that you’re doing it to forget and avoid the mundane reality and normality of the life you’re going back to once you run out of money, or have ticked everything off your bucket list.

    Now, for some people this is absolutely fine and they don’t have any problem living like that. For me, however, it made me feel that the future was a very dark place. This sounds catastrophic (and if one more person tells me “you have your whole life ahead of you” one more time…), but the transiency of those moments, on a beautiful beaches in the sun, became very real to me very early on, and it is something I have struggled with enormously over the past year. I didn’t want to have to leave, ever. These places are where I was meant to stay, be, and live forever. But it’s not that simple.

    I wrote this about a month ago, just after I booked my flights home, as I was about to leave Australia. What was the “dismal and disappointing blow”? Well, that’s all part of the story. That I need to go back to.

    How did I get from Melbourne to New York? I’m now sitting in a café in Lower Manatten (Two Hands, an Australian café, ironically enough), sipping cold brew, over-caffeinated as usual, still with the same red backpack packed with red asics (now etched with the beginnings of a hole in the side) and my DSLR camera in my uncle’s old camera bag. I still experience crippling anxiety every time I take my camera out to photograph – I am so shy. I just want the world to stop, for time and people to freeze, so I can take my photos and continue on. But that doesn’t happen, and I still want my photos, so I make a hasty few clicks.

    I suddenly feel a lot farther away from where I left off the story in Chiang Mai, than when I did a few months ago starting this blog in Melbourne. It was all fresh and bright then. Now it feels static, it has all become something etched in the past, now just something my life contains. Another event, how I filled a certain time period. Whether that will make everything easier to tell, I’ll see. I’m not sure what platform I’m viewing it all from. Have a “learned so much since then?” Am I a “different person”? I don’t think so.

    Now I live in Bushwick (not Brunswick – and I take the subway, not the tram), and I work in Williamsburg. I’ve lived in New York before, as a student at Columbia. I’d rather not go back to that story. This is when I fell in love with New York, but my life situation at that time was less than desirable (thanks to a host of health problems). I haven’t been back to the campus yet – Upper West Side. I spend most of my time in Williamsburg now. Bushwick is very much just a necessary living location, unfortunately. I’m currently living off the Dekalb L tram stop, smack bang in the middle of the scene, grunge hipster catwalks of Brooklyn (which don’t quite rival Melbourne, but almost), but New York rent prices are astronomical, so I don’t really have a choice. Even Bushwick prices easily take up a large chunk of my paycheck. Luckily I’m a quick 20 minute subway to Union Square, back to the bustle and madness of Manhattan (which I love), and 15 minutes from work in Williamsburg.

    Williamsburg is my ‘hood. I gym there, I work there, I Whole Foods there. I absolutely love Williamsburg – it is so my thing. North Melbourne (Brunswick, Fitzroy etc.) was highly interesting and eclectic, but I definitely prefer the bougie, classy, French-Scandinavian aesthete and atmosphere of boroughs like Williamsburg, the East Village, Soho and Greenwich and such. I amn’t cool enough for the hippy and alternative bling of Bushwick and North Melbourne.

    There are so many things I want to do with this blog space now and in the future, but the most important move right now is to go back to where the story left off, when I got off the plane in Thailand 18 months ago, the move which would change every life plan I had up until then envisioned for myself. A sort of backward diary. But I also want to keep in tune with the present, so I’ll definitely be doing more current blog posts along the way.

  • Traveling the World after University

    Traveling the World after University

    I’m writing this post from Kinfolk, Melbourne – a volunteer-run coffee shop just around the corner from the gym. I love this particular corner, with its industrial, towering, crafty red-brick buildings. Melbourne city is very crafty altogether, authentic and old-fashioned yet varnished with a sleek silver glow. If you’re looking to run your own shop, the shop front information provided here might be helpful to you. Consider this frameless glass shopfront for your additional touch of modern elegance and sophistication. You may also want to explore professional glass shopfront installers to help bring your vision to life. If you’re interested, there’s a diverse selection available in the shop front and shutter product range. For additional information on fire shutters, check out this article for further insights. Additionally, you can also find some great fashion clothing options in this vibrant city. You may check out these sites at 명품 레플리카.

    I had absolutely no intention of coming to Melbourne, ever (how I ended up here is just one of the many ridiculous stories I have to tell). A quick google image search of ‘best beaches in Australia’ and ‘hottest, sunniest places in Australia’ never led me to pictures of Melbourne (did Victoria even have beaches?). Before graduating from Trinity, I knew I either wanted to go back to America or venture to Australia, and had decided on America, as apparently the 12 month graduate visa program would no longer be running the following year. By February 2016 I had already paid the 500 euro deposit and began dreaming about life in California. I wanted to go back to New York too, and figured I could easily spend 6 months there and 6 months in California. In the interview for the visa I was asked what my plans were once I came back to Ireland after the year in the USA – I remember thinking, well if I don’t get sponsored to stay over there forever I’ll apply for an Australian visa so I can get the hell out of this country again (though politely responded that I would settle in Dublin and employ my newfound internship skills in the home country). If you’re curious about whether Walmart offers ear piercing, here’s a helpful guide at https://www.marketingscoop.com/blog/does-walmart-pierce-ears/?/.

    To be honest, though, going straight to the USA and working an internship program or career-focused job didn’t really fit my instincts at that time. I wanted to go straight to Australia and live in the sun, unconstrained by working rights (for the USA visa you need to have your work approved by your sponsor, meaning anything outside of that i.e. waitressing/barwork has to be done under the table/illegally), free to roam about the country and maybe hop back and forth to Asia (I really did think that Asia was a mere 3 hour flight from The Land Down-Under). I wanted to experience what it would be like to have zero focus, to roam the Adelaide hills with fellow vegan cyclists, eat smoothie bowls on Bondi beach, attend Instagram meet ups, maybe pick up a few internships along the way which would require minimal commitment and effort. But at the same time I didn’t want to risk missing out on the USA graduate visa, so reasoned that the Australian adventure would still be there for me afterwards. I don’t know why, but the graduate visa seemed more like the ‘grown-up’ decision (which was probably why my immediate instincts were leaning towards Australia). There was a lot of paperwork involved, bank account details to be confirmed, the ordeal of finding work which should represent the bridge between college graduation and a future career – whereas with the working holiday visa to Australia, I could just go, and work things out once I was over there, frivolously. I didn’t care about anything except sunshine, heat, getting a tan, keeping fit, taking magnificent photos, and finally meeting some real life vegans. All I wanted was to leave Ireland as soon as possible, to throw myself into a vortex (that it would be a sunny and hot vortex was very important, I cannot stress this enough). I got my vortex, and yes it was sunny and hot, but would also contain a sticky humid mess of challenges and surprises which I was not prepared for or expecting.

    I tend to throw myself into travel and life commitments in advance. Like when I booked flights to go to Sri Lanka at Christmas in 2016, and worked ten hour shifts at a bar in town to put together enough money for the trip. However, my planning was slightly skewed, as not only did I end up having hip surgery that October but I also overlooked the mountain of final-year college assignments I would be dealing with during that particular festive season. In the end I had to get a refund on my flights to Sri Lanka, which I then put towards my flights to Thailand in 2016.

    This brings me to a very sticky topic – money. I had absolutely no savings after my last year in college. I had always worked solid full time summer jobs since I was 17, but then spent everything while in New York, where I studied abroad for a semester in third year. The deposit for the USA visa and my flights to Thailand had been scraped together from Christmas and birthday money, as well as the Sri Lanka refund (return flights had been around 900euro). I was facing the trip to Thailand with very few pennies remaining, so I pulled another bar-work night-shift marathon the month before departure and took out a small loan to replace my old Sony beast of a laptop with a MacBook Air (significantly lighter travel material) and to cover my basic needs while in Chiang Mai. As I was planning on staying in one place for a month, and not moving around, I wasn’t going to need large sums of cash to get me through a long period of travel. Afterwards, I had the security of a job in the south of France where my accommodation would be covered for three months. My plan was to arrive broke in France after Thailand, save all my summer earnings and then head off on the graduate visa to California in September. Simple. Easy. Done.

    Although the trip to Thailand consumed all my waking thoughts regarding post-graduation freedom, I decided last minute that it would be a good idea to join my friends on a final celebratory weekend holiday bash to Barcelona. The girls were going for a week, so I arranged to join them for the first two days before my flight to Thailand.

    I remember sitting at the library computers in Trinity, going over my booking confirmations, and realising that I had booked the outbound flight to Barcelona for June instead of May. One of my friends passed by at that moment and came over all excited about the trip, and I just stared at the screen with a sinking heart, pretending to jolly along while thinking “Oh God, there’s no way I can afford to change the flight, brilliant, why, whyyyyy.”

    I rang another friend that night. “I just can’t afford it. Goddamn. And I remember imagining how great Barcelona would be during those shitty bar shifts, running cocktails lit on fire at 3am.” I rang back an hour later. “Feck it, just booked another flight out, though I’ve a stop-over in London so I’ll be late getting there.” (It took me eleven hours to get from Dublin to Barcelona.)

    It just hit me now that the trip to Barcelona was the last time I saw any of my best friends from college. When I arrived in the evening at the Airbnb they were there hanging out the balcony smoking, with bottles of red wine cluttered on the table. The next day we set off ‘early’ at 1pm and fell asleep on the grass outside the Sagrada Familia, trekked to the Gaudi village, decided it wasn’t worth the 8euro visit, and floundered back to the apartment when it started lashing rain. We were all keen on a sensible and calm evening in, maybe an aperitif before a few tapas, finishing with a beer on the beach. A few hours later we were all trashed, debating inconclusively about what time we’d leave for tapas and where would be open at 1am, before someone ingeniously suggested abandoning going out for food at all and using that time to continue drinking at home instead. This was met with unanimous applause and recognised as a magnificent idea. I do still remember a beach appearing at some stage of the night, though, as well as almost getting crushed by a sand flattening machine. There was a frantic last minute scramble at the Airbnb two hours before my flight back to Dublin when I couldn’t find my passport (I had obviously put it in one of those notorious ‘safe places’ where all passports disappear) and rushing a hug from them all.

    Once back in Ireland, I taxied to Terenure to collect my luggage – two rucksacks and a massive bike box. I had never ridden a road bike in my life. I did not know how to put one together, or how to work the gears. I had actually worked at a bike shop before but can’t remember having been too enthusiastic about it. It didn’t matter. I’m sporty, I told myself, I’ll adapt (while trying to shove away the horrific memories of my attempts at skiing). My Dad dropped me to the airport. “Don’t come back to Ireland, there’s nothing for you here.”

    And off I went.

    (Read about the next chapter in my travel journey here!)

  • 1 Year Travel Anniversary: Reflections

    1 Year Travel Anniversary: Reflections

    It’s been over a year. Since I packed two bags and left, on the little adventure I’d been waiting to jump into for years. I remember booking a flight from New York to Thailand while studying at Columbia in 2015, a stubborn and stupid decision as I was barely physically capable of making it from my dorm radiator to the university campus one block down the road. But I was determined to set off on my way to the Thai Fruit Festival in Chiang Mai where I would surely laugh about all previous health woes, while basking in a new-found appreciation of life and fitness.

    I didn’t make it to Thailand, and ended up having two surgeries later that year.

    But that’s another story.

    Interestingly enough, I wasn’t really interested or aware of travel as a concept at that time. All I cared about was hanging out with vegans and ridiculously athletic people, and having access to unlimited ripe fruit in a hot climate. When I flew back to Dublin, I felt immediately that I couldn’t stay in the country for the rest of that summer and searched a destination where I would be 100% guaranteed 45 degree heat and sun in August – Morocco.

    Someone asked me recently out of all the places in the world I had been to, where had been the most striking and memorable. Morocco was definitely where my passion for travel snapped into existence to the detriment of a cohesive future – I met people who had been traveling the world for months and years, hopping from country to country, having wild and magical adventures. The obsession with Skyscanner began. I remember finding a flight from Morocco to Spain for £11 and thinking that this was the most monumental possibilty, and enjoyed a stopover in Madrid on the way back to Ireland. When I arrived home I confidently announced to my parents that I wouldn’t be returning to college that year and requested they please put my tuition costs towards my world-travel itinerary (I truly believed I could span the globe for a year on 3500 euro – it would take personal experience to show me that this was a major underestimation). The answer was a resounding negative, so I patiently left my plans hanging until after I graduated. While in Texas, I explored various options to fund my travels, even considering Texas car title loans. If you’re planning a trip and need car rental services, consider looking for options like car rental Dubai airport for a convenient and enjoyable travel experience. Additionally, for comprehensive travel insurance, you might explore options such as The Sun insurance.

    During my Irish oral exam for the leaving cert I remember steadfastly assuring the examiner that I was going to ‘an baid ban a thogail’ out of Ireland as fast as I could once this secondary school lark was over. Even when I ended up at Trinity College, the place I swore I’d never attend, I couldn’t stay still and dropped out after first year to pursue my francophone yearnings in France (however, the French education system isn’t quite as lenient as Irish student life, which saw my swift return to Trinners).  If you prefer a more refined travel experience, you can click here for a private chauffeur services, offering seamless and personalized transportation.

    I’m currently typing away in a café called ‘The Tinpot Café,’ a rustic and cosy place with antique decor in Fitzroy North – Melbourne, Australia. I’ve been here for almost two months now (in Melbourne, not the café – although coffee shops are admittedly where I spend the majority of my time in this city). I am approaching the one year mark of being on the road. By ‘on the road’ I obviously don’t mean I’ve been trekking around the world and countryside daily, setting up camp every night (although it has almost reached that stage on many occasions). But I haven’t spent more than two to five months in one place in a very long time. And I’ve decided to start writing. Why?

    Firstly, it’s appropriate for the anniversary mood I find myself in these days – must do something to mark the occasion, right? A year is a standard measurement in these cases. Although a year does’t hold a lot of time anymore. When we were kids perhaps, one year would trench before us like a bottomless hole and you couldn’t fill a library with all the adventures, changes, thoughts and occasions which it contained. As we get older we find ourselves remarking with every passing 12 months how the past year has flitted by more quickly than any other. Now I’m going to attempt to fit it all into one blog.

    I’m going to start from the beginning and tell a story. This is primarily for myself (whether anyone reads it is irrelevant), something to occupy my coffee shop time, to refill the past year with perspective, a way to find what was lost along the way. We travel to find ourselves, have you heard that one before? Well, I lost myself. Completely. I lost my calm. This year has given me a new understanding of the concept of ‘comfort zones,’ and what it means to leave them – whether you choose to do so or realise you’ve done it unconsciously. You need to lose yourself before you can ‘find’ yourself.

    Ironic, isn’t it?

    Looking back and reliving the past year through photos, memories and videos makes me emotional, warm, frustrated – both proud and unsatisfied, grateful and regretful. The thing is, my problem isn’t that I need to stop caring about what other people think of me, but that I need to stop caring about what I think of me.

    I kept various journals and diaries when I was younger but the content always felt extremely false and flawed, uncommitted – not Anne Frank material. This project excites me, though. I feel as if there’s something lacking and missing, a part of myself I amn’t fulfilling, which nags and annoys me everyday because it won’t show its face, or tell me what to do, or how to do it. I could say that this is the aftermath of years of university and education, institutions and lifestyles which often ingrain a militant understanding of productivity and leave you scrambling desperately in their inevitable and violently abrupt end. “What are you doing with your life?” said no one in school or university ever. We spend our whole lives routed securely to an external structure which comfortably distracts us from any underlying internal questions and ideas which may present themselves along the way.

    Someone once told me that when I went to university, life would really begin. They were wrong. Your life begins when you hop off the tracks – a happy idiot full of expectations and plans. When I left for a month’s trip to Thailand in May 2016 I thought I knew it all. I kept going, and life began when I realised I didn’t have a clue how to live or what to do with myself – now that the whole world was mine I didn’t really know what I wanted at all, and slowly started to realise that doing what was right for me was actually a very complicated subject.

    Now I need to grab a second coffee and head to the gym before work. (Somebody just rolled into the café on roller-blades.)

    A very long story to come.