by cyleodonnellInsights from the Pavement: Goal-Focused on the Go
For some the biggest benefit of travel is the time to distance ourselves, both metaphorically and physically, from the life we have back home. For whatever reason this came into play, we obviously needed this time to collect ourselves and recharge the batteries.
Putting a focal point to our release from the past patterns of our lives has a lot to do with the angle and theme of the trip at hand. And the variables that accompany the plan and the execution of even a single trip can be so daunting that we often get lost in those details and forget the original point of the trip.
So how can we keep focus in a time of flux?
The best answer would be to remain mindful of our goals. To do this effectively, we should first determine how we remember things. This will help us find creative ways of remaining centered on our original objectives.
Are we more visual, and could therefore benefit from writing down our goals? Should we bring along a journal and add a writing theme to our trip to help us record how or if we’re doing what we set out to do? Is there perhaps someone coming with us who is better at memorizing our important items? Or would we be better off bringing a handheld recorder to use for keeping on track and reflecting our thoughts?
The key to remembering often isn’t the vehicle that we use to drive our focus forward, but rather simply being proactive. Taking action will do more to steady our minds about our goals, because we’re taking an active role in achieving them. And even the slightest conscious effort of maintaining focus is worth a hundred pages in a diary that discuss the same things. Five minutes of putting our bodies to work in an effort of accomplishing our aims is equivalent to ten times that amount of daydreaming out the office window.
Put your thoughts into action and your efforts will pay you back in remaining on task no matter what your travel plans or challenges.
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Like the photo from this journal? Visit the album HERE.
Insights from the Pavement is a new style of blog that I am trying out. These will be posted a couple times per week for the next few months. And I am interested in what my readers and passersby think of them. So be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments section.
Insights from the Pavement: Finding Value in Talent
More than at any other time in our lives, traveling reveals both our strengths and our weaknesses – and the varying levels of each.
Only a small fraction of what we know from school, dating, professional life, social customs and just about any other situation that we’ve learned from throughout our lives will serve us any good when on the road in a different part of the world.
But this should never intimidate us, because in all the other times in our lives, we were simply learning how to act, what to say or how to land that dream job. Out in the foreign wilds, the things that we’ll find out are more akin to our personal level of creativity, or tact, our street smarts and, of course, our talents.
Forget your high school jam band. Playing guitar in the talent show makes strumming for a village full of wide-eyed tribal onlookers seem like the season finale of American Idol. Your last uncomfortable date will pale in comparison to being hit on by a Muslim woman and worrying if you’re to be hung at the gallows by sunrise. And that time that you said the wrong thing at the board meeting will seem as frivolous as the tie you were wearing that day when faced with realizing that you’ve just offended the local religious leader by having accidentally made the most horrendous hand gesture known to this part of the world.
Every semester of ethics classes you ever took will be as useful as the first drop of sweat that escapes your brow in situations like these. In this way, the phrase “in the heat of the jungle” doesn’t always apply to temperature. And quick learning happens in moments like these. So they will undoubtedly leave us with the most firmly planted lessons and the most magnificent memories that we’ll likely ever experience.
Academic diplomas take us years to complete, while our creative insights flex like lean muscles after just a month on the road. And what we learn out there could never be taught in the classroom. The reason for this is that what we learn comes from within us. And we are the only facilitators of our own creativity. We find it in ourselves, we use it in our actions and we learn from it in an ever-expanding vocation of life-sized applications.
Make no mistake; the value of our talents cannot be measured in the world of academia. Yet they benefit us far greater, stay with us far longer and continue to teach us farther into our lives than even the most expensive and prestigious schools on earth.
Our talents are all our own. And while we’re busy learning about these intangible places in ourselves, the world is much the better for our efforts in bringing our talents abroad and learning in tandem with the experiences that we all share along the way.
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Like the photo from this journal? Check out the photo album HERE.
Insights from the Pavement is a new style of blog that I am trying out. These will be posted a couple times per week for the next few months. And I am interested in what my readers and passersby think of them. So be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments section.
Travel Geek: Documentary Singapore, Part Four
In this last part of Travel Geek: Documentary Singapore, I finish my journey by taking the sky-high cable car from Mount Faber to Sentosa Island to take a dip with live, man-eating sharks. The last thing I do is visit the world famous Raffles Hotel and have a sip of the famed Singapore Sling in the very place it was invented.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tJ1G3HJ8vk&w=560&h=315]
Travel Geek: Documentary Singapore, Part Three
In this third part of Travel Geek: Documentary Singapore, I take a photo walk around the city, interviewing shop owners, mosque tenants and museum workers along the way. After seeing the sights, I end my day at the night safari and come face to face with eerie creatures of the night.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR5YPjssMuY&w=560&h=315]
Travel Geek: Documentary Singapore, Parts One & Two
Thanks to diligence and hard work (or more like luck and having a blast), I have finally finished the next edition to the Travel Geek documentary series.
On the first day in Singapore, I walk all throughout the city and eat tasty dishes, go skydiving in the world’s biggest indoor wind tunnel and coast above the city on the world’s tallest observation wheel, the Singapore Flyer.
Below, enjoy the introduction (Part One), and “Day One” of the trip that I took the last week of March (Part Two) below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MsG85eTNZQ&w=560&h=315]
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufwgsSgPaTI&w=560&h=315]
Top 10 List for Working Out on the Go
In addition to the video that I made in Borneo in mid-March, I have compiled a list of smart things to employ while traveling if you’ve got it in mind to continue your workout on the road.
Just because you’re traveling, it doesn’t mean that you have to give up on your exercise routine. The list below will help you keep on track with your workout long into your travels — whether you’re traveling for just a week or months on end.
Keep in mind that, while I mentioned keeping a schedule in this list, I wanted to make a special note about that here.
The attention and care that you take in planning your workout regimen before you leave will be your best tool in preparing you for keeping up with your workout. We all know how busy and chaotic travel can be. But if you’ve created a schedule of your workout before you left, there should be little that stays in the way of your exercising goals.
Think creatively: You can use your backpack as a dumbell or a stack of books as a Yoga block. Look around for a hotel with a gym. Many towns and neighborhoods have a pool or small fitness center — ask around.
This schedule should ideally be in the form of a ledger or notebook with very specific times and activities. It should have a place for you to write down your progress and keep an accurate account of what you’ve done, when you’ve done it and how many or how long each exercise took to complete. Once you’ve checked it off, you know that you can take the necessary recovery time until your next workout date.
Above is a “general” schedule of workouts. It’s specific but not overwhelming. It’s organized, too — leaving ample time for muscle recovery between workouts. It also, you might notice, divides the workouts to challenge your body one week and aerobically work it the next.
I like this schedule because the muscle training weeks allow me to be “comfortably lazy.” This means that I can sit around in a hostel, lay poolside or hit the beach for an entire week but punctuate my workout with long periods of catching up on journals, editing photos or rendering the newest videos.
But this is specific to me, my travel schedule and my particular fitness goals. So you can shuffle this around a bit or use a lighter or heavier routine to suit your travel requirements.
This particular routine is good for those with “themed” travel, like photographing the scenes or writing blogs. But yours might be better suited having less muscle training.
The schedule below is for keeping track of progress and take notes like “too much beer last night” or “don’t like running on Mondays,” or things like that. It, again, is very basic and is based on the above regimen.
[About the video: I was in Borneo this past weekend filming for what will probably end up being three filming sessions to shoot what I want to shoot for the North Borneo Railroad, a jungle hike, some of Brunei and of course, the orangutan refuge (and maybe even do the Pada white water rafting). While there, I realized that Borneo is a great place to talk about the challenges of exercising on the go.]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN8xdEUghX4&w=560&h=315]
Below is the Top Ten list for how to stick to your routine while on the road.
The Top Ten List for Working Out on the Go:
1. Bring your own clothes and shoes — don’t plan on buying exercise gear or apparel in-country.
2. Pack any medical supplies that you need: inhalor, diabetic needs, etc.
3. In the cities, look for gyms that offer a free one- to three-day pass that can hold you over until you’re in the next city.
4. In the country, find a nice, out-of-the-way place to do your jogging. This will help to avoid animals, traffic and dangerous obstacles.
5. Bring a long-sleeved, synthetic fiber shirt for helping to avoid sunburn, dry skin from windy and arid conditions; and it will also provide a continual layer of moisture to help cool you off.
6. Bring a hat and sunglasses to keep the sun off your eyes and off of your face in the event that your workout takes longer than normal.
7. Don’t run in your hiking boots! And don’t hike in your exercise shoes. Take the time to pack safe enough shoes to support your workout.
8. Make a plan and stick to it. Just because you’re traveling, it doesn’t mean that you need to slide on your workout regimen.
9. Do sit-ups, push-ups and workout routines in your hotel room by bringing workout videos with you on your laptop.
10. Watch your diet. Extra attention must be paid when you change your diet to the host-country’s offerings. You can help this by bringing supplements and checking your beer/wine intake.
Do you find it hard to work out on the go? Tell me what you think in the comments section:
Singapore Day Three:
Okay, so day three technically exists. But I am not going to do a journal on it. I’m just going to run some more outtakes from the film and let you know that I spent this day coordinating, scheduling and rescheduling a filming session on Sentosa Island.
Sentosa Island is like an adult Disney Land on steroids. It’s no joke. And it’s not cheap. So perhaps it’s Disney Land on designer drugs sold at a posh club in Dubai. In any case, it’s exceedingly fun and I can’t suggest enough that you get your ass down there and spend some money that you’ve been saving for an amazing time. You won’t regret it.
Just to cover the highlights of what I filmed (and therefore what the journals will talk about) on the next blog; it was definitely a day of many firsts.
I started my day with a 1.6 kilometer ride in a cable car that glides from the mainland (if you can call Singapore mainland) to the island of Sentosa. I then perused Universal Studios, hung out on beaches with sand imported from the Caribbean and met with the marketing people from some of the most prestigious names in the Singaporean entertainment business. After that, I swam with meat-hungry sharks at Underwater World. Then it was off to leap into the largest indoor skydiving tube in the world and meet with some of the world’s best competition skydivers.
If that wasn’t enough to do some jetsetting in Asia’s most elite country, I headed up to the top of the 2,561-room, 1,300,000-square-foot, $8 billion Marina Bay Sands Hotel & Casino, where they let me swim (but not film) in their 150-meter infinity pool at the Sky Park – at the very top of the 55-story, fung shui-approved behemoth.
But you can check out the next journal to find out about all that. Let’s just say you’ll enjoy what you see!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knG62X3t6DQ&w=560&h=315]
Singapore Day Two: Part Two:
In the evening, I headed over to Little India to experience what all the fuss was about: the food.
Just past Mustafa Center is the section of town that leads to Arab Street, the famed location of many amazing restaurants and even the growing glamour of Kampong Glam (Glam Village). Here, you’ll find an array of delicacies – not the least of which is stingray sauté.
And of course, how can one eat out with friends and not share some “shisha?”
Shisha is a long time favorite item of restaurant goers here. After dark, younger adults to senior citizens group-order food and wash it all back with a bubbly brew of their choosing – much to the chagrin of the Muslim locals in the area.
The key ingredient, though, is flavored tobacco from a giant water bong known as a hookah. And because of the way that it is inhaled, it’s both incredibly addictive and extremely harmful. In fact, it’s about 200 times more dangerous than smoking cigarettes. But that doesn’t seem to stop these anxious smokers from indulging.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7AAe_dq8MQ&w=560&h=315]
In any case, after some lovely eats and chats with others having a coke-and-a-toke, I ended my night by catching up on journals and planning for the next day. Which, of course, was epic.
Be sure to come back in a couple days and check out the video from indoor skydiving, swimming with man-eating sharks, a mile-high cable car and much more!
Singapore Day Two: Part One:
Today, I was in for another wonderful day of heat. But I won’t complain about that anymore than to just say that I sweat non-stop for every moment that I was not indoors. In fact, for the most part, If I was awake I was pretty much sweating the entire time.
That’s not to say that all places in Singapore are hot. In fact they love their malls so much that they air condition the sidewalks just so that people are comfortable walking around to buy things. Now that’s a generation of dedicated shoppers.
And amazing malls aren’t the only things that I’d see on my photo-walk through Singapore’s Bugis area. I must have walked seven or eight miles throughout the course of the day, too. And while incorporating old colonial era architecture with the new age design of the world’s elite planners, this region of Singapore is truly worth the work to see.
It was nice to see just how much of the old cultural influence still has a hold on this futuristic, artsy, progressive city.
I stayed mostly away from the myriad shopping complexes in the city. I know that Singapore is famous for its shopping. But because of that, I am sure there are other places to find documentaries and blogs about them. No, sir. This trip was more about squeezing the “real” Singapore out of this place.
And where better than cultural heritage spots, museums and the old quarters. In this tiny island nation, there are plenty of those. But luckily, while the culture is spread out all over, the museums and dedicated architecture has a centralized location and can be browsed at an even walking pace in one afternoon or so.
I eventually made my way around to the opulent palace-like hotel where the original Singapore Sling was invented and first served. There is a lot of history in this place as well.
In 1887, the Sarkies brothers, Armenian emigrants, opened this bar in its first form – a 10 room bungalow. From there, its success was certain.
It soon grew into what was known around the world as the classy-people’s diner. Ngiam Tong Boon invented the Singapore sling, which now costs a bewildering $26 and tastes like costs much less. The very last of the world’s Singaporean Tigers was shot dead underneath a pool table, having escaped from the zoo and finally cornered here. In 1991 it had a $160-million renovation which brought it to its present form. And if you’re in the area and have an extra $750 lying around, feel free to book a room.
After cooling down and taking a breather, I headed back out to continue my photo walk to check out what else there was. There are churches and cathedrals all over the place. And there’s no need for a guide to make it around to all these places. Anyone walking around in this area likely works or lives there. So they should be able to direct you to all the hot spots.
And speaking of hot spots, I stopped by the Cafe La Caire and made some new friends, ate some great food and made another wonderful memory for the second day of my trip.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRn9-3PfrTM&w=560&h=315]
Singapore Day One: Part Two
When I woke up, I realized that I’d slept away a good part of what was left of the day. But I still had a couple of nighttime hours left. So I decided to do the night safari next to the Singapore Zoo.
It was amazing! Saying that it was up close and personal doesn’t really do this cage-free park much justice. I saw a pride of lions feeding on fresh beef from right across the street. There were wild giraffes, elephants and rhinos roaming free — no chains, no fences — nothing to keep them from leaving their little area.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGqMenKcDXA&w=560&h=315] I’ve included this video as an outtake. But I won’t give too much away. You’ll have to see the full video once it’s released to get all the goodies.
I was inches away from giant bats called flying foxes inside the exhibit. These guys had three-foot wingspans and I was so close to them, they were grabbing at my camera. One even flew over my head and touched down for a fraction of a second as he buzzed me!
I even saw a 7-meter crocodile-like Indian Ghavial from right underneath my feet as I leaned over an eerily low-built bridge. Never fear, however, because while these animals look like they’d make quick work of just about any size of animal, this is a fish-eating reptile.
The list of animals is a little too numerous to name here. But the video should be coming out soon. So keep an eye out for that. Suffice it to say that I was impressed and overjoyed to have had the opportunity to see this amazing, new part of Singapore. It’s highly recommended.
On the way back, I decided to hop off the bus at the Chinatown center and walk back from there. It was a hell of a walk (which ended up taking me from 11pm until 1am), so I would probably advise against doing this at night, since it traipses through a small red light district where plenty of drunks are stumbling about.
But the nightlife was cool to see. Singapore definitely ties one on in the wee hours.
One last shower would finish me off as I could feel my eyes getting heavy by the time I hit the bunk for the night.
