2 months to go!

Yep, about 60 days, as February is short. I start to get excited. Still many things to do but also several others done. Hopefully Daniel will take the apartment and most of the furniture. It will make things easier. My apartment rent is now 1500chf and a raise is expected due renovation of the kitchen. I hope will not be a problem for Daniel. Other people is interested in few of the furniture, but they don't stop asking for cheaper price when I'm making already 50% off the price of new. And furniture is not a car, it gets much less used with the time than a polluting engine.

What is taking time to decide is about the insurance. Basically it exists worldnomads which makes a long trip travel insurance. BUT, their trip ends when you come back to your home country, no matter how long more the policy lasts. It shits if I decide to visit my family. Then they say you can by shorter policies and renew. But they also write that they stop any cover as soon as policy ends. In my understanding, if you are in hospital when the policy ends, they will not pay, as it ended. If you renew, they say it was a existing problem, so no cover. Other insurance multi-trip exist BUT, maximum trip time is 31 or 45 days. Not easy. Insurers don't really insure you. In Portugal I think not find any long trip insurance either. I'll try next week.

Eva is also searching for people for her apartment who would take the furniture as well. Is nice and shity work at same time. But knowing who will take the apartment makes you feel better.

And it is now public that I'm leaving. The gym was the last to know. I told them on wednesday. David accepted (well, no other chance) but was sad as my class is going very well, with more than 25 people going each week.

Dinner time!

Termination of contract checklist

Today I've received the full list of things I should do before leaving CERN. Sixteen points to go through, to get signatures. Then also decision has to be taken on what to do with the pension fund money... leave here, put in a bank?

It is quite good deal for me to leave CERN, as the rules protect a lot the ex-employer. CERN will pay up to one year of storage room for my belongings (even if there will be very little to store) and also my moving to another country up to two years after I left CERN. Plus, I'm entitled to 2 or 3 months of salary after I leave, which will most likely cover a big part of the first year of the trip.

I should defenitely cheer up about all those advantages.

Job offer in Taiwan

Before I leave I already got a job offer in Taiwan! These are good news and we never know but I'm afraid I'll refuse it. In Taiwan they miss a experienced DBA (my job) and a temporary help would be good, as their research center makes part of the Grid and serves all SouthEast Asia.

Thanks alot to my old boss for this offer and specially for the consideration. Indeed, much of my success at CERN I owe to his trust on me since beginning. Thanks Jamie.

Budget

My (our?) budget for this trip is about 20.000CHF/year/person. Our experience and few contacts showed that an average of 1.000EUR/month/person is used when travelling, this including everything from lodging, food, travelling, gifts, souvenirs, etc. Of course we are talking about SouthEast Asia, South America and India. We will start our trip from Switzerland, being first stop probably Vienna. Eastern European countries and Russia, where we will spend good part of the time, are more expensive, so maybe we will go a bit higher than the estimates.

Lets see. For the moment and for me, this does not bother. I hope to have enough to cover expenses for long time.

Homeless traveller - how bureaucracy annoys me

From April 1st most likely I'll not have anymore the resident right in Switzerland. Neither I'll have an home in Portugal (ok, my parents). At some point this year my CERN heath insurance will finish and I'll need a new one, unless I want to use the portuguese social security system, for which I did never contribute, neither I know if I'm allowed to use.

Things I've to take care before setting off:

• Portuguese new identity card (will also let me know if I've social security number or not)
• International insurance to repatriation in event of accident
• Possible health insurance with world coverage
• Notify new address to bank
• Cancel any billing contract (eletricity/radio/phone/internet)
• Get a estimate and contract with a furniture-keeping company
• Sell/give away all furniture
• Decide which clothes to keep, which to donate
• Get the russian visa
  

Russian visa - introduction

Our trip will likely pass by Russia. Since long time (5, 6, 7 years?) that I want to visit deep Russia (is how I call Russia apart from Moscow and St. Petersbourg). While my first six months in Finland, back in 2002, I managed to travel for a week in Russia, visited the two big cities. I enjoyed a lot St. Petersbourg and found strange Moscow, but maybe also because it was just the day after the end of the occupation by Tchechens of a theater in Moscow, which ended by more than 100 people dead when police trowed some sleeping gas. In any case until the end of my six months I dreamed about returning to Russia as soon as I would finish my university. I even went to Russian embassy in Lisbon to ask about the procedures. Life changes and instead of going to Russia I went back to live in Oulu, Finland and then Geneva, Switzerland.

This time it seems for real, Eva and me will go to Russia... if we manage all the bureaucracy.

In order to get a Russian visa one needs first an invitation. To get this invitation, for an independent traveler, it mostly obliges an agency. While waytorussia.net is the most complete source of information, there seems to be also several travel agencies who do the work, including some in Switzerland, like RussianConcept here in Geneva.

For the invitation we should choose two things: the duration of the visa and the beginning date. Now the big question are: how long we want to stay in Russia? When we plan to arrive to Russia?
For the first question, I believe the 90 days is a good bet, if not even 6 months. For the latter, it depends on how deep we will visit the countries on the way. We want to check-out the Baltic states and some of Poland and a bit lower Slovakia or Czech republic. Things to discuss...

Travel research - part I

A few links were open today during the creation of the blog. While checking wikipedia and answers.com for some concepts, I crossed:

• Backpacking, which is what we will be doing;
• Ultralight backpacking - a form of backpacking where people try to stay below 9kg or even below 4.5kg for a determinated hike, bringing all essential stuff to ensure their safety. While the article and definition covers essentially fully autonomous multi-day hiking (which we will not be doing), it comes with some ideas that Eva and me have already implemented in our trips: multi-functional gear, light weight clothes, cut on any superfluous item and cut in sizes of toilet items. This way we managed to travel each one with a 35l backpack for up to 20 days trips (without food). And this also includes an autonomous (except lodging) three day cross-country ski holiday in Lapland, where we had to carry clothing+food+beer. :-) An article about our backpack and carrying stuff will certainly follow on this blog.
• Backpacking light magazine - a magazine for the affictionados of ultralight backpacking.
  
• Banana Pancake trail - is a list of places in SouthEast Asia where backpackers often go. I've already done the destinations in Malaysia - Perhentian Islands and Melaka - but my friend Luís is a good master of it, I believe also because of the infamous "Lonely Planet - SouthEast Asia in a shoestring" which I offered him on his departure from Geneva.
• Wanderlust - or strong and irresistible impulse to travel. I discover this word couple years ago and love it (a reference in my other blog).
  

Disclaimer

The chronology of the blog is not the same as in real life. Today I'm posting about ideas and events that crossed my mind this rainy january sunday. Later other posts will cover subjects that crossed Eva and my mind in the past, which I consider worth mentioning.

Welcome to World | Unlimited

Two months and half to go, I open the blog. Still unpublished, I believe people will discover it few weeks before our depart.

"World | Unlimited" name was not easy to choose or decide by. Many other names crossed my mind, from simply "World trip", to "Eastwards" or something with "sunrise", "journey". I looked at the wiki page of Fernão de Magalhães but nothing come up. Then I looked straight, to the wall of my room and a card of the contamporary art exhibition called "Art | Basel" appeared. One of the sections of this exhibition is called "Art | Unlimited". I love the name and lettering of the card and decided to adopt to this blog. Wikipedia's page on World had the description sentence.

The logo was made using MS Word 2007, default Calibri font in bold, size 72 (page view 100%). The font properties were changed to be scaled to 80%, spacing condensed by 3pt. The vertical bar (or pipe, for computer geeks) is raised by 5pt. I've chosen the colors based on my web page, layout of 2008. Then I've done a print screen, pasted to IrfanView, crop and save the image as png.