Hi friends, it’s been another year & time to (finally) write an update on what’s keeping me busy! =)

Super-brief summary:

I got addicted to programming and am landing my next career in software engineering.

Brief summary:

• January: I took a back-country split-boarding course with NOLS in Wyoming
• February: I briefly moved to Toronto, obtained my permanent resident card while making some long-overdue progress in drawing and painting before taking a short touristy trip in Abu Dhabi and London
• March – October: I came to Silicon Valley in response to an invitation from a French programming school named 42, initially I intended to stay for one month, solve some puzzles and pick up some basics of coding (which I always thought might be fun but never actually managed to take the time to learn). This last part turned out to be highly addictive and before I knew it, I have programmed non-stop till the end of the year and found myself interviewing as software engineer at various tech companies.
• November – December: Stayed for 6 weeks in France and Ukraine to visit other campuses of 42, collaborated with local students and more level-ing up kicked off the interview process for my next career.

Due to the different nature of topics, I’ll spilt the post into two parts: Part I contains various bits of random trips/things I do till I started programming and Part II describes some programing projects and how I got intensely interested in the field.

So let’s start by rewinding time to January 2018:

Split-boarding with NOLS:

I took a 14-day backcountry split-boarding course with NOLS which includes a 10-day expedition into the mountains of Wyoming (i.e. drag a sled containing all gears, food, cooking equipment; built quinzhee to live in etc.). Was a lot of work but an extremely rewarding experience, learned a lot about rations, avalanches, cold injury, how to crafting snow into useful structures… Now I feel ready to head into the wildness even in the winter.

…and of course there’s the snowboarding part where we made marks on lots and lots of untouched powder!

Some drawing and painting in Toronto:

I got back to Toronto late January to finish some logistics and immigration paperwork (was planning to work in Toronto for a few years, although that plan didn’t end up happening). While in the city I signed up with a local atelier managed to do some drawing and painting there (the above are mostly my works from a Sargent workshop in which we learned to reproduce the technique used by John Singer Sargent, I also did some Bargue drawing and life portraits)

Abu Dhabi & London:

In mid February I went to UAE for the first time to see a friend and visit the Louvre of Abu Dhabi and the most expensive painting ever sold. Stopped by London for a week to catch some shows, museums and good food, before flying to California for what I thought was a one-month intensive programming camp… (continue in Part II)

So it’s been almost a year since I set sails away from the sophistication of the corporate world to find more primitive adventures. Although not all things went as planned, it’s been perhaps the most memorable year I’ve had: 14 countries in 5 continents, 2 broken bones, tried many new things and met many new friends. Main while, I guess the main plot of my life has somehow unfolded semi-unexpectedly: I became a Canadian permanent resident and married some French model theorist.

Updated map (places visited, by country)

Chapter 1. Snow, ice & mountains

January: Alps (France & Swisserland)

I started my journey in the French Alps, without having much clue about how the mountains work and where the best ski places are. I did the fool-proof thing of googling where Mont Blanc is and made my way there (logic being I probably won’t miss out by starting at the highest point, there’s gotta be cool stuff around it, right?) So I winded up passing through Moscow, Lyon and found myself in the ski/mountaineering mecca of Chamonix, where I tried paragliding, snowshoeing and took some first courses in snowboarding.

Then I headed to Swiserland and spent a week climbing frozen waterfalls. We ended up driving around Swiserland finding different falls everyday and moved from single pitch to multi pitch and towards higher grades. Conditions were generally -15ish degrees plus windchill. There’s nothing like hanging on vertical ice with painfully frozen fingers and toe trying to do pull-ups.

February: Alps to UK (Austria, France, UK, Ireland)

At the beginning of February I went from Austria back to France, doing more snowboarding on the way. Then I broke my wrist on the day which there’s a photographer following the class and we were asked to go down an easy slope to get photos taken. Of course I tried to look like I can ride better than I actually can, and fell hard. Luckily the doctors in Chamonix are extremely experienced with such injure, ‘We get this 20 times a day…everyday’ he told me while mechanically casting my arm.

After attempting to snowboard with the casted wrist (which worked relatively well), I decided to cut off the cast after 10 days and head to the Scottish winter mountaineering class as planned (which did not go well as my hand started to turn bright blue halfway up the mountain on the first day). So I spent the rest of the week wondering around the Scottish countryside, where I learned to embrace the slowness and developed a new understanding of where Turner got his amazing landscape colours from.

Then I did some museum-going and spent much of the day at coffee shops in major cities throughout England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland.

March: Japan

After a short stop back in Shanghai I decided to head out for some more Snowboarding, this time in Hokkaido, Japan.

Towards the end I was able to go off-piste and into the woods

Did some touristy things while there as well (by now I have officially been to all Disney parks in the world!)

Chapter 2: Ocean

April: Indonesia

After putting down my ski goggles and digging out my diving mask, I went straight to the warm ocean for some surfing and diving.

Found the new world of free-diving and got completely hooked (I feel like I’ll never want to use a scuba tank again)

May: Western Australia

Going further south I arrived in the vast empty lands of Western Australia.

Arrived in Exmouth – A small town in which the main industry is whale-shark tourism (i.e. taking boats of tourists out and drop them down to swim with wild whale-sharks in the ocean). Here I had a wonderful few weeks volunteering as a crew member on a whale-shark boat, of course applying some newly-acquired free-diving skills =)

June: Indonesia

I went back to Bali and volunteered for the freediving shop in June, painted logos, fishes and instructor’s fins while furthering my freediving training. After a month I was able to hold breath for 4’30” and reached -40m (which is sufficient depth for getting instructor license). Also received my custom-made carbon fibre fins from Greece, in red like all my other gear of course =)

Chapter 3: Land sky

July: Western USA

The plan for the summer was to get into the dessert, get skydiving license and start big-wall rock climbing in Yosemite. It did not exactly go as planned…

With a good friend I met snowboarding in Japan, we had a classical american road trip through Nevada and Arizona, camp and hiked in death valley and grand canyon.

August: Atlanta, USA

Then I went to Atlanta to get my AFF skydiving license, met lots of awesome people in the skydiving community, learned how to pack my own parachute and broke my ankle on the 8th jump.

September: Berkeley, California, USA

My original plan was to spend about a month in Yosemite to try breaking into the rock climbing community (by, perhaps, showing up at the infamous CAMP 4 and stay there until I find some cool guys with a van). The goal was to start big-wall climbing, hopefully attempt some classic multi-day routes by the end (El Cap being my lifetime rock climbing goal).

Obviously that plan was completely scarped once I broke the ankle…So what ended up happening was that I got ‘stuck’ in Berkeley for 6 weeks, during which I picked up some reading, mathematics, cooking as well as the above-mentioned French model theorist whom I ended up marrying a couple months later.

October: Canada to Turkey

My Canadian permanent resident application got approved! So I went quickly to Hong Kong and took care of the documents, went back to Shanghai to pack up, then officially ‘landed’ in Canada as new immigrant!

A week later I took my first ‘trip aboard’ as a Canadian PR =) Not wanting to push the ankle too hard yet, I decided to do some traditional backpacking without extreme sports, with a good friend I met earlier on the road, we set off for Turkey.

Did some standard touristic sightseeing (the greek and roman ruins far exceeded my expectations).

…and did some mellow exploration of nature

November: Morocco & Western Sahara, then back to Canada

After Turkey I arrived in another long over-due popular backpacking destination: Morocco. Starting off by city-hopping from Casa Blanca to Rabat, Fez, Marrakech, Essaouira.

Then into the desert:

Then I did something slightly less conventional: I took an overnight bus down south to the costal city Agadir, rested for a night there and took another overnight bus ride to a small town called Laayoune, in the rather controversial area of Western Sahara (former spanish colony, now officially belonging to Morocco). I went, to pay my tribute to Taiwanese author Echo Chen, whose books about the desert and living life as a wanderer and nomad had an undeniable influence on me from back in my teenage years.

The town is remote and rather unremarkable in general, with lots of UN personnels from the special mission which has been here since 1990. But I found various sites which appeared in the books, the author’s mud hut, the spanish church, the postal-office and even stayed at the legendary (and only) fancy hotel in town which remained exactly the same as 50 years ago.

– For those who are curious, Echo Chen was a Taiwanese lady who studied in Madrid, one day she came across a photograph of the Sahara desert in a magazine and felt a special connection, subsequently decided to move there. Those Chinese-language books are semi-fictional stories about her life in the desert. The books had a lasting popularity as inspiration for young people to ‘follow dreams’ and ‘wander around the world’.

From there I returned to Canada and got married at the end of November. It was quite fun, we found a street-corner with some trees and Christmas lights do perform the ceremony and finished right when it started to rain…

December: US, Bahamas, Belize

As I have already been to all Disney parks in the world at this point, I decided to finally try the Disney cruise lines! – Took a quick trip from Miami to Bahamas. Although cruise was not exactly my cup-of-tea, I was pleasantly surprised by the Disney experience (and so much so that I pre-booked an open-ended second trip while still onboard). Some highlights include the Animator’s Palate restaurant which changes from blank&white to full color through the course of a dinner, seeing the latest StarWars movie and Pixar’s Coco and the Christmas fireworks.

Then we took a trip to Belize for some Rain-forest and diving. In particular, I checked the great blue hole off my diving list (this last picture was not mine), applied free-diving skilled learned earlier this year and went down 21 meters without gear (decided not to do more since there wasn’t other good enough free divers around to rescue).

Finally, welcomed the first light of 2018 deep in the Rainforest of Guatemala! Hope this will be a year full of new adventures!

Yesterday I returned my phone, computer and access card to the Firm, officially puting an end to my 1.5 years of consulting. I have been planning for this day, packed up all my earthly belongings and locked them up in a 1 cubic meter box in the outskirts of the city, got a Hong Kong sim card to by-pass the Chinese internet blockage, calculated savings from the McKinsey period, placed them into s separate account & marked it ‘to be spent’. Right now I’m on a plane, heading northwest, to start my journey.

My farewell e-mail to everyone I know at the Firm states that I am to ‘take an indefinite amount of time catching up on all the cool stuff I have not been doing enough; to re-gain inspiration and embrace (once again) the endless possibilities of the world’. 

Some has concluded this is a ‘gap year’; but I’d rather think of my time in the corporate world as an adventure outside of my usual routine. Sometimes it all feels like a role-playing game: wake up, put on my ‘consultant costume’ and head out to complete a bunch of pre-set tasks for the day. This world infacinating for an accidental tourist, almost as if there is an invisible bubble dividing us from reality. In this alternative world one gets delivered between planes, fancy offices and fancy hotel rooms; spending their days on calls, e-mails and meetings; making decent amount of money. This can be comforting and satisfying to many, leading to losing track of one’s dreams and goals, to wind up just tagging along and climb the ladder of conformality and prestige. So naturally I found myself steering away and setting sails into uncharted waters, once again.

When trying to come up with a list of things (anything anywhere in the world) I think way back into childhood and ask myself what I used to dream of and haven’t done (or done enough of) yet. Right now I found the major shortage would be building proficiency in outdoor activities – as a kid i remembered that I was no less passionate about the outdoors (from normal camping to expeditions into deep ocean and high mountains) than I was in, say, math or art. One difference, though, is that I’ve realized my mediocre talent in that area from very early on. Hence, I thought, since it’s not likely that I’ll be a great mountaineer or sportsman, this better wait till I have done a few years of stuff I’m actually good at. But this ‘itch’ has always been there. Time to take actions!

4 major themes of activities I would like to improve my proficiency in (some I have no experience in, such as ice climbing).

Note: not my images, for illustration & aspiration only

Ice & SnowLandOceanSkyIn addition of course there are less active hobbies I will continue to peesue, such as painting/sculpting and continue to expand my world map =)

It’s difficult to plan for an open-ended journey, so I have attacted like a large oil painting: one starts from a very rough sketch of the composition, then work up the ‘resolution’, one small section at a time, the parts closer to the painter gets more details filled in first while the objects further away remains a sketch with few brush strokes and lots of room for revision. Here is the current ‘sktech’ of 2017:

• January – Feburary: Snow sports in the Alps, snowboarding, ice climbing and some mixed Alphine climbing
• Feburary – March: UK, mainly outdoors in Scotland
• Spring/Summer 2017: a subset of the following activities

– Australia & New Zeland for skydiving/hang gliding/hiking

– Himalayas to observe the mountaineering season and get some high-altitude experience (no Everest)

– Caribbeans/Hawaii/SE Asia for more advanced scuba diving and surfing

• Summer/fall 2017: Southwest USA for pilot license, burning man and rock climbing (time to take steps towards my El Capitan dream)
• Fall 2017: a subset of the following

– Europe for oil painting/drawing/sculpture workshops

– Convensional sight-seeing in a few parts of the world I have not been yet (Japan, Turkey, Morocco, Middle-East

– Patagonia for kayaking, climbing and hiking

• Winter 2017: hopefully I may conclude the year in Antartica

Note that this is what I can come up with through day-dreaming behind an office desk, looking to improve it as I go and meet cool people; So if you have ideas/ recommendations/ couch to host random person in a cool place; shoot me an e-mail! =)

Finally, my New Year’s Eve greetings from Red Square, Moscow as on my way to the Alps~Let 2017 be a magical year for all!