Top 10 Tips for Backpackers

Lots of my friends are starting to get into the backpacking culture and one of them suggested I start a backpacker tip of the day on my blog. I think that may be overkill, but instead i've decided to create my top 10 list of tips (the kind you only learn from backpacking a few months) for backpackers:

1) Don't travel with any white clothing. No white shirts, underwear, nothing. It gets dirty much faster than colors, it's a bitch to clean, and ends up turning pink when you accidentally wash it with a color. Once exception: if you're going to Rio de Janeiro for New Years.

2) Travel with a Cocoon. It's a very light, silk, sack you can sleep in when you end up in a hostel that ain't up to your standards of cleanliness. Buy one at your local camping store.

3) Travel with a role of Duct tape. You can fix anything with Duct tape.

4) Travel with Imodium. If you plan to backpack on any other continent other than your own, bring this stuff....it's worth it's weight in gold.

5) Don't bring shaving cream. The water in different parts of the world is different, and your shaving cream/gel is made to foam with the water back home....absolutely useless and takes up lots of space/weight in your pack.

6) Only take three pairs of underwear, max!!. Face it, if you're traveling for a while you're gonna have to do laundry (by hand in the sink). Once you get over this, you realize you don't need a week's worth of underwear and socks. Spend 5 minutes doing laundry every night and you have clean underwear everyday and a much lighter pack. Make sure to buy high-tech hiking underwear...dries in 2 hrs!!!

7) Hide some cash somewhere other than your wallet.

8) Don't travel with your girlfriend, best friend, sibling or any person from back home. Ok, that's a little harsh, but don't do it for too long cause you'll miss out on meeting new people...that's half the fun of backpacking!

9) Use a website like HospitalityClub or meet locals and get free accommodation. I know partying with Americans/Canadians/Australians/English/Irish is fun...but how about a little fun with the locals too?

10) If you're Canadian, don't put that silly flag patch on your pack...looks cool for the first week and then you realize you're a nerd. If you're American, buy a Canadian flag patch and put it on your bag.

Social Networks Galore

Social networks have come and gone, i was an early adopter of a few of them, including Orkut which ended up being hijacked by brazilians, but after a while i got tired of them because they didn't really provide much value.

Over the last month, I've jumped back onto the social networking band wagon to see how things have changed over the last couple years. I chose two social networking sites which many of my ex-coworkers were on: LinkedIn and Facebook.

LinkedIn, the social network for professionals was a challenge to get started. I found the system of linking up with old friends (who i hadn't kept email contact with) quite time consuming (and not very intuitive): ask a friend to introduce person X, hassle your friend to forward it on (some people are better at forwarding than others), person X approves and sends back their email address, copy the email address and add a new contact with the email, request is then approved by person X. Do this for 30 people (only 5 at a time unless you upgrade your account) and you'll understand the pain. But after all the setup, i think it's been worth it. Other people write reviews of your work, which im sure will be read by future employers and you get to keep all your contacts in one place receiving updates about their careers even though you're not working together anymore. They also have a nifty 'Answers' feature which allows you to ask questions via the social graph. Recently I asked a question about hosting providers in the US and got a stream of high quality answers...ended up choosing Slicehost in the end (very cool btw). Overall i'm pretty pleased with LinkedIn.

Facebook, a 'web 2.0' social networking site that i've been hearing about for years has been quite a bit easier to setup. Literally in one evening, I had upload pictures, found university/highschool/elementry school friends, added a map of places i've been to around the world and even poked someone! But seriously, the main reason I actually got onto Facebook was due to them opening up with platform to third-party development...it's a great idea and seems like a win-win for almost everyone involved, but still very early to tell. Thumbs up regardless.

Mon gone

Another great weekend in Dublin, we finally have some summer weather. Monika, a friend of mine from canada, visited and was treated to our usual warm Dublin welcome which included excessive drinking and partying...for the play-by-play visit her blog. She made quite a good impression and im sure i'll be fielding many 'when is monika coming back' questions for some time.

Stockholm

Hey all. Just a quick update...i spent the weekend in Stockholm with a couple friends of mine.
Many things were as expected:
- Clean city
- Meatballs
- Beautiful women
- Ice Bars

But there was also a few unexpected things. For instance, it was cheap!! Ya, i've been living in Dublin for too long... But the strangest thing was small pieces of American culture scattered about. For example, 7-11 on almost every corner! Plus, they're crazy about classic American cars. The weather was great, so all the swedes were out styling their 1960's muscle cars or 1930's whatever.