To continue my 1 – 1.5 month late blog writing habit, here’s a post about England, Ireland, and Madrid back in the beginning of June. From Egypt, I bussed and hitchhiked my way back to Tel Aviv and got on the cheapest flight available: $90 to London. I was on my way to meet 3 friends, Ryan, Kasey, and Alina, in Dublin, with a quick stop in Oxford along the way. For anybody who has been regularly reading this blog, you may recall a ski trip in Switzerland back in January. Well the people from that ski trip all live in Oxford and I had a really good time with them so I thought it’d be fun to visit. Cassandra, one of my best friends from Pomona, also came that weekend.
 
We spent a bunch of time wandering around looking at Oxford’s beautiful architecture, having beers in bars, and park chillin. I was excited to finally be in a place that used hops in their beers, but the excitement of IPAs was dampened by England’s habit of serving their beer warm and flat. I will never understand the appeal of a cask ale over a cold, crisp American IPA.
 
Oxford
The highlight of Oxford was definitely tree climbing. A couple of the guys in the Oxford crew were experienced climbers who used ropes and harnesses to scale otherwise unclimbable trees. Andrew is a nature photographer who photographs the canopy of trees, and has done everything from primate conservation photoshoots to chainsaw advertisements high above the ground. I found his life very inspiring and hope that I, too, can find a way to combine outdoor sports and nature into a career like he does. Tim, the other climber, doesn’t do it for his job, but is still an awesome guy who likes to do awesome things, and a great teacher. Tim showed us how to tie the ropes so that we could safely hoist ourselves up the trunk of a giant Beech tree. We had to throw one rope over the highest attainable branch while another rope held us securely in place. This is by far the hardest part, as throwing a rope accurately while hanging in a harness at an awkward angle is no easy task. We would then pull ourselves up, sometimes using branches and sometimes just using the rope, tie back in when we reached the top of the high rope, and do this process all over again. About ten rope-throws later, I made it to the top.
 
Jaysen forgets which way is up

 

Cassandra hangs in the tree

 

looking down

 

selfie!
 
After an epic day of climbing and a great weekend spending time with old and new friends, I hopped on a train to Wales, where I would get a ferry to Dublin. Alina and I were to arrive in Dublin that evening and Ryan and Kasey would arrive two days later. I hadn’t seen Alina in almost three years, but we decided to meet up in Ireland on a whim and it turned out to be the best idea ever. It was love at first sight (well, first sight in 3 years, at least…). We met our couchsurfing hosts, an Irish woman and a Spanish man who had tons of amazing life experiences to tell us about, and spent the evening catching up. The next day we switched CS hosts to another guy who had more space for Ryan and Kasey to join, so we brought our stuff over to his very comfortable apartment right in Dublin’s city center. Though he was a bit of a creeper, he was very generous and we got along pretty well. He took us out to some bars around Dublin and gave us our own bedroom to sleep in. Another couchsurfer, the one and only Ben Bang, was also staying there and he came on an adventure to Howth with us the next day, an area of beautiful cliffs and beaches just north of Dublin.
 
Alina and I at Howth cliffs

 

selfie with a kid on a leash
When Kasey and Ryan arrived, we hit the bars again, attempting and failing over and over again to understand the Irish accents of the people we met. The next day was spent wandering around Dublin, trying really hard to acquire the taste for Guinness but ending up still not being a huge fan.
 
We found Dylan at the O’Connell statue

 

Trying really hard to acquire a taste for Guinness

 

The Guinness factory, which we did not go inside
 
That night was spent at Kasey’s friend’s house, who lives just outside of Dublin, and the next morning I had to say a sad goodbye to Alina, as she was headed back to Germany. Ryan, Kasey, and I spent the day drinking wine and eating cheese in a park, shotgunning Guinnesses on a street overflowing with kilt-clad Scotsmen, and watching the Ireland vs. Scotland soccer game in a pub where 90% of the crowd was wearing a kilt. We discovered that there may be a language even harder to understand than the Irish accent: Scottish. That night we went out for our last night in Dublin, to a carnival-themed club which served cotton candy for free. The next day we got on a bus and went to Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, where we would meet our last couchsurfing host, Mark.
 
is it Scotland or is it Ireland?
 
Mark was a super nice guy who had never hosted couchsurfers before, but was so into the idea of couchsurfing that he told his flatmate we were old friends in order to give us a free place to stay (he wasn’t so sure if his flatmate would be keen on the idea). Mark took a day off of work and drove us all the way to Connemara, over an hour away, so that we could see the castle there and see the beautiful western Ireland countryside.
 
Connemara castle

 

Irish countryside
 
After Galway I said goodbye to Kasey and Ryan and headed to the airport to fly to Madrid. I had a flight out of Lisbon 2 days later to go back to the US. and had originally planned to spend those 2 days in Lisbon, but that plan changed after spending time with Alina. After she left Dublin, we got to talking about when we could see each other again, and made the crazy decision to book a last minute flight and run off to Madrid for my last days in Europe. Somehow I found a way to spend 2 nights in Madrid and still get to Lisbon in time for my flight, via 2 blablacars and a train, stopping in Caceres to pick up my suitcase that I left at Matt’s house along the way, and we went for it. I’ll leave out the details, but it was the most amazingly romantic getaway that I ever could have hoped for. And the jamon iberico- absolutely orgasmic. I hope that someday the two of us will reunite.
 
Alina and I in Madrid

 

“me gusta jamon iberico,” said the Spanish person
 
The next thing I knew, I was landing in Boston to the smell of Dunkin Donuts and the sound of whiny American accents. After a year spent in 27 countries covering several thousand miles in buses, trains, ferries, airplanes, and cars with new friends from all over the world, doing everything from cooking a grilled cheese sandwich over lava on a glacier-capped volcano in Iceland, to skiing mountains that were once minefields in Bosnia, to being given full control to play with equipment worth more money than I’ll likely ever make while working in a lab in Germany, to the legendary hakuna matata parties in Darmstadt, to getting dumped by a long-term girlfriend but making the best of it by traveling longer, to playing with baby goats while working on a farm in Bulgaria, to meeting the nicest restaurant owners who picked us up and fed us a giant meal while hitchhiking into Albania, to getting a free hostel room in exchange for folding sheets and advertising and leading pub crawls in Tel Aviv, to understanding the meaning of transcendence at Israel’s Burning Man, to coming face to face with sting rays and lionfish 100ft underwater in Egypt, to never really liking Guinness but having a great time nonetheless in Ireland, to a last-minute decision to run off to Spain for a couple days with a new-found romance. A year spent traveling alone but never a single day spent actually being alone or without excitement. A year where I learned more about languages, cultures, perspectives, interactions, how to make friends, how to feel comfortable being myself, how to keep an open mind, how to find and connect with like-minded people, and how people live on this planet than I ever could have learned from any job or class in the world.
 
Inspired to enable others to travel too, I returned home to the land where drinking fountains flow freely, where public toilets exist solely for the reason of keeping piss off the streets rather than for making a profit, where I’m not the only one who says “awesome” and “dude”, where one can drive 3000 miles and people will still speak the same language, where unlimited Cholula is an option in college dining halls, where anyone can enjoy an abundance of oversized artery-clogging portions dripping in grease, where Ritz crackers can be readily slathered in EZ Cheeze, where weed laws are the most progressive in the world but healthcare laws are some of the worst, where republicans whine about gun laws and poor people, yet where productive talks about race, gender, sexuality, and general social justice are more common than just about anywhere else, where an incredibly diverse variety of people, cultures, and ecosystems live side by side, where pristine wilderness truly exists, where IPA gushes out of beer taps at craft breweries, and where really dank Mexican food is never far away.
 
So, readers, go traveling. Finish your college degree and go explore. Go alone. Don’t make a plan. Don’t book a return flight. Don’t take much money. Don’t feel like you need a career-path job right out of college, there will still be job openings next year and you’ll have a whole lot more valuable life experience under your belt. Don’t feel like you’re too poor, just go to a cheap country or use resources like workaway and helpx to travel for free. Face your fears and just go out there, you’ll be amazed at how quickly your fears disappear and how many incredible opportunities come your way. After all, YOLO.
 
 
1 year later