Kamis, 19 Juni 2008

Travelling for free

It was many years ago, around 1993. At the times I lived in Sydney, Australia- one of the nicest place to visit and live. As a student, no money in my pocket nor in my bank but my interest to see the other parts of the world was so strong. How could I travel to other countries to see those beautiful places with no enough money. 

As we all know, there's a will-there's a way. My school has a policy of sending students to conferences all over the world for free if the students got their paper accepted for the conference. Knowing this policy, I tried to find where I wanna go (I know it's not a proper way of thought :-) ) and try to find out whether there is a seminar, workshop or conference in that city which is  in the area of my study.

Having found out the conference then I started to spend my time writing paper for the conferences. It was very hard, I could barely write in Indonesian. Writing in English made me near mad ( I was mad actually :-) ). Thinking in Indonesian and then translating to English made me spending more time than i thought.

But It's worth trying. My papers brought me to US (DC, NY, TX, AZ, CA), Canada, New Zealand Zealand (and Rotorua), ENgland(London), France(Paris, Lyon, Chamberie), Switzerland(Geneve), Netherlands (Amsterdam, Den Haag), Malaysia (KL, Penang), and for sure Indonesia. This blog was created for this purpose. Trying to dig into my memory about the journey I made. Lots of  people I met, many places, interesting and sometimes sad things. I finally concluded that The World is so wonderful; it is too wonderful to miss. So be a traveler, see the world. Then you know that How Wonderful God must be!