Nothing special

This place will eventually be deleted, as I don't seem to care much and prefer my new site gaidal.com.
I'm also on Twitter as SwedishNomad and yeah there is really no need for this. Less is more. :)

OK, so...

Uh...

What?

I'll be 24 years old in 50+ more days.
Over 50 days. That's really a lot of time. I don't even have to be alive efficiently...
Not that it matters how old I am.

What am I doing.

2-3 weeks ago I thought that I maybe wanted to become some kind of engineer. I'm glad I didn't manage to convince myself!
I spent the last week helping with gardening/farming work at a school of... of... growing lots of different things together organically, each on a very small-scale, trying to mimic nature's ways. I'll just keep going there for now. I can go there without any experience or knowledge and just work as much as I feel like, and still be useful. It's amazing how those people are working *with* nature, and how relaxing it is to be there and be part of it. Doing 5-6 of physical work in that environment, it's really as if I'm getting it all back, or more than the energy I offered!
My parents grow some raspberries, blueberries and wild strawberries in their garden. It's just a few small bushes, but there are so many berries all the time I can't believe it. I can eat as much berries as I want, and it's perfectly sustainable because ripe berries need to be moved away for the young ones to grow. Even just taking the ripest ones, it's way more than I need and there's lots left for bugs and for reproduction. Exploitation-free! It's... much more than "getting food for free", which is just economics, it means belonging to a healthy eco-system for a moment.
Nature is so abundant just being the way it is. There shouldn't be a lack of anything. Yet when I go to a city, which is also really a humans' nest and part of nature too, I feel depleted. In just a few hours it's like "what am I doing here?". Maybe it's because I'm in a transformation phase, where I know I don't want the capitalist consumerist way of life, but am still not confident about how else to live. And if you go to any modern store, it's not like it's not designed to completely suck you in. And I'm sensitive.

"Get everything you need! You just need money. And it's necessary and normal and healthy for people to spend their lives working with things somebody else decides for you, so you should be doing that anyway. If you're better than others and useful to mankind you can be successful and get extra money and other people's attention and maybe love. And when you have excess money you'll free!"
Sry I'm already so free it hurts lol!!1oneone, I don't "need" anything, everything including eating and breathing is luxury; it's a gift, not earned or deserved! With time, I can learn to need less and less and less if I just want to. Do I need a heated/cooled placed to live? Do I need shampoo for my hair or does soap work? Do I need a deodorant or does vinegar work? Do I need to marry and/or settle down? Do I need to buy food or can I live from surplus? Do I need a certain community to belong to more than to others? I don't know! I am constantly looking for my own answers. I'm not doing whatever I'm doing because I don't want to work, I do want to use my body and mind and the energy that comes with my existence. I want to use it in the right direction though. It is not unimportant how you invest your time in existence. And it's not like sustainable ways of life are ever advertised, who would pay for that; you have to look for it yourself... look closely at everything. And you don't know if you're doing well or not at all, I might never know... :)

It's hard. Like, getting Apple's latest iPhone certainly is not sustainable, yet I want it. In order to justify that "investment", or sacrifice of natural resources, I want to try to manage without a laptop and sell it to someone else. Might let someone have camera, mp3 player et c as well as I won't need them. However, this doesn't change the hard fact that: I want to belong to the sustainable so much, yet I want unsustainable things from time to time.
Help. :(
One could argue that thinking so much about every purchase is sustainable. But it's not sustainable from the point of view of my long-term mental health.
Perhaps I just need to forgive myself and just do whatever? But if that's what everyone's doing, then the earth will... but what if I'll drive myself mad this way... but...

So yeah I'd really just like not to sit here but to go back to my school and spend a day picking weeds, planting things, harvest... It makes my mind silent, even more than sleeping or meditating. But I have a cold and am too dizzy to be out. And it's weekend anyway. :'(

By the way. According to some website (confirm for yourself), *all* train traffic in Sweden runs on renewable electricity. I was using an energy calculator to find out the prices for emissions trading, and it said "train within Sweden: 0.00 kg CO/km". Made me happy!
I have to add now though that I also read this:
Infinite, free energy is in itself not at all a solution for mankind's situation - it would lower prices, boosting the exploitation of all kinds of natural resources. Good point. I too used to believe infinite energy would kind of "solve everything".

Oh and by the way again. For some reason I miss the Chinese people so much and still feel like I will have to be there sooner or later. Right now I can't see how I can be in China without living in a monster city, and I want to be in nature, so it makes no sense at all. Time will solve everything.

I just walked the last 30 km, my very last part of Skåneleden - I'm done! 1050 km!
And I have new pictures which means I have to upload the old ones that I was going to upload and that means it's time to write a blog post.

The University Thing I had going: I thought way too much about it every day and then I went hiking and realized that I don't really want to do it. I was trying so hard to find a way to "become someone" the way I thought I had to, that I couldn't see that it was not something I would have enjoyed. Not until the beginning of this week. I met an old friend who's on his 4th year, and he told me that I don't really need to be admitted, but just attend classes and learn and pretty soon I'd be able to get in. And then I was like "OK let's do it then I... guess? Hmmmm... nah? Maybe... no. Not really, huh... No. No! Hey, wait, NO! What the, why have I been thinking for so long that I 'have to' do things like this? NEVER!". And just let it go around Tuesday and it was awesome and I haven't thought about it once since and that's nice.

Being sure that I wouldn't need my math books again, I took the opportunity to get rid of ALL MY BOOKS! I used to have 15 books in my parents' house, the ones I hadn't been able to part with before. Now I only have one and it'll be gone soon. I managed to sell my Japanese bow & arrows and clothes and everything related. I got rid of all old DVD discs and their case. Gave some clothes to a second-hand shop. Parted with most of the old letters I had been saving, and some other documents. Deleted lots of movies and music and stuff from my laptop, realizing that I can get such stuff anytime in this modern global world.
So much less stuff now! I'm getting closer to knowing exactly what I have. I congratulated myself for probably being down to under 20 kg, then one day later I realized that I still have my own... bicycle. So it's definitely over 20 kg in total.

Spent several full days learning about hammock camping on the internet. Ordered stuff from the US for ridiculous amounts of money. Will total at over $900, not counting the new backpack and other stuff I already got here in Sweden. Going to have to work soon. :P

( pix )

So, back in Sweden, and my impression of it changes every hour. I guess things I perceive about different places and cultures are all about myself in the end...?

In any case, during my third time in Japan I still felt as if under pressure. Pressure to work, perhaps. I'm not sure. I frequently felt less than enough, my thoughts were trying to find ways for me to "catch up" with things. My pulse was definitely higher, and although it could just have been the hot weather, I'm sure glad I didn't have to worry about my thyroid gland going wild this time.

Although China made me feel really happy for no reason, which is really the best way to be happy, it also scared the shit out of me, seeming like an exploding capitalist system way out of control.

I think every opinion I have of different countries is becoming obsolete. Having met the people in Japan and China that mattered most to me while I was living there, and then soon returning here to my relatives, I have started to understand better where I am coming from, why I was drawn to certain people, and how they have influenced my perspective much much more than I could see. I bet nothing I have experienced of this world is at all representative of its true nature! :)
And this seems to gradually unlock a kind of hope for this world that I never used to have.

Tomorrow morning I am going to Lund University after all, to see if someone will be missing or if they will take in extras. I don't know why but I have to see this to the end before I know what else to do. It's as if I am about to make a big choice about who to be in this world. I don't understand it. I honestly have no idea what I want, if I would even accept it or not. My mind is changing opinion every time I experience something, several times a day, so I know it's of no use here.
On one hand this might be the first I'm so strongly convinced that no matter what I do from now on it will be incredible, and at the same time it's like there was an important choice to be made, where I really mustn't fail, which is paradoxical. I can't see what this choice is about, as I as a matter of fact was not accepted in the final selection. Add the fact that, as I just said, can't use my mind at all.
Like, WHAT? I love and believe in this world and in mankind. It doesn't really matter what I do personally because I'm a just a very small man. What's the deal?

Perhaps my subconscious is trying to be smart, pressuring me to learn some universal concept that in the end has got nothing to do with my current life situation.

Live in Sweden or keep traveling? Enter the economic system or keep hiding from it? Settle down in a community or keep coming and going as a "stranger"? Try to find a place among the "normal", or choose the alternative path? I still have the feeling I'm choosing between things I don't even know what they are...

I'm back in Hakata, Fukuoka, where this adventure started.
I needed to do it to get some things out of my system. Outwardly there's been lots of randomness and interesting encounters with all kinds of people. Inside me it's been a bad-ass roller-coaster the whole time.
Still alive and breathing though.

As for me wanting to go to university in Sweden and study for 5 years to become and engineer... This is one way to look at it: I had had this in the back of my mind, that sooner or later I have to accept how society works and do something like this, and become something that people and I already know what it is. After having played along with this for a few months, if only inside my head, it now seems to be gone. I don't think I'm interested in "finding something I like working with and a place in society", or whatever it was, anymore.

What is it that I'm doing with my life, only wanting to deal the inner reasons for things I desire, and never caring what actually happens with my goals in the end? What is it supposed to lead to?
Sometimes I'm scared as hell of the growing void. :)

Anyway, flying back home to Sweden tomorrow morning.
Here are the pictures from Jiuzhaigou in northern Sichuan, China.
( China pictures )

I'm back in China! Hi China!
Sichuan might be the awesomest place ever.

I'm here with my Japanese parents, guiding them in my old home town Chengdu and around it. I was sure my Chinese would be so bad it wouldn't be of any use at all, and I was totally wrong. Outside China it kind of sucks, but here it just isn't a problem at all. I think I even worry less about Chinese than Japanese, which is not because my Japanese isn't way better, but because the relaxed Chinese atmosphere.

Not knowing what to do or where to go or what mattered at all, I had decided to spend this summer finding out what the "deal" with Japan and China is in my life.
I have now spent 6 weeks in Japan, understanding a few important things about what it means to me, for instance how I expected something from it subconsciously that doesn't exist. I then spent most of my time diving into uncomfortable feelings and memories, trying to come to terms with stuff. I think I did a little. I found new things that I like about Japan, and it was all like "well, alright, why not?" when I left.

Then I arrive to China. Hehe. Wow! Mm... Uh. There's immediately a new sense of fulfillment and completeness. It's like there is something warm in my chest, a new kind of knowledge that doesn't need to consider anything. I find it really amusing, having been searching for everything everywhere intellectually for so long. I guess I needed to think that there was a solution to find, and in this case that I had come up with something after India with this mathematics engineer plan. I felt that I had to do something, that my future and the stability and safety of my life could be "ensured" if I tried hard enough. Now it seems so shallow, considering and calculating and knowledge and that whole package is just an empty shell. Like, the mind is a tool to use *after* you know your direction, in order to get there...? I have been relying it solely on it, no wonder everything has felt so empty without... this! Whatever it is. Wonder if it will stay for a while, lol.

OK I'm being really corny now, yuck. Anyway. During my first night in China, my mind was obviously trying to solve this new problem, trying hard to compare the value of my new warm fuzzy feeling of completeness with my carefully calculated plan to make my life safe and stable in Lund/Sweden and tons of other stuff that "had to" be analyzed. But then I was like no stfu don't analyze it, it feels good right here right now, the actual outcome doesn't matter! Everything is good! Don't do anything! ("by the way, that way you also don't risk fooling yourself with feelings that might disappear tomorrow and doing something hasty and stupid again... so no conclusions at all, plz. Making conclusions is an insult to the quality of this feeling!")

I just checked the status of my university application and miraculously, I am *not* admitted! I am still "first reserve", I guess nobody refused...

So I'm really happy that I didn't rush to decide to change my plan and replace it with an equally empty "China plan", but just enjoyed the moment. It was a test for me to allow things to resolve themselves, and I feel much more satisfied this way. I won. I think that is the only way for foolish me to reach the next level. Right now I'm just so happy that... I am... happy? ish? And it's so awesome to be back here and I love my Chengdu friends and my millions of questions about cosmos and life and everything don't matter at all at the moment. I only have a few days left and I don't know what to do next and I love it here AND I won't do a shit about it! Because I have already tried solving life-situational problems so many times before and it only created new problems to solve. And after a few years of trying to adapt to circumstances I'm really really tired.

So I'm going to Jiuzhaigou tomorrow, now I'm in a hotel a few km outside it. It's supposed to be really stunning and it's kind of tricky to reach this location and stuff and it's cool to be here.

No big news.
My life is peaceful.

I'm back in my hometown Toyokawa where nothing major seems to have changed. It's hot as hell here. The most obvious things are a brand new computer with a 26" wide screen display, and the old TV has been replaced by a 42" flat screen. This reflects that trend in the world very well.

Me and my (Japanese) parents will go to Chengdu in China in two weeks.

Before that I'm going on some fireworks festivals with a friend, a barbecue party, and another festival.

Back in April this year I applied for a university program called "civilingenjör i teknisk matematik" which I think would be "Master of Science in Engineering - technical mathematics" (no confidence in that translation). I think I'll get in because it says I'm the first reserve. And if I do I think I'll give it a try at least.
I might have found a place to live for a few months but I don't really know.

I'm listening to an audio book by David Deida called The Way of the Superior Man. It's much less macho and stereotypical than things I've read and listened to so far and more interesting.

I need to start doing math exercises, I probably couldn't solve basic differential equations if my life depended on it!

I left my WWOOF family this morning and am now in Oita city, waiting for a ferry that will take me to Osaka. It leaves at 16:25 and arrives tomorrow morning - I hope it's somewhat comfortable so that I can sleep!

I'll summarize my first WWOOFing experience. I stayed with the family for nearly 2 weeks. Some highlights:

* I ate five times a day and there were lots of dishes every time for lunch and dinner, and they kept asking if it was really OK "only to eat vegetables" every single time.

* The family owns a huge chunk of land in the mountains since 400 years ago and the father and his mother manage it by themselves. They're very well connected and I was introduced to new people all the time, and also got to participate in several events such as making candles with elementary school kids, or a meeting about the "Cinderella Project", an upcoming event where they will try to bring local young men and women together and have them marry each other.

* One day I misunderstood my instructions and spent 4 hours destroying a part of somebody's shiitake mushroom plantage, believing it to be firewood. It took me and two others 3 hours to repair the damage and it's uncertain whether there will still be any mushrooms. If not they might have to pay 100,000-200,000 yen in two years when they find out.

* I helped pick, sort, pack and distribute thousands of green bell peppers. It seems like only old people still do agriculture in Japan, and I wonder who will provide food in 15 years. For instance, the three daughters in my WWOOF family had no interest whatsoever in that kind of thing. I myself am probably not the right person to change the trend since I tend to become lazy and try avoid this kind of work very soon and escape the present by doing ANY mental exercises instead: I learned the names and positions of all 47 prefectures in Japan, and did a fair amount of calculating and thinking in general during these two weeks. It's strange because physical work gives me better appetite and sleep and seems pretty balancing overall. But I am simply not used to doing ordinary useful things. I like to play. With my brain, mostly.

* I noticed how dull the youngest kids' free time was, consisting of lame TV and lame computer games. I download some classical SNES games that I could find in Japanese and set these up in their computer. It was so beautiful to see a 11 year old's fascination over the world of Zelda 3! I think I got that game at about the same age, and I realize how much all these little adventures meant to me! The way I perceive reality is definitely influenced by all those good games I grew up with. It's awesome that I was able to share such great culture with Japanese kids, it's like I'm paying it back, or forward. And kids are so smart - these girls had never heard of Super Nintendo before (too old) and within minutes they played with both hands instead of one, stunned enemies with the boomerang, defeated the first boss, and made it to the first dungeon.

* I also shared some of my rich personality by putting various unusual songs on the mp3 players in the cars. (In one car they had a USB mp3 player driven by the cigarette lighter, that had a short range FM transmitter which sent the music to the car radio. Coolness.)
Examples: Yoroshiku Kamen theme, Metronome, W, Onyanko Club, rap covers about WoW, and the pirate bay theme song. If I hadn't shared those songs, would they ever have made it to such a place?

* I was asked so many times what kind of Japanese food I like that I started to say random things such as cat meat tempura. And I realize more and more that no matter how awesome I think I am, saying things like that, speaking in WoW language and about math and what not with people who don't live in those worlds, perhaps most of them will not be inspired at all but just think I'm weird and avoid me and go on with their non-weird lives. Me being full of beautiful nonsense and no usefulness doesn't mean that people are waiting for me to convert them. Hm. Which is fine, it just makes it seem less useful to be useless.

Alright time out I don't know anymore, I'll go grab some curry rice now and find my ferry.

At this point I have absolutely no idea which country in the world I'd rather be in. When I think about it there's no opinion or feeling at all. It's probably all the same anyway. It will be so exciting to see what I think by the time I get result of my master plan that I have been working on since April.

Hello world!

That phrase makes me think of my intellectual/geek background. It's a world that seems very far away now that I'm working staying with and working for a Japanese farmer family!

Summary of the last few days: So, I was in Kagoshima on my way to another farm on that island near Okinawa, but realized that the ferry was so expensive that it would've been cheaper to stay in a hostel for 10 days than the "sleeping and eating for free in exchange for work" (= WWOOF), and it didn't make sense. I had just met a funny Japanese man who had been traveling for 18 months and was going to buy a train card that lets you travel as much as you want during one weekend for 10,000 yen and make a circle around Kyushu, and decided to join him for a day instead and then make it to another farm I had contacted before.
One of the places we ended up in was Sasebo on the west coast of Kyushu, a city full of young white guys from the US military; famous for having a flourishing hamburger culture. It's weird. What are they doing there, being my age, moving as if they were on duty, not seeming to know Japanese; and who's paying for it?
After Sasebo I said goodbye to my new friend and was going to go back to Kagoshima in the south because the hostel there had been so awesome. But instead I got tired and wanted to rest earlier so I got off in Kumamoto to find somewhere to stay. The best I found was a room twice the price in Kagoshima, in a minshuku run by a senile old lady. It was shabbier than anything I've seen in Japan and neither toilet nor shower worked properly and I met shabby Japanese salary men and talked about their lives and it was really interesting. In general Kumamoto was the trashiest part of Japan I've seen (sorry!). :)
The next day, yesterday, I got on the train going this way and got off half-way at a famous place called Aso. I don't know what's good about it, I guess it has beautiful scenery and famous hot springs and spas and hotels. To me it was a dying village, with lots of tourist business but no local life at all. When I decided I move on there was still 2 hours so I slept for a while at the station, and then met a group of 5 young Chinese who are apparently visiting Japan for a year through work. One of the girls was pretty cute and spoke some Japanese. I might go visit them in Kokura after my stay here.

Then I came to the farm where I am now and where I will stay for 2 weeks. It's run by a couple, their 3 daughters who call me elder brother, their grandmother who makes great food and constantly apologizes about not being able to provide anything better since I'm a vegetarian, and two cats of which one is like old and retired and one a crazy playful deadly hunter killer.
I don't know where to start telling about everything I learned about this place today, so I'll save that for later or probably skip all of it except this:
The family has owned this land for 400 years and seems very well connected to the local community, which I have already seen several different parts of and been introduced to. I just attended a meeting the town council had about an upcoming event that will attempt to help young local people to meet each other in order to marry. All in all it has been really interesting. And now it's too late and I'm going to work tomorrow but there is no time to be on the internet when people are awake!

OK, here is a tiny selection from my ( pictures )

Until yesterday I was staying with a couchsurfer in a small north Kyushu. She asked me how much I had payed for my train ticket from Fukuoka to her place and I told her: 5250 yen = ~55 USD for a two hour ride. Reply to comment on my last post: Yes local trains are cheap. Others are ridiculously expensive if you don't get a round trip or something.

The original reason I went to see this couchsurfer was because I was going to WWOOF on a farm near her place, but I had a kind of misunderstanding with those people and I decided to go to another farm down in Kagoshima, at the southern end of Kyushu island. After they agreed to let me stay there they sent me their address and I realized it's on a tiny island almost all the way to Okinawa, 15 hours by ferry from Kagoshima. That's not what I wanted. But alright then!
Anyway, this is what I was doing in Oita-ken.

So anyway, this girl told me that I would have to spend crazy amounts of money traveling like this (by train) and that I should hitchhike like some of her friends, because that's something that works really well in Japan apparently. I thought of changing my plans for the next day and try that instead, it seemed totally unreasonable considering the distance and things that could go wrong, and then I had to do it because it seemed so wild and exciting.

DETAILED STORY OF 13 HOURS OF HITCHHIKING FOLLOWS:
So last night I got myself a small whiteboard and a marker from a 100 yen shop, and the couchsurfing girl dropped me off near a major road on her way to work this morning. I wrote TOWARDS THE SOUTH with three big Japanese letters, held out my sign and my thumb and waited. First car picked me up after 40 minutes. It was a guy, 23 years old like me and very polite and tidy, who was on his way to watch Terminator 4 on his day off work. Alone, since he didn't have a girlfriend yet he told me. He was just going to Oita, maybe 15 minutes away, but went through the whole city for me and dropped me off on the other side.
I found a new place and after waiting for 30 minutes a 42 year old man picked me up. He told me he's only going a few kilometers in that direction and later I realized he didn't even need to go there but was doing this just for fun. He shared with me that he'd just confessed to a woman and got turned down. I asked what he had said; he had asked if she had a husband and she had replied "sumimasen" and then run away.
After trying for 30 minutes more without getting picked up, I walked to a Lawson store further down the road to confirm that I was standing on the right side of the road. It was already past 11 and I hadn't really gotten anywhere, hundreds of cars had refused to pick me up and I was hungry and thirsty. I had 300 kilometers left and 5-6 hours, this was not going well at all although it was really interesting. I got myself water, an anpan and an onigiri at Lawson and went back to the road. After 30 seconds a man dressed like your average homeless in Sweden came out and asked where I was going, and told me he was going halfway to Miyazaki and that one of my kanji characters was wrong! I said I would like to go with him even if he was going to that place in the middle of nowhere, because it looked like it would at least be along the main route. He then told me to wait for him to change car I was like what??? I waited until he got back and got on. Then, after driving 10 meters he asked if I was interested in Japanese tea-something-something, I said "uh? yeah I guess maybe?" and he turned the car around and parked at his home, which was on the other side of the street from Lawson! Aha. He ran inside and came out with a bowl, a bag of macha-tea, and the thing you need to prepare it and gave it to me as a gift. Sure, uh, thanks.
Hm.
We got going, I tried to be very polite first with proper Japanese, try to think of topics to talk about, offer some snacks I had brought and so on. It felt pretty awkward but I gradually got more relaxed and dropped the honorific Japanese after he told me that it's totally unnecessary and only some boring people care about it at workplaces and such. We then started having some really interesting conversations about everything.
We got to a place with a huge statue of a Japanese princess standing in the mountains, rising above the forest, and he suddenly turned to take me to its accompanying Buddhist temple. It was a beautiful place and I would never have found it otherwise. However I then hinted to my driver that I needed to be in Kagoshima before 5 pm to catch a ferry or I would have no idea what to do, and he was like hm I wonder how you can get you there on time and decided to drive those 150 or 200 extra kilometers for me. I didn't understand this at first because it was of course unreasonable, but realized later along the way. I said that this wouldn't happen in Sweden, and he told me that well, a Japanese salary man couldn't do it either. I gradually found out that he was unemployed at the moment, seemingly surviving on whatever came his way, plumbing and selling miso and whatever.
On the way to Kagoshima he refused to let me pay for lunch and fees for entering the highway, totaling at 4,000 yen or so. We arrived in Kagoshima half an hour after the ferry had left, and spent 90 minutes or so driving between the mostly closed ports, trying to get information. We went back and forth and asked 15 people and I was totally helpless. I hadn't asked for all this and didn't know if I should try to be more responsible and suggest that I try to manage on my own or... But it didn't make sense because I wouldn't know what to do then and we both knew that so I shut up. There wasn't another ferry tonight so I am now stranded in Kagoshima. At about 8 pm it was dark and we went around the city looking for a cheap place to stay. There were no parking lots so I went to a place to check prices while he drove in circles, I left all my stuff in the car including passport and I didn't even know his name. I hesitated for a second which is probably reasonable under the circumstances, but he came back of course. We then said good bye, I said thanks, got my stuff and went to the internet café I had found. Apparently he was then going to keep driving to the west side of Kyushu to a place where they have some exotic kind of miso... I didn't quite get that part.

WHAT'S GOING ON RIGHT NOW:
I have called my farm on the island and apparently there's no ferry tomorrow, the next one is the night the day after tomorrow which means I'm stuck here for two whole days. I'm at an internet café which I need to describe further with some ( pictures )