Travels after Exchange Semester 2014 pt. 3

The 21^st of January 2015 at 13:10, Denmark

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 5-8 minutes)

Hong Kong

3rd: I had found an awesome guide for Hong Kong by a guy who has traveled pretty much anywhere in the world and found all the underground places to see and eat. So I decided to follow his guide. His guides can be found at www.nomadicmatt.com. He recommended me staying at Chungking Mansion, which supposedly was the cheapest place to stay in Hong Kong and great for young backpackers. I checked in at one of the many guesthouses in the building, Canadian Hostel. Interestingly it was run by several Indian guys. I had forgotten my shoes in Thailand, and apparently Hong Kong was a bit more north than I had expected, and thus it was also colder. So I only had my flip flops. Still it was somewhere between 15 and 22 degrees, but I think I was the only one wearing only flip flop, jeans, and a sweater. So I needed some shoes. I went to a local market called Ladies Market. It is a bargaining market, so I didn’t want to buy anything the first day until I knew more about the price level in Hong Kong.

4^th:  I began my day with a trip to Ngong Ping 360, which is a cable car that takes you to the top of a mountain with amazing nature and a beautiful view over the landscape. On the top you also find Po Lin Monastery, a monastery for monks, and Tian Tan, a huge Buddha statue. It was an awesome trip and highly recommendable.

At night I browsed more markets: Chun Yeung Street Market (food market), Temple Street Night Market, and Ladies Market to look for more clothing, shoes, and other stuff.

5^th: I began the day with a trip to the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery, and what an amazing but long walk. A you walk and climb the many stairs you are surrounded by thousands of buddhas on both sides. When you finally make it to the top there are several small temples and building and statues with other Buddha structures. One of the temples must have had 10.000 buddhas inside (perhaps that’s the reason for the name of the temple).

Afterwards I went to Hong Kong Heritage Museum (where 1/3 of the top floor was dedicated to Bruce Lee), Che Kung Temple, Hong Kong Museum of History, took a stroll through Kowloon Park before making it to Mr. Wong, a restaurant Nomadic Matt had recommended n his guide. Mr. Wong himself greeted me and guessed I was from Denmark before I even opened my mouth. It was an all-you-can-eat-and-drink restaurant for 60 HKD (50 DKK). He sat down at my table asking me what I wanted. I didn’t quite know how it worked here at the restaurant, so he asked: ‘You like broccoli? And fish?” and some other things. I thought he would prepare it all in one dish, but no. He came in with a big plate with 15-20 spring rolls, dumplings and things like that, a full plate with fried rice, a full plate with broccoli topped with cashew nuts, and a full plate with sweet and sour fish with onions and a few other vegetables. Wow, that was a lot! So I sat there alone with 4 full plates in front of me. Honestly each of the plates was the size of a normal meal, so it was quite a challenge to finish it all. But needless to say I succeeded although I had to open the button on my pants halfway through!

After Mr. Wong I went to see a Symphony of Lights, a light show they put on every day at 8 pm between two of the islands in Hong Kong. After that I took the Star Ferry across the water to Hong Kong Island and had a magnificent view of the Hong Kong skyline. I walked around in the financial district on Hong Kong Island and looked at the huge buildings. It was amazing to see and it reminded me a lot more of New York than China. Upon returning I took a stroll through the Avenue of Star, Hong Kong’s Hollywood Boulevard.

6^th: Before I made it to Mr. Wong yesterday I had passed a shoe store and actually bought a pair of nice dress shoes as I couldn’t board the plane night wearing only flip flops and arrive in Prague with freezing temperatures. So I put on my new shoes and threw out my flip flops before checking out of my accommodation.

I began the day with breakfast/lunch at a Chinese Michelin restaurant where I had the most amazing dim sum I have ever had. Especially the baked buns with BBQ pork inside were delicious! Afterwards I took a ride in the Peak Tram, an old train, which took me up an incredibly steep angle to the top of a mountain on Hong Kong Island with a stunning view over Hong Kong and its beautiful skyline, which in fact was voted even better than the skyline of New York.

After enjoying the view I continued walking up the mountain to Victoria Peak Garden. My new shoes weren’t made for walking and already now my right shoe started hurting a little bit. Before riding the Peak Tram down the mountain again I noticed a restaurant I remembered Matt had written about called Mak’s Noodles. It was a former Michelin restaurant and although I wasn’t the slightest hungry I figured I  wouldn’t turn down my last chance to have a Michelin meal in Hong Kong, so I had my second Michelin restaurant visit that day. Afterwards I went to Honk Kong Park, took a stroll through Jardin’s Bazaar Street to look at the street food and some markets, and continued to Victoria Park. By now my shoes really started hurting. It was nice dress shoes and they were quite hard and stiff. Not only did the right shoe squeeze my right little toe, but because they were so hard, my feet were all sore from all the walking. Every step I took hurt more and more and I found myself walking around with fisted hands to convert the pain in my feet. Every step felt like an eternity. At one point I was about to just screw it all and go to the airport 5 hours before my flight so I could get my shoes off. But on the other hand I would regret it later if I didn’t see the last few things on my list. So I continued with hurting feet and fisted hands. I wanted to go to Kowloon West Promenade and take a short tour there. It was difficult to enjoy as most of my focus was on my feet. It turned out this walk was quite a bit longer than I had expected and when I was back I hurried down in the subway and rested my feet for 2 stops. I then suffered all the way to Mr. Wong again. I wanted to have another great meal here. And sure enough this time was no different! He came in with a soup, spring rolls and other baked things, broccoli, noodles with pork, and a plate with chicken and vegetables. Puh! This time was much harder than yesterday, and I had to take a pause in the middle, but I finished it once again except for some of the spring rolls.

I then passed through the Ladies market and purchased a briefcase, which later turned out to be 1-1½ cm too small for my laptop. Damn! I then picked up my backpack and went to the airport to catch my 11 pm flight! And oh boy, what a relief it was to get off my shoes while waiting at the gate, not to mention the 11½-hour-flight to Istanbul before continuing to Prague.

I had a layover in Istanbul, and it was freezing. When taking the bus to the plane I looked around and I think I must have been the only person not wearing a jacket and most other people were even wearing gloves and hats. Needless to say, I was freezing a lot.

Prague

(continued on the 5^th of February 2015 at 11:45, Denmark)

7^th: The reason for my trip to Prague was to visit Iben, my girlfriend, whom I hadn’t seen since July. After arriving in Prague I took a bus to her work and met her, and then she followed me back home to her place during her lunch break. I then had some time to relax before she would return again after work, where we would be going out for dinner at a local restaurant.

8th: While Iben was at work the whole day I slept a little longer, did some laundry, and went shopping. Then when she returned later in the evening we took a tram to the city and saw the powder tower on our way to a local restaurant I had found and wanted to try. Afterwards we walked through the city to the Old Town Square and passed the famous astronomical clock and the Church of Our Lady before Týn.

9^th: Iben took a day off and so we went for brunch at a nice restaurant she had previously visited. We then headed towards the National Gallery where they had an exhibition of Alfons Mucha‘s 20 huge wall paintings inspired by the Slavic mythology and the history of the Czech nation. Afterward we headed back towards the city and had dinner at a restaurant.

10^th: We began the big sightseeing day with a visit to the John Lennon wall followed by an early lunch. We then continued to Prague Castle and Cathedral and walked around the beautiful parks and admired the sights. We then later crossed the Charles Bridge and took a photo in front of the statue of Charles before walking through the city center once again.

In the evening two of Iben’s friends from her Czech language class were celebrating their birthdays and they had invited me as well. So we were a total of 7 people who met at a Mexican restaurant and had an awesome dinner with drinks before continuing to a bar for another drink. It was super fun and great to meet her friends as well.

11^th: On my last day in Prague Iben and I went to Vysehrad, which featured an old cathedral and a cemetery located on top of a big hill as an old fortress. It was super beautiful with an amazing view over the city and the river. Iben and two of her friends have a weekly bouldering day. I wanted to try it, so we met up with Anders and Marcela In the afternoon for two hours of indoor bouldering. It was super fun and quite exhausting for the hands and arms. We ended the session with a beer and then Iben and I continued to a traditional Czech restaurant for our final dinner before I would be flying back the following morning.

12^th: Iben and I had to leave the apartment at the same time, and so when she had to get off the subway we had ourbig goodbye, and then I continued to the airport.

Copenhagen

12^th: Upon arriving in Copenhagen my mom was there to pick me up. It was great seeing her again, and now my very long trip had come to an end.

I left Denmark on the 2^nd of July 2014 and returned again on the 12^th of January 2015 – a total of 6 months and 10 days. During this period I boarded a total of 21 flights or a plane every 9 days and visited 6 different countries (some of them two times). An amazing trip had ended and now I could look forward to my next one.

Travels after Exchange Semester 2014 Pt. 2

The 21^st of January 2015 at 13:10, Denmark

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 10 minutes)

Singapore

15^th: After checking in at our hostel which cost us 8 AUD per night we took a walk around the neighborhood. Remy had a friend in Singapore, so he was staying there. Unfortunately we didn’t see him after this as he was traveling to the US a few days later.

16^th: We began the day with a long walk through the park called MacRitchie where we did the tree top walk. It was a rainforest with wild monkeys and lizards. It was long but awesome walk.

In the evening we met up with SQ, a Singaporean guy from Couchsurfing, who had agreed to show us around in Singapore since he couldn’t host us. So he showed us Singapore as a local person. He took us to classic Singaporean restaurants and told us about the history of the country etc. At night we went to Gardens by the Bay, a huge area filled with amazing gardens and green life. They were still building it and it is almost done, and they have spent several billion dollars on the project. It is stunning to experience. There were also a few domes with different plants. One of them even features a big waterfall. Amazing!

17^th: Sindre had had problems with his credit card since we arrived in Singapore. He hadn’t been able to withdraw cash from ATMs, so instead I had paid for his expenses until we would arrive in Thailand where his credit card hopefully would work again. Sindre and I wanted to go to Universal Studios on Sentosa Island, and they had a discount if we ordered tickets online. Apparently it wasn’t only the ATMs that rejected Sindre’s card, the website did as well. Then I tried to order online. But because I had lost my Danish SIM card for my phone I could not receive the SMS with the code I needed to authorize the purchase. So the only option was to go to the park and pay the full price. As we were approaching Universal Studios our mood got better and better as we were looking forward to getting in. We stood in line and when it was our turn to pay for the entrance they said my card was rejected as well. I couldn’t understand this, so we tried 2 more times, but still it was rejected. I knew the PIN was correct and there were sufficient funds. Well, what to do? We then went to some ATMs and both of us tried all the ATM with our credit cards, but both our cards were rejected with different messages on the screen. Well now we were really screwed. But the weird thing was that I had used my credit card the day before buying water at 7-11 and a sandwich from Subway. Our chances of getting in at Universal Studios looked pretty slim now. We decided to then get some breakfast and see if my card would work in the restaurant. We found a former Chinese Michelin restaurant where we had an awesome breakfast (lunch) with dumplings, noodles and much more. When we were done I handed in my credit card waiting for the exciting news… But no, rejected. I then had to spend 50 SGD (225 DKK) out of the 80 SGD I had in total. So now we had almost 30 SGD for the both of us for the rest of the day.

We didn’t want our bad experiences until now affects the rest of our day, so what could we do? We decided to tour around Sentosa Island and take heaps of fun photos and just explore the island. We did have a great time and we got lots of weird looks from people.

In the evening we met up with the girls and SQ again. He then took us to Marina Bay Sands, the iconic luxurious hotel in Singapore shaped like a ship on 3 pillars. It is the hotel where they have an infinity pool on the roof, where it looks just like you will fall down from the building if you climb over the edge of the pool. Unfortunately you have to be a guest to use the pool, but instead we went to the roof top bar Ku Dé Ta where we had 30 SGD drinks while overlooking the Singapore skyline. You could also see Indonesia from here.

Afterwards SQ took us down to see the Marina Bay Sands water and light show. It was absolutely amazing to see. I hadn’t seen this type of art before. There were hundreds of lights and several projectors lighting up a surface of water and steam. It looked magnificent and it was amazing how clear the images and pictures actually were.

We ended the evening by walked around the city, crossing Helix Bridge, a bridge formed like DNA structure, and took pictures next to the Merlion, Singapore’s mascot, before saying goodbye to SQ.

18^th: The last day we spent just walking around the city seeing some more tourist attractions and some markets before going to the airport in the eveing.

Thailand

18^th: Upon arriving in Phuket, Thailand, we met Ann, who was a Thai person that had spent a year abroad at Dina’s house in Germany. So she picked us up from the airport and had arranged accommodation for us for the first 4 nights. Amazing!

19^th: We walked around Phuket and got some traditional Thai food from several Thai street kitchens. It’s amazing how such a small mobile kitchen can make such great food! Honestly, I think that it is much better than the restaurants and it’s far cheaper. Where else can you get a full meal for as little as 30 THB (6 DKK)?

20^th: Dina had arranged a rafting, elephant, ATV, and zip line tour. So we had 30 minutes of rafting, 30 minutes of elephant trekking, riding a long zip line, and ended with a 30-minute-tour on ATV. All for the price of just 1600 THB (275 DKK). You just cannot compare that with anywhere else in Europe! It was interesting to experience the rafting in Thailand versus rafting in Australia. In Australia we watched a security video of 20 minutes and then we spent another 20 minutes talking about safety and how and what to do when rafting to make sure everyone was safe and had a great time. In Thailand on the other hand we just sat down in the boat without any form of instructions on what to do and what not to do, and then we began our rafting trip. Fortunately the guides were very skilled although it was 2 boys aged less than 14. For sure that would not have been okay in Australia! But hey, it’s Thailand. At least they provided us with life jackets that almost fitted and probably didn’t work.

21^st: Day trip to Phi Phi Island with snorkeling. The trip itself was delayed already before we started. And once we had snorkeled before arriving at Phi Phi we had our lunch buffet. And then we had 45 minutes to explore the island and be back on the boat again. In 45 minutes you almost cannot make it further away from the pier than all the tourist shops, so we didn’t see anything on the island except the beach, which by the way was way better back in July. Upon returning to Phuket we met up with Ann at a local market and had some more street food.

22^nd: We left Phuket and set sails toward Koh Samui, an island, about 9 hours north east. We checked in at a guesthouse, which turned out to be right in the middle of a party street. So the loud music from downstairs and the surrounding bars blasted the whole night until 4 or 5 am. Needless to say we didn’t sleep much.

23^rd: Sindre and I spent most of the day together doing laundry and also getting an oil massage from one of the many massage places. At night Sindre and I went out to some bars, and of course we got tricked in some of the tourist traps. Let’s just say, what turned out to be a cheap happy hour drink suddenly became quite expensive. When 4-6 girls in bikinis all working in the bar come over to your table and start playing games with you for drinks from the bar just because you like 2 Scandinavian guys, you know you are entering hostile territory! Of course we lost most of the games (4 in a row and pool), and had to buy expensive shots for everyone. After a while we continued our pub crawl to Ark bar where we shared a 5 L beer tower, which caused our memories not to function at optimal capacity, and so we lost each other for the rest of the night.

24^th: We moved to another place on the beach. We went to a beach to shot a Christmas video. In the evening we walked along the beach to find a local restaurant where we had our Christmas dinner. They don’t celebrate Christmas in Thailand, so it was rather difficult to find some traditional Christmas food. But I did get my duck although this time it was in the form of a spicy red curry. Afterwards we found a Christmas tree where we gave our secret Santa presents to each other. I gave some clothes to Sindre, and from Sindre I received a coconut massage – mhm! (Not from him).

25^th: There were supposed to be a big party on Koh Phangan, another island 1 hour north of Samui, so we left Samui. Koh Phangan is best known for its full moon parties although it wasn’t full moon this day. But we went to another huge party on the beach in the south east. We had buckets and balloons with laughing gas. It was great fun. I wasn’t feeling too good, so I decided to go home a bit early. I started walking and I couldn’t find the main road, so I ended up in nowhere taking some stairs that were barely visible because plants had grown all over the stairs. I doubted it was the right way, but I had walked so much, so now I was pot committed, as you say in poker. I made it to the top of the stairs in my flip flops. Everything was almost completely dark, and all of a sudden I found myself standing on a huge cactus! I took a few careful steps and decided to face my mistake. As I turned around I looked at the sky and it is clear that a storm was coming. I could see a very clear water line in the skies and it was coming closer at high speeds. It took less than 10 seconds and I was hit by an enormous amount of rain while I tried to step over the cactus once again. I was soaking wet within 20 seconds and I had to fight my way down the stairs again and all the way back in that unbelievable rainy weather. Long story short, I was freeing and finally found a taxi that could take me all the way home.

26^th: We moved to another place to stay for 2 nights in bungalows. The quality turned out to extremely bad. As Sindre and I entered our bungalow there was a giant lizard in the bathroom. I went to the reception to ask if they could get it out somehow. The Thai person just looked at us and smilingly said: ‘It’s okay’. Not much help to find here. Fortunately it was gone later in the evening.

27^th: We rented scooters and drove around the island until the girls’ scooter punctured. When we finally got it fixed it started raining like crazy, so we hurried back home.

28^th: We continued our travels to another island, Koh Tao.

29^th: We rented scooters and drove around the island to the various beaches, lookout points, and attractions. The roads were very bad and as soon as you left the main road the roads very extremely hilly. So the scooter could barely transport Sindre’s and my own combined weight of 150 kg of iron steel. Even if we held the gas at maximum we were going up the steep hills with only 5-7 km/h. A few times we actually stopped and I had to jump off and push his and the scooter up. We had a few of these rides in the evening as well when it was dark. It was pretty crazy and quite dangerous as the scooter almost couldn’t break down the steep hills with both of us on it at the same time.

30^th: We left Koh Tao and headed towards Bangkok and arrived after almost 12 hours of transportation before checking in at a hostel that cost us 280 THB for 3 nights (50 DKK).

31st: We began the day with a breakfast meal for 20 THB (3,5 DKK) and then headed to Wat Saket, the Golden Mount, one of the many temples in Bangkok.

The big New Year celebration was taking place at Central World at Siam Square, so we went there. There were tens of thousands of people all gather at the big area to see the countdown for 2015. In classic Thai style there were two clocks counting down from 300 seconds and of course they were 7 seconds apart. At 00:00 people celebrated and the fireworks began. It lasted 5 minutes and ended as quickly as it began. I looked at the clock as most people were trying to leave the place again and it said 00:06. It was the shortest New Year celebration I had ever participated in. I didn’t know where everybody was going, but it didn’t seem like there was much going on, so we walked all the way home stopping at a restaurant to get some food.

1^st of January 2015: I checked out from the cheap hostel and checked in at a proper hotel as the others were checking out tomorrow morning anyway. We then went to Patpong, Bangkok’s red light districts that featured a lot of markets, shops, and brothels, and several female shows you wouldn’t want to see in a million years!

2^nd: Day tour to 3 floating markets around Bangkok where we bought lots of food at all the markets and I had 4 sticky mangos with rice, a traditional Thai dessert. Madara, Dina and Sindre were heading to the airport in the evening, so we had our big goodbye time.

Travels After Exchange Semester 2014 Pt. 1

The 21^st of January 2015 at 13:10, Denmark

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 10-15 minutes)

Leaving Sydney

On the 2^nd of December I was about to begin my 40 days of traveling after my exchange semester in Sydney had ended. Back in October I had met some other exchange students who had already planned a long trip, which I found very interesting. So after a few travel meetings with them I decided to join the majority of their trip. In total we would be 5 people, a Latvian (Madara) and German (Dina) girl, a Norwegian (Sindre) and French (Remy) guy, and of course myself from Denmark. We were a very diverse group so to speak. The trip looked like this:

• 2^nd – 6^th of Dec.: Auckland and Rotorua, Northern Island of New Zealand
• 6^th – 10^th of Dec.: Gold Coast, Australia east coast
• 10^th – 14^th of Dec.: Cairns, Australia, north east
• 15^th – 18^th of Dec.: Singapore
• 18^th – 3^rd of Jan: Thailand. Starting at Phuket, moving north east to the islands, and then Bangkok.

Ironically, I had already done most of this trip. I had visited Gold Coast twice already, Cairns during my spring break, and the 2 weeks in Thailand was almost an exact replica of the 2 weeks I spent in Thailand in the beginning of July.

After this I would say goodbye to the others and continue my own way back to Europe:

• 3^rd – 6^th of Jan.: Hong Kong, China
• 6^th – 12^th of Jan.: Prague, Czech Republic
• 12^th of Jan.: Returning to Copenhagen, Denmark

There trip in itself was amazing with tons of fantastic experiences. In order for the blog not to become too long, I will only highlight the biggest experiences at the various destinations.

Auckland & Rotorua, New Zealand

2^nd of Dec.: After meeting the others in Auckland, we rented a car for the 4 days as we would have a bit of driving to do over the 4 days.

3^rd: Muriwai and the Gannet Colony (Gannet is a bird, in Danish called ‘Sule’). The sand at the seemingly infinity beach was dark from the volcano activities. There were cliffs and rock in the water, beautiful blue sky, and thousands of gannets sitting on the grassy areas on the cliffs. It was an amazing sight and beautiful surroundings.

Afterwards we took a 3-hour-drive to Hot Water Beach – a beach where if you dig maybe a meter down in the sand you have hot natural water coming out the ground. Apparently you have to be there early in the morning or late in the evening, so we didn’t get to experience that.

Then we continued to Cathedral Cove. After parking the car on top of a smaller hill we walked around 45 minutes through beautiful nature down to Cathedral Cove. The pictures speak for themselves. It was a fantastic and small area well hidden from everything.

4^th: After checking out of our accommodation in Auckland we set our sails for Rotorua about 3 hours south east of Auckland. But first we did a stop at Mt. Eden – a volcano in the middle of the city. I had assumed the volcano to be a huge mountain outside the city, so honestly I was a bit disappointed when I found out it was in the middle of the city and only 196 meters above sea level. But even more interesting, it was an inverted mountain. So instead of a mountain top there was a big crater.’

Rotorua is known for its geothermal activity and features geysers and a lot of mud pools. After arriving we took a walk through a garden where we saw several mud pools and geothermal activity. There were natural hot pools, steam coming out of the ground, hot stones, beautiful natural colors in nature, and a lot of smoke and rotten egg smell everywhere.

In the evening there were some Maori, indigenous people of New Zealand, at our hostel who told us about their traditions and life as a Maori. It was very interesting to hear something about another culture I had never met before and barely knew anything about.

5^th: In the morning we drove to Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland. It is an iconic geothermal attraction featuring many hot springs noted for their amazingly colorful appearance, mud pools, and the Lady Knox Geyser. We started with the Lady Know Geyser which was scheduled to go off at 10 am. It turned out that the put some natural soup in it to make it go off, so it wasn’t all natural.

Afterwards we continued to the Wai-O-Tapu park itself and walked the several kilometers around the colorful nature and hot pools and springs. I have never seen such powerful colors or this sort of combination of colors in nature before. It was fantastic to experience. And even though it looks amazing on the pictures they are only a poor substitute for the real experience.

Following Wai-O-Tapu we stopped at a redwoods forest on our way back home. We had walked a long time already, so we took a short route through the forest and saw the enormous trees.

6^th: We left Rotorua early morning so Sindre, Remy and I would have enough time for a visit at Hobbiton, the actual location where they filmed The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Although I don’t consider myself a fan, it was a fabulous experience to see the movie set. After a short bus ride through classic New Zealand nature with hills on top of hills covered in bright verdant grassy areas and thousands of sheep running around we made it to Hobbiton. Everything was kept exactly as in the movies and the guide told us different stories and fun and interesting facts about the place, the movies and other things. Nearly 100% of the plants and trees are living greens, however all the hobbit houses are just a façade. There are nothing inside the houses except just enough room to stand inside and close the door, so that in the movie it looks just like a house. So all the scenes inside the hobbit houses are filmed at a studio. Another interesting fact is the illusion of the relative sizes of a hobbit and Gandalf, the very tall wizard in the movie. What they did was that they filmed Gandalf in front of a small hobbit house and door while they filmed the hobbits in front of a bigger hobbit house and door. This coupled with a special lens for the camera created the illusion that Gandalf appears much taller than the hobbits (unless the hobbits were actually kids in costumes when they were being filmed from the back).

The final interesting fact I will mention is how Peter Jackson, the instructor, and his team tried to create the exact environment described in the books. This meant everything from the fruits on the trees to the curvatures of the tree branches and much more. So with several of the trees they had branches imported from England, which they then somehow attached to the trunk of the trees. Sometimes they also had to take down the original fruits from the trees (say, blooms) and instead attach other types of fruit (say, pears), or perhaps they attached leaves from a different sort of tree. What an incredible amount of work and time that must have taken! Also, the huge and characteristic tree on top of Bilbo’s house in the movies is completely fake. They couldn’t find a suitable tree that would fit on top of his house, so instead they had a fake tree made. It consists of 7-10 big pieces put together and then they later attached more than 250.000 leaves on the tree! It looks spectacular and you wouldn’t have any clue it was fake unless someone told you. It is however a slightly different green than the other trees and it doesn’t sway in the wind in the same way as the others.

In the afternoon we continued to the airport and flew back to Australia to Gold Coast.

Gold Coast, Australia

6^th: Madara and Dina had been looking for couchsurfing at the various destinations we were traveling to. Couchsurfing is a website where people can put their home up if they are willing to host other people for a period of time. Typically the host provides a couch for the visitor(s) to sleep on for free. It is a smart concept, however, it wasn’t something I thought I would ever use. I like to know that I am going to stay at a place that can provide the amenities I like, such as a bed and a minimum cleaning standard. Just small things like that, which I am willing to pay extra for (or in this case, just pay for). But the girls had found this place for the 3 of us while Sindre and Remy were staying at a hostel. When we arrived at the apartment we met the host and 3 other girls who apparently were also couchsurfing at the same place as us. Brett, our host, was living in a moderate sized apartment with 2 bedrooms and now he had 6 couchsurfers on top of that. Already my fears were being confirmed. So Brett’s roommate gave up his room so Madara, Dina, and I could sleep in there. At the same time he would share the couch with the 3 other girls. And of course we just slept in his dirty bed with his old sheets. And they didn’t really have any blankets or pillows other than the used ones on the bed. The drop that broke the camel’s back was the following day when he mentioned that he recently had had lice, but it should be all gone now. And we just slept in his bed last night without him mentioning it or providing us with clean sheets or anything. After that I knew this probably was my last couchsurfing experience. The following night I slept on the couch and the last 2 nights I stayed at the hostel with the other guys.

7^th: Gold Coast was much more relaxing than New Zealand, so we spend the day on the beach, playing pool and going for dinner.

8^th: We rented surf boards and spend a few hours surfing the powerful waves at Surfers Paradise. There was an amazingly strong current, so in just a few minutes you would end up 30-50 meters away from where you started. In the evening 2 other Danish girls (Laura and Kristina) met Remy, Sindre, and I. They had been staying in the same house as Remy in Sydney and I had met them several times before as well. We then went to their hostel and met some other people and played some drinking games with them before going out partying at a club called Sin City. It was a very fancy club in which the girls working there were only wearing bikinis. We partied most of the night and had a great time. Afterwards I went to the hostel where the guys were staying. They were sleeping in a 20 person dorm room, and there were beds available so I just took a bed and stayed there for the night.

9^th: After spending the afternoon at the beach, the life guards closed the beach because of the coming storm and thunder. And what a weather! Massive raindrops fell at very high speeds while thunder lit up the sky. We spend the evening at Laura and Kristina’s place with a few beers. Unfortunately, Remy got quite drunk, so instead of staying up the whole night before going to the airport we could get 1½ hours of sleep before waking up at 3 am to go to the airport.

10^th: If you haven’t noticed from the pictures, Remy looks incredibly a lot like Jesus. My pictures might not be the best, but almost everyone we talked to said he looked like Jesus. In my opinion I saw great similarities between the looks of Remy and Jesus in ‘The Passion of the Christ’. After having had some beers and wine and only 1½ hours of sleep Remy wasn’t too energetic or ready to go to the airport, so Sindre and I had to make sure he followed us and got to the airport. Every time we sat down Remy would sleep and look miserably. It was just like seeing the crucifixion of Jesus anno 2014. There was so much pain in that sight. Miraculously we got Remy to the airport and on board the plane to Cairns. He admitted later on that he didn’t have any memory of getting to the airport, haha.

Cairns

10th: In the plane I was sitting among a group of Japanese people. As we were about to prepare for landing and everyone was wearing their seatbelts including the cabin crew, one of the Japanese men opened his seatbelt and stood up. Immediately one of the stewardesses got up and said in a firm manner: ‘Sit down! And put on your seatbelt!’. So he sat down again. The stewardess had barely sat back down and put on her own seatbelt before he stood up again. This time she shouted ‘SIT DOWN’ from the back of the plane. And he sat back down again. Finally once we had landed and were approaching the gate the Japanese guy stood back up again! This time the stewardess didn’t see him immediately. So finally he was able to walk 8-10 rows in front and sit next to someone else he knew up there. But because he had opened his seatbelt and stood up, all the other Japanese people in that group began opening their seatbelts and standing up. It was the lemming effect showing its true influence on human nature. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. It must have been the first time these Japanese people were ever on a plane. Japanese people started opening their belts and popping their heads up everywhere in the back of the plane. This time two stewardesses had to rush in and make everyone sit down again. I couldn’t help smiling and laughing a bit – it was just so typical Japanese. Then finally when the seatbelt sign turned off, it was like all the Japanese had previously engaged in some sort of bet about how many people they could fit in the aisle. It was a 3×3 plane and everyone tried to get to the aisle. And of course they were all trying to grab their luggage at the same time. And when it literally was full at the aisle they started grabbing other people’s luggage and handed it to them even though some of them were still stuck at their window or middle seats. Naturally I didn’t have that big of an urge to get off the plane after just 2 hours of flying, so I sat down waiting in my aisle seat. Unfortunately for another Japanese woman that meant she was trapped in her seat. I could tell she really wanted me to stand up and fight my way out in the aisle so she could join us. But I didn’t want to do that. And after a minute or two she become a bit frustrated and tried to get me standing up using hand gestures. But there was no way I could fit in the claustrophobic myriad of Japanese people. Instead I lifted my leg so she could pass me, which she happily did joining the others in aisle. Generally it is a big chaos when everybody has to get off the plane, but this was beyond comparison. I had never seen anything like it before!

Finally we made it to Cairns, where Sindre and I checked in at a hostel, while the other went to their couchsurfing place. We arrived in the morning and right next to our hostel there were 3-4 black moving trees. It turned out it was bats! The trees were filled with thousands of big bats. The trees looked more dark and black then green! This was the second thing today I had never seen before. I thought bats hid during daytime but here they were in the middle of the city in the middle of the day. Amazing!

There was also another smaller tree with maybe 100 wild budgerigars (undulater) in various colors.

11^th: Since none of the other had been to Cairns before they wanted to do a snorkeling trip. Although I had done it during my spring break I didn’t turn down another opportunity to snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef. Cairns were extremely hot with temperatures in the high 30’s and the Great Barrier Reef was 28 degrees even 2 hours away from the coast. Incredible! We snorkeled at 2 different locations and experienced the beautiful coral reefs, fish, and other water species and living organisms. I also had an opportunity to do a 3-minute trial dive. I got the gear on and went under water for 3 minutes. I was fun but I would rather take a full diving license another time.

12^th: Sindre and I had also booked a trip to the Daintree Rainforest and Cape Tribulation about 1-2 hours north of Cairns. We began the day with a visit to Wildlife Habitat in Port Douglas.

We then drove through the rainforest to a place called Mossman Gorge. It was a spectacular place in the rainforest with water running down a river surrounded by the rainforest. Afterwards we went to Cape Tribulation, which I believe was a part of the rainforest. Anyway, it was very beautiful and I had a feeling of a true forest although it was very different from the picture I have of a rainforest in my mind, which is the Amazonas in Brazil. We ended the day on board a small boat sailing the Daintree River, where we saw a small live crocodile.

13^th: Remy and Sindre were skydiving, so I spent the day with Jessica, a German girl from the Rainforest trip. We didn’t do much, just chilling at the lagoon and walking around the city. In the evening we all met up for a BBQ on the Esplanade.

14^th: The others were leaving Cairns at 6 am and I at 6 pm. So I had the day to myself. I checked out and went to another hostel, YHA. I spent the day here doing some work on my pc and writing my blog. We all had crappy flight connections to Singapore, so when I connected in Darwin at 9 pm I met the others who had arrived 12 hours before me. From here I had to wait 8 hours until my next flight for Kuala Lumpur before boarding the final one for Singapore. Ironically, a direct flight to Singapore from Darwin is 4:30 while my flight to Kuala Lumpur took 4:50.

Exchange Semester in Sydney 2014 Pt. 7

Blog 12

The 26^th of December 2014 at 13:00 at Pink Bungalow, Koh Phangan, Thailand.

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 10-15 minutes)

Classes Ending

At the end of October all classes had ended and the exam period was about to begin. One of my courses; however, had an exam on the 29^th of October already, which was just 2 days after returning from Brisbane after almost 2 weeks off from school work. So I had a bit of work to do to prepare for it. And of course on the 28^th there was an evening seminar in Sydney on the psychology of wealth by Martial Peter, which I had to attend. And wow, I am glad I did so. I had never seen anyone else do what he could do. We were just a few people that day, and Martial could practically read people like an open book to an extent that I feared he knew what I was thinking the whole time. Amazing! More on Martial and his extraordinary ability and gift will follow later in this or the next blog, as he was doing a 2-day-seminar in November, which I later participated in.

On the day of my exam I spend the whole day studying from early morning to late afternoon. At 5 pm I left my apartment to get some food and be ready for the 6 pm exam start. At 5:50 after eating my food I walked up the stairs to what I thought was the room where the exam would take place. But to my big surprise I was at ‘Matthew Theatre’ and not ‘Colombo Theatre’. Ups! Such a small detail that just makes all the difference. I quickly asked around and the few people who were present could not help me, so I ran to the library to find help. The person even had to look at a map to find it, and apparently it was located right next to my apartment. So I ran from one side of campus back to my apartment all sweaty and stressed. As I entered the building I saw everybody walking in the doors to the room, so I still made it on time, but not in the best mental conditions after the running and stress. However, the exam went well I thought.

Exam Period Beginning

I had my first exam on the 11^th of November, so I took a few days off at the end of October to do some fun stuff. This included a ‘Halloween Harbor Cruise’ from Darling Harbour around the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge at night time on a big party ship with 3-400 people with a club in the middle of the ship. On the first of November I initiated my ‘From Geek to Freak’ experiment, which you can read about in a separate blog.

2 Day Trip to Canberra

On the 5^th Frederik from Germany and I decided to take a trip to the capital of Australia, Canberra, which was a 3-hour-drive from Sydney. Apparently many Australians say it is a boring city with not that much to do, so the expectations were rather low, but both Frederik and I wanted to experience it anyway. We arrived at Canberra early morning and went for a walk through the city, which was fairly small. We then went to the parliament buildings – both the old one and the new one and we got to see the Senate and the House of Representatives both places. Although I am not known for my interest in politics, it was great to see and experience it myself. First is the New building

After our visit to the political locations we went to the State Library and the High Court of Australia, which was the highest court in all of Australia. We even got to witness a live court case. There were five judges in long dark clothes facing everyone in the room. Surprisingly both the prosecutor and defender were wearing long white wigs. I thought that tradition was discarded at least 2 centuries ago, but apparently it is still alive here in Australia.

The following day we went to the War Memorial Museum and got a free guided tour, but the museum was extremely huge and since we weren’t the greatest history fans we left the group to experience the museum on our own at a faster pace than the group did. The museum had exhibitions from every single little battle Australia had every participated in – or at least so it felt. That being said it was a very modern and interesting museum (especially if you have a little more interest in history than I did). After the War Memorial Museum we went to yet another one, this time the National Museum of Australia. Thus museum contained everything from painting, sculptures, statues, old artifacts etc. from many different periods. As we walked around the museum we encountered a huge painting by Pollock. One of the employees asked us how much we thought it was worth. We said around 5 and 10 million AUD. But no, not even close. It was a staggering $400 million AUD. Wow! He continued by saying that it wasn’t even the most expensive piece of art they had. Downstairs they had 2 sculptures worth $450 million AUD. The painting was unique, but the sculptures didn’t look that unique.

The Psychology of Wealth

On the 8^th and 9^th of November I flew to Gold Coast to participate in Martial Peter’s 2-day-seminar on the psychology of Wealth. Even though it had only been a short while since the introductory event in Sydney I was very much looking forward to spending 2 full days with Martial and learning more about myself, Martial, and the human mind. The information shared by the participants in the room during the seminar is confidential and I cannot share that. Instead I will explain the even in broader terms. I should also mention that the following is my interpretation and understanding and therefore the accuracy of the information might be inadequate. Martial uses a combination of several tools and techniques which coupled with his fantastic understanding of the human mind and behavior enables him to get his lessons across and teach them very effectively to people. It wasn’t just an intellectual understanding he gave us, but also an emotional one – unlike traditional education. He used his techniques to create what is referred to as a breakthrough session. A breakthrough is when a person reaches a threshold in their mind on a particular subject, and when that happens this is the point where you can create lasting change – changes that most people believe take years to do. Using breakthroughs Martial created more changes in record time than I have ever seen or heard anyone do before. It sounds unbelievable and it sure seemed like that until I witnessed it myself. It was much like seeing Tony Robbins in action – both men with an extraordinary understanding of human behavior and sensory acuity. Only very few people can do what Martial and Tony does. As far as I am aware they are the only two people in the world I know of. Again, I cannot go into specifics about the event, but it was an absolutely amazing experience and a fantastic weekend in which I learned more about myself and how the mind works than I had in a long time. I give Martial my deepest recommendation. You can learn more about Martial on his website: www.martialpeter.com.

Trading Justice Podcast and First Speech at Toastmaster’s

With my trip to Canberra and Gold Coast the 2 weeks I had before my exams were almost over and I hadn’t been studying a whole lot before my first exam on the 12^th of November. And of course I had also volunteered to do my first speech at Toastmaster’s on the 11^th of November – the day after returning from Gold Coast. On the morning of the 11^th I had my weekly online webinar with people from the US on trading stocks and options and the financial markets. I had a question for my instructor, Tim Justice, after the webinar, so we spoke on Skype afterwards. He then asked me if I wanted to join him and his both Matt Justice on their Trading Justice Podcast. They usually do 2 podcasts a week on the financial markets on everything from trading opportunities, trading strategies, currencies, financial politics, global economics new etc. They are always super good, so for sure I was happy to be offered to participate. Since I appeared in this episode and taking my age into consideration the topic was on the evolution of a young trader. We talked about my story and how I got involved with Robert Kiyosaki’s company Rich Dad and when I started having an interest in the financial markets. We then progressed talking about trading strategies and the differences and challenges of being non-US-based and trading the US markets. It was super fun and exciting and hopefully I will be back again in the future. For some reason the sound was all perfect when we recorded it, but on the final file there are some lags and short periods with silence. You have to create a free profile to access the podcast. The podcast can be found here (I appear until around 40:00): https://www.tackletrading.com/trading-justice-39-christian-ljungbeck/

Recording the podcast took a while and I then only had a short time until I had to leave my apartment for the Toastmaster’s meeting. I spent that time rehearsing my speech so I would be ready for my very first official speech.

We were around 20 people at the meeting and after the first half it was now time for me to deliver my speech. The first topic every speaker talks about is themselves, their life, and interests for 3-5 minutes. After the initial nervousness which according to the audience wasn’t visible I got back on the right track and in my opinion I delivered a very great first speech.

Exams and Goodbye

The following 2 weeks passed with exams and a lot goodbye BBQ’s and other goodbye events:

12^th: ‘Financial Institution Management’ exam.

14^th: Ria Dev from my ‘Managing and Leading People’-class graduated. I wanted to see an Australian graduation, so I went and say congratulations. Since I was about to graduate from my exchange semester at UNSW I figured it would be appropriate taking a picture with a graduation hat on.

In the evening we did a BBQ in Coogee and went out for drinks at Coogee Pavillion and the Hotel.

15^th: 2 Danish girls hosted a big party with close to 100 people in a very small apartment connected to a small garden.

18^th: I had spent the last few days studying for my ’E-Business’-class. I started reviewing everything from week 1 of classes and finally made it to week 12. Then on the very last slide of the whole course the teacher had specifically indicated from which chapters the 7 exams questions would be coming from and in 4-5 of them she had also indicated the topic within the chapter. As soon as I saw that slide I remembered that she had talked about it during the last class – I had just completely forgotten about it. Doh! I had spent a lot of time reviewing all the course material, and most of it could have been saved as a lot of the chapters and lectures would not appear in the exam. Well, it was all sunk costs at that time, so I spent the next few hours reviewing only the relevant chapters.

Since I was about to leave Sydney soon my Toastmaster’s club had given me the opportunity to do my second speech on the 18^th. I really wanted to do that, but I didn’t feel I had the time to prepare for it, but I had volunteered for it anyway. So I went and did my second speech on ‘The 6 Human Needs’ in front of about 20 people again. I tried to think about the areas of improvement from last week and focus on those points. And it went extremely well! And people were happy about the topic as it also related to them and not just me.

19^th: ‘E-Business’ exam

20^th: Goodbye dinner with Kathrine, Saina, and Nathalie in Coogee and playing pool at Coogee Bay  Hotel.

21^th : ‘Real Estate Economics and Public Policy’ exam.

In the evening Åsmund, Erik, Laurens, and I went to the city for dinner. We walked around the city and went to Glenmore Hotel where Laurens’s girlfriend Lauren was working. They had a rooftop bar right next to the Sydney Harbor Bridge overlooking the water, the city, and the Opera house. We then decided to go on a rooftop pubcrawl, so we continued to Shangri-la Hotel and went to their bar on 36^th floor with an amazing view over Sydney. Laurens and I were both wearing flip flops which made it very difficult to enter any bars, but when the employees in the door were looking the other way, we quickly went inside. We all purchased one of their very delicious drinks and enjoyed it watching all the lights in the city. We then continued our pubcrawl, but we quickly discarded that as we were rejected 4 different places because of our flip flops. But then all of a sudden I got the fabulous idea that Laurens and I could just turn our flip flops upside down so that we would be walking on our feet but the flip flops would cover the top of our feet until we would get into the bar. That way the security persons would not be able to see the white skin on our feet and only if they were to look down on our feet specifically would they see it. We decided to try it. We got in line at a bar and after showing our IDs we were allowed to enter. It worked, Haha! We had to take 5 steps up before we could enter and both Laurens and I were walking like penguins on the stairs half laughing still trying to act normal. We went on to several other bars later on and surprisingly it worked every single place. Only one place did they notice my shoes just after letting me in, so the security guys stopped me and to my surprise in a hard tone he just said “Hey, turn your shoes around properly, man!”.

22^nd: Lauren joined the four of us and took us to Shark Bay and Milk Beach in the north-eastern part of Sydney. Here we could do some cliff jumping from a 5-6 meter cliff into the water. It was super fun, and we had an amazing view of the whole city and landscape surrounding it. In the evening we went to a running Sushi restaurant before continuing to Coogee beach where we had some beers and later we went to Pavilion.

23^rd: I spent 5-6 hours planning my travels after the semester before going to Erik and Peter’s house. It was Erik, Peter, Laurens, and Stine’s last day in Sydney, so we said goodbye and see you in Denmark.

24^th: Picnic at Coogee Beach with a mixture of people from everywhere.

25-27^th: Practical things to take care of and getting ready to leave Sydney on the 2^nd of December.

28^th: Meeting with the official Anthony Robbins group with Dave and Katrina Elliott from UPW crew in Sydney on business mastery.

1^st of December: My final day in Sydney. I wanted to leave Sydney earlier, but because Empowernet were hosting an event ‘Masters of Wealth’ featuring Robert Kiyosaki live in Sydney I postponed my travels so I could get a chance to see Robert live. The event had 6 speakers in total including Scott Harris, who is the facilitator on Wealth Mastery, so the audience was in very great hands this day. There was a bit of selling with so many different speakers promoting their individual products to take advantage of the changing future and economy. Finally Robert Kiyosaki appeared as the final speaker and he received a standing applause even before he started speaking since he had touched almost everyone’s lives in the room. Robert Kiyosaki is the author of the book ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ and he is the leading authority on personal finance. His teachings are mostly very controversial to common sense and traditional advice. He was awesome to see and experience live after having read several of his books and bought my trading courses from his company.

Exchange Semester in Sydney 2014 Pt. 6

The 30^th of November 2014 at 14:20 at the Village, University of New South Wales, Sydney

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 10-15 minutes)

Visit from Denmark

After returning from my spring break on Monday the 6^th of October it was soon my turn to be the guide as my parents were arriving that same week on the 9^th. On that day I had signed up for a full-day real estate investing seminar with Mark Rolton talking about specific strategies on how to invest through his company or using real estate options and using those strategies create a very specific retirement plan. It was profound knowledge, as Mark called it. An amazing system.

In the evening I met my parents in front of the apartment they had booked through Airbnb. It was great seeing them again on this distant side of the world. They had been traveling for close to 30 hours so they were rather tired, so we went to bed early. The following day we planned out what to do and see here in Sydney during the first 1½ weeks they were spending here before we would rent a car and drive north to Brisbane during the last week. We took a walking tour around Sydney and had some lunch. In the evening we went out for dinner at the yearly Night Noodle Market in Hyde Park where a lot of food stall were set up selling mostly Asian food combined with music and a few activities.

On the 11^th I had signed up for yet another full-day seminar – this time on NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) with Sebastien Leblond, founder of NLP Top Coach in Bangkok. He was amazingly good at NLP and provided us with specific and valuable strategies and tools. For those of you, who don’t know about NLP, check it out. It can save you many years, and it teaches you how the brain works and how to use it advantageously. After the seminar I met my parents again and we went to Darling Harbour for dinner. We found a big restaurant located on a boat from which they would make a big firework show at 8 PM. Just as we finished our dinner the show started and we were probably located in one of the best locations for the fireworks.

Obviously my parents wanted to see and experience Sydney, so I got to do a lot of the thing and activities again. This also included the Bondi-Coogee-costal-walk, which we did on the morning on the 12^th. It is an amazingly beautiful walk where you can walk right next to the water on cliffs with great viewpoints along the way.

The following day we went to the Sealife Aquarium at Darling Harbour. It was a huge place with many different exotic animals none of us had seen before anywhere else. They also had an enormous pool with several different species of sharks, fish, dugongs, and other animals. And since the aquarium is located in Australia, obviously they also had lots of beautiful corals.

No trip to Sydney is complete without a show at the Sydney Opera House. So on the 14^th we went to see Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I. The tickets turned out to be quite a bit more expensive than expected as the low ‘from-price’ apparently was standing tickets with no view of the stage. But anyway, we went for the 3-hour-musical. It was very beautiful and we got to see the Opera House from the inside. The musical had some very nice effects and some funny moments although we definitely didn’t get all of them in the midst of all the singing and Asian-English languages. After the musical we talked about it, and honestly I didn’t really understand what it was about, but neither did my parents. Haha, it was a comical situation, but we did enjoy it!

As we were leaving the opera it had started to rain heavily. And heavy rain in Sydney is quite unlike what it is back in Denmark. I think just 5 minutes of heavy rain is similar to the amount of water falling down within an hour on a normal rainy day in Denmark – it’s powerful. Fortunately we could walk under a roof all the way to the bus stop. But even standing under the roof at the bus stop we still got wet from the rain and wind. During the bus ride the rain started to get heavier and heavier. And from the place we got off the bus close to the apartment was only 200 meters. So as soon as we got off we started to run as fast as we could towards the apartment, but it was rather useless. I found the whole experience to be quite funny, so I was laughing during the whole run. Even though it might only have taken 60 seconds we were all three soaking wet as we entered the apartment.

The next day the weather was complete fine again and we boarded a boat from Circular Quay towards Manly which is located a bit north of Sydney. A funny thing was that I met Frederik Ha from Germany who I had previously visited Manly with back in August. He was also going to Manly with his parents. We arrived in Manly and began our long walk around Manly and the beautiful scenic nature surroundings.

We spent most of the day here and upon returning to Sydney in the early evening we went to the Sydney Tower Eye which is a 309 meters tall building with an observation deck. When entering they first showed us a 4D short movie about Sydney, and then we could enter the observation deck and take some nice pictures and enjoy the 360 degree view over Sydney. On our way back home from the Tower we walked past the Night Noodle Market again where we got some dinner. We sat down at a table behind a small Mercedes Benz dome where they apparently served free food and drinks, so we got to try a bit of different cuisines. In the park the Australian news station 7News were present. We walked closer to where they were located, and then they asked me whether I wanted to try and be part of the news, which I of course wanted to. So they were filming me while I was reading the text that appeared on the screen in front of me. It was very fun, and the result speaks for itself, haha.

https://7live-sydney.click2share.com.au/ac0c0edf824f7332c778f65d8bb49634#189693

The last few days in Sydney we spent on some of the last must do’s in Sydney. So we took a trip to the Sydney Royal Botanics Garden and had lunch around Wollomollo, one of the most expensive areas around Sydney where there were no parking spaces but instead people had their own private spot for their boats and yachts in front of their apartments.

On the 18^th we had booked a full day trip to Blue Mountains from Sydney. The trip started early in the morning with a stop at Featherdale Wildlife Park which is a small zoo where you can pet and feed many of the animals. Especially the kangaroos were hungry that morning and they kept eating not only the food but also the ice cream cone containing the food.

From here we headed on to the Blue Mountains where we had several stops at different viewpoints such as The Three sisters and we walked around and could see the seemingly never-ending beautiful nature far away in the horizon.

Included in the trip was also an aboriginal show, where 4 aboriginals were teaching us about their culture and performing different dances and songs. I couldn’t help thinking that the dances look like something they just came up with right before they went on stage. Or perhaps even improvising on stage! Hehe, but anyway, it was fun to see.

After the show we continued to the 4 scenic world attractions which involved 2 huge cable cars, the world’s steepest train ride, and a scenic walk in the rainforest on the side of one of the mountains. It was very beautiful and a fantastic location for a day trip with a great combination of mountains, viewpoints, and rainforest.

Shortly after departing Blue Mountains we got dropped off at Sydney Olympic from where we took a 45-minute-cruise back to Sydney on the river. As we approached Sydney we could see the whole city from the water, and after shortly stopping at Darling Harbour we sailed under the Sydney Harbor Bridge and got off at Circular Quay right next to the Opera House.

From here I wanted to take my parents to a special restaurant in Newtown someone had recommended. It was called ‘Lentils as Anything’, and it had a rather unique concept. It is an organic vegetarian restaurant, and they only have 3-4 different things you can order. There are no prices for the food, but instead you donate what you want to or what you believe the food is worth. Furthermore, the waiters are not employees, but instead they are volunteers. We arrived at the restaurant and apparently all the tables were shared, but they only had room for three people at a small table in the corner. We ordered 3 different dishes and decided to switch and try all of them. Shortly after the band started playing and we enjoyed our meal with music playing right behind us.

Our last day in Sydney we spent at the Rocks looking at a small market as well as walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge from where we could take some amazing pictures of the city and Opera House.

Road Trip from Sydney to Brisbane

On the 20^th of October we left Sydney in the morning for our trip to Brisbane and headed to our first stop which was the Jenolan Cave, which were located almost 200 km west of Sydney. The cave network is around 40 km long with more than 300 entrances and it is listed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The caves are estimated to be around 340 million years old. We got a tour in the Diamond Cave with a guide and around 20 other visitors. This was one of the so-called ‘show-caves’ meaning that they had made it easy for people to walk inside by building stairs and installing lights. After entering the cave our guide gave a brief introduction after which she turned off the lights and we were then standing in utter darkness. It is a rare experience to be standing in complete darkness not being able to see anything at all during these times when we have lights illuminating almost everything everywhere. Whether your eyes were are open or closed made no difference! We continued deeper inside the cave at narrow small paths up and down stairs seeing natural diamonds, crystal, live stone, drip stones, and much more. It was fantastic; however the pictures aren’t even close to reflecting the beauty of the caves. After our tour we drove to a very local place where we had booked accommodation for the night.

The following morning we headed for Port Stephens and more specifically Nelson Bay. It was a rather long drive, so we arrived in the afternoon. We then went to Mt Tomaree at Shoal Bay where we followed a small nature trail to the top of a big hill with an amazing view over Nelson Bay.

Before departing Port Stephens the following day we wanted to see the renowned sand dunes, so we booked a quad bike tour where we drove around and up and down the sand dunes located right next to the water. It was great fun and a good combination of adventure and sightseeing.

After the sand dunes we drove further north to Ellenborough Falls, which at 200 meters is one of the longest single drop waterfalls in the Southern Hemisphere. We parked the car and walked the 641 steps down to the bottom where we took some pictures. After climbing the 641 steps on the way up again we continued our trip to Port Macquire.

At Port Macquire we started our day on the 23rd with a trip to a light house on the beach. We walked along the beach and climbed some rocks before continuing to a local koala hospital located close to the beach. Koalas from around Australia were transported to the hospital where volunteers and koala doctors made sure the koalas recovered again before they could be released back to their origin again. I think we saw 15-20 koalas – most of them sleeping in the tall eucalyptus trees. Before leaving we donated some money to keep the hospital running. We then headed to Ricardoes Tomatoes & Strawberries – a big local farm selling home made fresh strawberries and tomatoes and every possible type of derivative from these two ingredients. Next stop was Yamba.

From Yamba we started our trip at the blue lagoon close to where we stayed. There were some big rocks in the water and when the big waves hit the rocks there were huge splashes.

From here we continued to the notorious Byron Bay known as a beach paradise with beautiful surroundings. We only had 2-3 hours here, so we had a quick lunch and walked to the top of a big hill where a lighthouse was located. From here we literally had a 270 degree panorama view over the mile-long white beaches and the ocean.

Next up was Gold Coast – located 80 km north of Byron Bay. In Gold Coast we stopped at Surfer’s Paradise, which is the touristy part of Gold Coast. Again we only had 2-3 hours here, so we walked along the esplanade next to the beach and walked around the centre of Surfer’s Paradise. During this weekend there was a race going on, so a big part of the city was blocked and from almost everywhere you could hear the sounds from the race cars as they were racing. After Gold Coast we drive to our last destination, Brisbane, from where I began my spring break adventures. So now I had covered the whole Australian east coast from Sydney almost 3000 km north to Cairns.

Brisbane

The following day on the 25^th we started our day with a 1-hour-drive to Australia Zoo north of Brisbane. This zoo was founded by Steve Irwin and it is still privately owned by the family. As we arrived in the zoo there was a show starting shortly after in the famous Crocoseum. It was an amazing show that involved birds, dingos, crocodiles, and humans! Amazingly they let the birds fly around in the open space flying right next to other wild birds, but they all returned again (or so we think, haha). It was no doubt the best zoo I have ever seen or visited before. All the animals had great space and there were several hundred zookeepers to take care of the animals. At one point as we were walking we encountered a zookeeper who was walking one of the wombats with a leash as if she was walking a dog. She said it is something they do every day with the wombats individually to ensure they are thriving and get some new sense impressions. It was an amazing zoo, and like Featherdale you could also feed the kangaroos here.

After the zoo we headed back to Brisbane and drove to Mount Coot-tha, which was a lookout point a few kilometers from the City where we had an amazing panorama view over the city. As it was fairly late when we made it to Mount Coot-cha we returned the following morning on the 26^th to experience the view in daylight as well.

This was our last day together in Australia as we would be flying on the 27^th in the morning – my parents to Copenhagen and I to Sydney. After the lookout we drove to Southbank which is a cultural area in the middle of Brisbane with different activities and attractions such as a lagoon built so it looks like a beach. It was a really cool place to walk around.

After Southbank we drove to Newtown to meet up with Phoebe whom I had gotten to know from my apartment tower at UNSW. We met her and her parents and talked for around half an hour before we continued to Kangaroo Point, which was an area next to the river where you could do different activities such as rock climbing, segway, or other water sports. In the evening we took a walk around the center of the city. Because the G20 meeting was coming up in 3 weeks from this time, there were a lot of different cultural performances and activities going on around the city. As we were walking around we came across the Old State Library which was illuminated with beautiful changing lights making the building completely different every 30 seconds.

As we were standing in front of the library suddenly music started playing from the building to our left and 30-40 people dressed in white walked out the doors on the first and second floor. Then they started singing opera while a fantastic light show illuminated the building. It was amazing to see. The video can be seen below:

After the opera concert ended we continued a bit through the city where a dance off was going on. Numerous dancers with different styles were performing in front of a crowd of more than 500 people. We returned home late in the evening and started packing our things for the flight the following day. The following morning on the 27^th of October we headed for the domestic terminal where we parked the car and entered the airport. After checking in we went upstairs to the security check and had our big goodbye time before my parents had to return the car and check in themselves at the international terminal.

There was extremely much turbulence on the plane from Brisbane to Sydney, but the worst part was over Sydney before landing. Honestly I have never experienced such a bumpy flight before. And it didn’t make it better that we had to cruise around Sydney for another 15 minutes before landing. At one point the girl next to me looked at me and said ‘Oh my god, I’m panicking’. I wanted to help by saying something, but I didn’t know what, so instead I said ‘Yea, it’s crazy’, which quite didn’t make the situation better for her, haha. But well, the intention was good. As we finally landed people started clapping as everyone could feel it was a rather difficult landing.

Exchange semester in Sydney 2014 pt. 5

The 13^th of November 2014 at 10:10 at the Village, University of New South Wales, Sydney

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 10 minutes)

This blog is a continuation of the previous one and describes my adventures from my spring break.

Skydive at Mission Beach

On the 2^nd of October we left Magnetic Island and set course towards Mission Beach, where we were going to do our long awaited skydive. We were 10 people in total who had signed up for skydiving, so while we would be skydiving the others spent time on the beach relaxing. While on the bus from Magnetic Island most people were sleeping, but I spent 1½-2 hours preparing for my upcoming skydive. I tried to mentally prepare myself the best possible way by implementing and applying some of the strategies I had learned from Tony Robbins before doing the firewalk as well as other strategies I had read about. Whether it worked or not is hard to say, but I didn’t feel bad or overwhelmed in any way when preparing for the skydive or taking off the ground in the plane. I’m sure it did have a great effect that I had mentally prepared.

After arriving at the skydiving place, we all signed the required waivers that we would not sue them if the parachute didn’t open etc. We then watched a safety video, but just like the safety video in airplanes I doubt that you actually can remember what to do when the times comes and the emotions are running high. After the safety briefing it was time to put on the skydive gear and belt and a bus transported us 20 minutes to the local airport where a plane was awaiting us.

My instructor and I were the first ones to board the plane so we got to sit right next to the pilot. The plane was very small and I was surprised it could fit all 15 of us.  The plane was very narrow with 2 parallel benches along the plane. When you haven’t tried skydiving before you have an instructor attached to your back to ensure the skydive will be a great experience and everything will go as planned. So everyone sat back to back in the plane, so the instructors could make sure we were properly attached to them.

We then took off and rose up and up in the plane. It was a 14.000 feet skydive (4,25 km) with a 60-second-free-fall over the great barrier reef with a guaranteed landing on the beach. It was extreme settings, and the view was astonishing from the plane. We could see small islands below us and in the horizon, and the sun was shining making the Great Barrier Reef looking crystal clear. At one point I felt we had kept going up and up for a very long period of time, and that we probably soon would be at around 14.000 feet. I asked my instructor, who had done more than 10.000 jumps, and he informed me that we were only at 6.000 feet altitude. Not even half the way! Wow! It is hard to estimate distances when you aren’t used to it this way. Usually airplanes are flying at around 30.000 feet (or around 9 km), so this was just around half the altitude and we were about to jump out of the plane from here.

Finally, we reached 14.000 feet, and they opened the door. It was hard to tell what people were feeling or thinking since I was sitting at the back not able to see their faces. But I’m sure some of them felt some very weird and special feelings. Honestly I didn’t really fear the jump or feel bad about what was about to happen. Maybe 20 seconds after they opened the door, the first pair sat down on the edge of the plane with their feet and legs hanging out in 14.000 feet above ground. And all of a sudden they were gone. It looked just like something from a movie. It went so fast that it seemed as if it was the powerful wind had taken them and pulled them out of the plane. As soon as the first pair was gone, the next pair was already in position, and so it continued.

I had assumed we all jumped with maybe a minute or two in between and great distance, but I think from the time they opened the door to it was my turn to sit down on the edge of the plane only took 1-1½ minutes. It went extremely fast. I think they purposely did it this fast, so people wouldn’t have time for doubts and second thoughts. I think everyone was quite occupied with just getting into position, which wasn’t all that easy with another person attached to your back. Finally it was my turn to sit down on the edge. But with another person attached to your back, you don’t really sit on the edge of the plane. The instructor does that, and you are more or less just hanging and dangling in the air only thanks to the safety gear and belts you are wearing. Hanging in this rather unique life-affirming position the instructor told me to take the position he had told me in the plane. So I put my head back and looked right up in the sky and grabbed the front of the safety belt. It was a weird feeling knowing what was about to happen, but still I didn’t have the thoughts about ‘WTF am I doing here?’. And then all of sudden the instructor pushed us off the plane into our 60 seconds free fall. Just as we jumped off the plane we were spinning around doing a flip or 2 in the air and I remember seeing the earth, the ocean, the plane, followed by the water and plane again, and now I was overwhelmed with the strangest feelings and thoughts such as ‘Holy shit, what am I doing? What’s going on?’. But as sudden as those thoughts came to me, they were gone again. The instructor balanced us out in the air so that we were dropping straight down face first looking at the ground and my previous thoughts and feelings were replaced by feelings of ecstasy and adrenalin. It was intense, amazing, and revitalizing dropping with 220 km/h for 60 seconds through several layers of air and skies screaming on the top my lungs.

Then all of a sudden the instructor released the parachute and the speed slowed down immediately and the noise from the air stopped. We were now slowly dropping and could enjoy the fantastic view. Because we had dropped so fast in such a short period of time my ears were blobbing just like when you fly in an airplane, but this was more intense due to big drop. Fortunately it disappeared shortly after. After a minute or so dropping, I got to steer the parachute and we were spinning 5 times around ourselves.

The instructor took over once again as we about to land on the beach. We got closer and closer, and I pulled up my legs, so he could make sure we had a great landing. And we did. Back again on solid ground it was unbelievable to think that just 5-6 minutes ago I was sitting in a plane 14.000 feet above me. What an amazing experience! Although it can seem a bit scary, it is highly recommendable, and I’m sure an experience like this can provide us with the emotional strength we sometimes need in life.

If you haven’t seen it already, my 5-minute skydive video can be seen here:

Tully River White Water Rafting

After an experience like a skydive I doubted that the rest of the trip could ever compete with it, but fortunately I was wrong. The following day we were going to White Water River Rafting on the Tully River just south of Cairns. We arrived and were split up in teams of 6 people plus a rafting guide in each boat before cruising down the 14 km long rafting journey on the Tully River. It was a very different experience from skydiving, which was an intense burst of adrenalin and energy. This was an 8 hour long day and a combination of action and relaxation, of big water drops and beautiful nature. We had an extraordinary time attacking the challenges the river threw at us while our guide shouted different commands at us in order to best get through the mazes of stones, water drops, and other obstacles. We didn’t tip over the raft, but we very close at one point. This place required all of us to move all the way to the right side of the raft in order to move forward and get through a narrow spot between some stones while at the same time being aware of the water drop right after the stones. We all moved to the right, and after a while the raft got through and we gained speed. But before we had even returned to our original positions, we were floating on top of a new big rock on the left side of the raft, which caused it to turn 45 degrees to the right while it was almost vertical. As we were all 6 sitting in the right side of the raft, our weight was about to cause the raft to flip upside down, so the instructor was screaming ‘OVERLEFT! OVERLEFT!’, and we all threw ourselves to the left just in time to prevent the raft from flipping. Puh! We made it, and we were safe again. Rafting is fun and definitely worth doing in the future again.

Snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef in Cairns

The following morning waking up in Cairns I once again thought to myself that now it couldn’t possibly get any better. But wrong I was again. This morning we boarded a huge catamaran with maybe 150 people in total which took us out on the Great Barrier Reef to snorkel at 2 different spot, and you had the option to purchase a 30-minute dive as well. The first place was in the middle of the ocean and no land in sight anywhere. There was a big area with beautiful corals surrounded by a 10-12 meter deep ocean. I saw some exotic fish I had never seen before, some of which were huge – perhaps almost a meter long. After getting back on the catamaran again, some of the people who had dived reported that they had seen ‘Wally’, a huge fat fish maybe 2 meters long. Some of them had also seen a smaller shark of around the same size as Wally. Yikes! I’m glad I didn’t see the shark although it is supposedly a very rare sight to see a wild shark. The other snorkeling spot was next to a small island known as a bird sanctuary. The island was packed with birds all over – it was amazing. We all snorkeled a bit and walked on the beach. On my way back to the catamaran I encountered two sea turtles, which I followed around in the water. They must have been a meter long and wide, so they were fairly big.

Enjoying Cairns

Returning to Cairns again we picked up our wristbands for tonight’s ‘Ultimate Party’ as they call it. It involved dinner, pubcrawl, activities, entrance to bars, as well as transportation in a party bus between bars. It was heaps of fun with a lot of hilarious activities.

The 5th of October we had to ourselves until the last group activity and farewell dinner at 5 pm. Most of us spent the day at the lagoon in Cairns and by the pool at the hostel. Then at 5 pm we all met up at Cairns ZOOm and Wildlife Dome. It was an indoor zoo on top of a casino. And in the zoo were a big zipline course, and 2 obstacle courses anywhere between 3-12 meter above ground, as well as other activities you could perform while the animals were walking or flying right next to you. It was absolutely unique to experience. I did 3 of the activities, both the medium and high obstacle courses and the Power Jump, which was a 30 meter drop where you landed on a trampoline. The drop itself wasn’t as exciting as I had imagined, but still it was fun.

After the activities we went for our farewell dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the building. Some people said a few words, and Angie thanked us all. Upon returning to our hostel we all sat outside and had some beers and the group gave Angie a present to thank her for her time and an amazing trip we would all remember in the future. I think most of us agreed that the past 10 days were perhaps some of the best 10 days we had ever had.

Exchange semester in Sydney 2014 pt. 4

The 12^th of November 2014 at 20:15 at the Village, University of New South Wales, Sydney

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 10 minutes)

It has been quite a while since last time I published a blog on my experiences and life here in Australia. The reason is that I almost was traveling all of October, and because I also had to follow school, I didn’t take the time to focus on the blog. But that is about to change again! Because it has been such a long time and there are so many new experiences this blog will partly be structured with bullet points.

The Weeks Leading Up to Spring Break

The two weeks leading up to spring break, which began on the 26^th of September, there was quite a bit of school work. Some of the highlights from the 2 weeks are the following:

12^th: Live rugby match at the Allianz Stadium here in Sydney. Frederik, Tobias, Peter, Nicholas, and I went to see a match between Manly Sea Eagles and South Sydney Rabbitohs. I had no idea of the rules, and neither had the others. Nevertheless, it was exciting to experience. I think Manly got crushed in the first half with something like 42-0, but the game ended a bit more even.

13^th: With some of the people from Tony Robbins UPW-crew I went to FX Zone – a big indoor trampoline park similar to Sky Zone. It was great fun, and good to see the crew again.

18^th: Dave Elliott, one of the senior leaders for Tony Robbins, had offered a free coaching session to everyone from the UPW crew. He is a great coach himself, so I figured why not get a professional outside view and perspective on my own life? So we spend around an hour over Skype talking about different topics I wanted to discuss. When you really sit down with a professional coach it is amazing to experience how much value they can actually bring to you in such a short period of time – and Dave was exception. He added great value, and in fact I learned some things about myself and life. His specialty is relationships, but he is open for other topics as well. If you want to check out his website, go to http://legendaryloveforlife.com/.

19^th: Alibaba, the Chinese company, had its Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange. I wanted to follow it when the US market opened and possibly place an order. Because of the time difference, the market opened at 00:30, but it wasn’t trading. The demand was so great that they had to postpone trading. And after the clock hit maybe 02:00 and it still hadn’t traded, I decided to go to bed.

22nd: This was the day of my parkour injury, which is described in my previous blog called ‘From Geek to Freak – Part 1.

Spring Break – Aussie East Coast from Brisbane to Cairns – 26^th – 6^th of October

Finally it was time for my very first spring break trip. I had signed up for a trip starting in Brisbane around 1000 km north of Sydney and ending in Cairns around 1700 km north of Brisbane. We had a lot of stops along the way so we probably drove closer to 2000 km.

Arriving in Brisbane and Meeting the Group and Guide

On the 26^th I flew to Brisbane from Sydney together with the 5 others I had signed up for the trip with. After arriving as we were walking to the meeting place to meet our guide on the trip, Jesper said ‘I don’t hope we get a 40-50-year-old-guide’. When we arrived we were greeted by an almost 50-year-old woman. We laughed a bit at his recent comment that came true. But after talking to Angie for just a minute, she had already crushed our prejudices, and it was clear that it was not going to be her that would slow down the group the next 10 days, no it would be us. She was the most playful and energetic person I think I have ever met, and despite of her age she blended in with all 30 of us as if she was yet another person joining the trip. This turned out to be the case during the whole trip.

Fraser Island

The trip commenced in morning on the 27^th. Before we checked out of the hostel in the morning, I took off the bed sheets and right there on my bed was a fairly fat cockroach climbing around. Yikes! I’m glad I didn’t see any before I went to bed (as stupid as that sounds), even though I did have my suspicions about it. Anyway, our first stop on the trip was to Hervey Bay from where we sailed to the famous Fraser Island. It is the world’s biggest sand island, and it is really a small paradise. Surround by white sand beaches and rainforests in the middle, it is a place for relaxation and beautiful nature. We checked in at our accommodation and enjoyed a day on the beach and by the pool with beach volley and other activities.

The following day we did one of the infamous 4WD Jeep tours around a part the island where you drive on the beach right next to the water, and sometimes in the water as well as through rain forests. You are allowed to drive up to 80 km/h on the beach, and that is really fast considering how bumpy it is driving on the beach. As we drove through the rain forest and on the beach the driver told us stories about the island and from the jeep we were able to see whales and dolphins far out in the horizon.

After a couple of hours of driving around, we got off the bus in the middle of a rainforest and had to walk on a rainforest walking track through some beautiful nature. The driver called all of us together to give us the mandatory snake safety briefing. Apparently the rainforest was home to 6 of the world’s deadliest snakes, so everyone was very attentive of the surroundings on our trip. Along the walking track there was a small water stream, which contained some of the world’s cleanest water according to the driver. It was an amazing walk with beautiful nature and strange trees.

Snorkeling Trip on Board the Derwent Hunter

Later that day we left Fraser Island and we had our longest and only drive at night to Airlie Beach where we arrived in the morning of the 29^th. We were dropped off right at the harbor where we had to board the Derwent Hunter – also referred to as the sexiest ship in the port according to the crew. It was a full day snorkeling tour, so we departed Airlie Beach and set sails for our first destination or more precisely our first snorkeling spot. And yes of course, you cannot put me on a ship for a full day without me gaining the wisdom of another toilet-story, and this time was no different. So here it goes: Just as we departed, the crew spent some time talking about safety, the trip, and also the features of the ship which included the toilets. Because it is a ship they work differently from regular ones. I heard their words, but I wasn’t listening. I thought it couldn’t be that difficult, and I believed that I would be able to figure it out myself. Sure enough, an hour later I went down to use the toilet. As it is very small I have to sit down, which was also a good idea as the ship was rocking form side to side. All of a sudden I think we encountered a bigger wave which caused everything on the ship including me to shift to the left. Apparently as I quickly discovered the toilet seat was loose and with my weight on top of it, somehow it completely fell out and rolled across the floor until it hit the wall. ‘WTF just happened?’ I remember thinking. It was such a comically and unique situation that I had to laugh of it myself. But it was only the beginning. Now it was time to test whether I could remember what the crew said about flushing the toilets – all I remembered was that it was extremely important to turn a lever or handle back into the right position. But before I had even finished that thought a paper on the wall had caught the attention of my eyes. It was an A4 page paper with big letter describing how the toilets worked in 3 bullet points. I started reading it just to make sure I was about to do everything correct. I read point number 1 and 2 and everything just seemed straight forward and logical so I decided not to read point number 3 – bad idea! As it later turned out this was the small detail I needed that would have made all the difference. I turned the lever, which filled the toilet tank with water, and I flushed. It flushed as expected and everything seemed completely fine until the toilet stopped flushing, but the water still kept pouring out from the tank. After the water level hit a critical point I had to do something, so I grabbed the toilet brush although I had no idea what to do. I’ll spare you for the details, but I’m sure you have guessed it. Then all of a sudden as lighting from a blue sky it struck me. I quickly closed the lever I had opened, which cut off the water supply. I flushed again, and everything went back to normal. Puh! I was glad it hadn’t been worse, which it easily could have been. As I am washing hands, I read the paper on how to operate the toilets again. And sure enough, under point number 3 which I had skipped before, was all the information I had needed to prevent the above. Lesson learned. When people emphasize seemingly simple things, it is probably important. Sorry for the long anecdote, but my blog is M-rated 🙂

After having sailed for maybe 2 hours we arrived at our first destination in the middle of the ocean surrounded by a few smaller islands. It looks amazingly beautiful with the blue sky, crystal clear water, and green islands. One of the surrounding islands is Hayman Island, which supposedly is where the rich and famous people go. It can could as much as $8.000 a night and up. So unfortunately we didn’t get to go here, but we snorkeled at a smaller island close to it. It was fantastic to snorkel between all the corals and exotic fish observing life in the water. The area was known to be home for sea turtles and after a bit of snorkeling we encountered one. We were able to swim next to, under, and over it. It was absolutely amazing to swim side by side with one of these marvelous creatures.

After our second snorkel I walked along the beach at one of the small islands, and as I crossed some trees and branches on the ground I saw something move right in front of me. I had a shock as I realized it was a snake. Right there in front of me – maybe just 2 meter in front, and it was probably around 1½ meters long.

After returning to Airlie Beach again we all went out for dinner and some of us went out to party.

Magnetic Island

The following morning on the 30^th we had to meet at 7 am sharp as we had to catch a ferry later that morning a few 100 km from Airlie Beach. I have a bad tendency to often be late, and this morning was no exception. So Andy, an American guy, and I were 10-15 minutes late. Angie, our guide, had threatened anyone who would be late with a spoon of vegemite. I didn’t think she was serious, but oh yes, she sure was. So upon entering the bus Andy and I were given a fork with vegemite on that we had to eat in front of everyone as a punishment for being late. I think it is impossible to describe the taste of this unbelievably horribly tasting thick brown Australian product. On a picture it could look similar to Nutella, but it is nothing like it. Its smell is disgusting and its taste is even worse. I have no idea how Australian can eat it – I think you have to grow up with it in order to eat it. Needless to say, Andy and I suffered for almost 30 minutes after having eaten it.

On our way we stopped at a thrift shop to buy some clothes for tonight’s theme party ‘ladies night’. So everyone secretly had to buy woman’s clothes for the person whose name appeared on the piece of paper that we drew from a hat. Everyone had to dress up as women, and you had to wear the clothes you were given. In the bus we all showed each other what we bought and told who it was for. There were some outfits that were really crazy and maybe across the line – the outfit I bought was probably one of them. After our shopping we continued to Townsville and boarded a boat which took us to a small island called Magnetic Island. It was only around 15×12 km, but it too was a small paradise with amazing nature. Before dinner we all changed to our newly acquired female clothes. Then we went for dinner, joined in on a special drinking bingo game, and later partied at the hostel with an amazing view over the water the rest of the night.

The following day we could spend as we wanted to on Magnetic Island. I think around half of the group wanted to rent scooters and take a tour around the island. So the 15 of us all went together to the scooter rental place and signed the paper work etc. Some people had never driven a scooter before and had a bit of trouble operating them, and you could tell they were a bit uncomfortable riding them. While this was going on I talked to one of the other guys from the group and said ‘that the worst place to fall off the scooter must be right here in front of the rental place and the employees’. As I’m sure we all have experiences and examples of – karma is a bitch. So sure enough after 7 hours of driving around the island with no problems I return to deliver my scooter. And just as I am about the take the very last turn from the street to the rental place I have a bit too much speed and I cross some gravel while turning which resulted in the scooter sliding and me falling off. Just like I said 7 hours previously this must be the worst place to fall off. And it wasn’t just in front of the employees at the rental place; no everyone from our group was there as well. So I think I must have had a good crowd of around 20-25 people. As soon as the scooter slid and I realized I didn’t hurt myself badly, internally I had to laugh of the situation and the fact that I spoke those words a couple of hours previously. Fortunately the damage wasn’t too great, so it ended up costing me only $40 in damages. I think Andy and I had a special bond together on the trip. Not only were we both late in the morning, but it turned out that he too had fallen off his scooter.

Despite my fall, it was a great trip around the island. We stopped at several of the beaches on the way, and we saw a wild koala sitting in a tree – a very rare sight – and we also got to feed wild wallabies.

OCCAM’S PROTOCOL – PART 2 and FROM GEEK TO FREAK – PART 1

The 7^st of November 2014 at 20:40 at the Village, University of New South Wales, Sydney

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

 

Occam’s Protocol Terminated

When I back in September decided to complete the 28-day-experiment ‘Occam’s Protocol’ I was determined to finish the experiment as prescribed in the book ‘The 4 Hour Body’. However on day 22 during one of my regular parkour classes I was on a roll and had finally carried out two challenging exercises I had been working on for a few weeks. Then we moved on to a new exercise and I decided to take the challenge as I was performing so well that day. It involved jumping 1,5 meters forward from a 0,5 meter tall stone to the top of a 1,7 meters tall wall. I did some test jumps that went well, and the instructor told me I could do it. And I knew I could do it! So I finally jumped. Everything was perfect until the very moment before I was about to land on top of the wall with both my feet. For some reason while I was in the air I decided not to land on both feet as I was supposed to, but instead I turned a little bit in the air in order to land on just one foot. The result? My right foot on the top of the wall slipped and slid across the top of the wall while at the same time my left leg fell down hitting my knee into the wall. Ouch! Unfortunately there are no recordings of it. Once I got up I actually felt okay. Luckily it didn’t hurt that much and I could still bend my legs without too much pain even though my left knee looked rather injured. There was no blood and it was all white, but within a few minutes it started bleeding.

The funny thing was that my rather unique landing position on the wall had scraped my skin and a lot of my hairs off on the back of my right leg. So when I looked at the wall afterwards it was all white with a rather big hairball on the edge.

I decided to get some return on my investment, i.e. health insurance. So I went to the health service center at UNSW so they could take a look at it. Unfortunately, it meant that I had to terminate Occam’s Protocol until I would be able to lift weights with my legs again.

The results from the experiment can be seen below.

As you can see I gained quite a lot of weight within a short period of time.

From Geek to Freak Initiated

During October I was on my spring break trip and had a visit from my parents, so I wasn’t able to initiate the experiment until November, where I won’t be going anywhere for an extended period of time. So as of the 1^st of November I decided to begin the experiment again. This time, however, I wanted to do the more advanced version of it. So instead of beginning with Occam’s Protocol I decided to initiate ‘From Geek to Freak’. The original experiment is described in Tim Ferriss’ book ‘The 4 Hour Body’, but a short summary can be seen on his blog here: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2007/04/29/from-geek-to-freak-how-i-gained-34-lbs-of-muscle-in-4-weeks/ and the actual exercises can be seen here: http://fourhourworkweek.com/geek-to-freak/. This experiment allowed Tim to gain 34 lbs. (15,4 kg.) of muscle in 4 weeks. I want to test it out and see if it works.

However, just like with Occam’s Protocol the only supplement I will take is ‘Vital Strenght protein powder – Lean muscle growth’. Naturally this is likely to have an effect on my results, which is why I am not targeting 34 lbs. of muscle. Honestly I would be surprised if I gain even 5 kg. especially considering the fact that I have never been able to cross the 70-kg.-threashold for more than 2-3 consecutive days.

Here are the results so far:

EXCHANGE SEMESTER IN SYDNEY 2014 PT. 3

The 11^st of September 2014 at 14:20 at the Village, University of New South Wales, Sydney

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 15  minutes)

Uni and Everyday Life

The following few weeks in Sydney from the 18^th of August (the end of my last blog) I spent quite some time on home work and assignments as I knew I was going to Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within seminar in the beginning of September for 5 full days, so I had to prepare in advance. The uni work isn’t that exciting to write about, so I’ll spare you for the details.

In the evening on the 19^th I went to a free 1-day-event called ‘financial freedom through FX’ with one of the world’s leading forex traders, Greg Secker. I knew in advance this was an event where he would promote his forex trading product and coaching, but I enjoy going to events like these as you always take home something – even though it might just be a small phrase or idea. I went primarily because I myself have an interest in trading (although not forex), and therefore I wanted to get to know his beliefs about trading and copy and adopt them as my own. One of the keys to duplicating another person’s success is to copy their core beliefs. Through my almost 5 years of business schooling I have been taught that it is not possible to beat the market return, however every day there are people around the world who do it. So who do you listen to? I would rather listen to the ones that are actually doing it than those who claim it cannot be done, which is the reason I went to this small event. It was actually really good, and he was also a very great speaker. Now, it is only a maybe 2-hour event, so of course he cannot go into details about what to do, but he sure opened everyone’s mind when he showed how he had made £19.000 in just 4 minutes! Sure he is a sales-person; however his credibility and results speak for themselves. I didn’t sign up for the program, however I did receive some valuable information about his beliefs such as: “To achieve and believe we must spend time in the company of those who are already doing it” and “Anticipation is the mother of all skills in serious money-making” and much more.

On the 21^st I visited another Toastmasters club close to UNSW, and to my surprise I found that Alex from my accounting class was actually a member of this one. The format was very similar to the first club I visited.

I signed up for a parkour class during the semester and the first class was on the 22^nd. It was really fun. We were a group of maybe 10 students and one instructor in his late 20’s. It is a very psychological sport, so whenever he shows you what to do you think ‘that doesn’t look too difficult’ but when it’s your turn your mind goes ‘oh fuck’. The same pattern continued the next couple of weeks in my parkour classes. Even though my 10 years of trampoline training definitely helps, the ironic thing is that I have no problem doing full front and back flips, but a ‘simple’ thing such as jumping over a wall with your hands first cause me quite some trouble. Anyway, I keep practicing. I have 2 parkour classes a week – on Mondays and Fridays.

On the same day I had the experience of being denied access to a bar together with Erik and Emil because we were too drunk according to the security guy at the door. Now I can’t remember if I have ever been denied access after having had less than 6 beers on the excuse of being too drunk. The funny thing was that one of the other security people came over to us just 2 minutes after and told us to go inside or further away as people were sleeping in their hotel rooms just above the bar. Apparently, he could tell we were too drunk, so I doubt this excuse was even valid. Anyway, to be sure to get in you need to bring girls or go in alone. Åsmund, who had definitely been drinking the most, had arrived just a few minutes before us. He had a plastic bag with some clothes in it, and when he had arrived one of the security people asked if he was working in the bar. Åsmund had said yes, and the security person had let him in the employee entrance. When he told the story the next next day, it just confirmed my suspicion that the security people had no idea what they were doing, haha.

The following day I went for dinner with Peter, Åsmund, Erik, and one of Eriks’s friends, Mandy, and her friend, Grace before going to some bars in Newtown.

On the 24^th it was time for the 5 km Sydney Color Run. Fortunately it was located just north of campus, so when I woke up during the morning I decided to run to the starting area. It turned out to be a bit further than expected, so my warm up for the 5 km race was a 4 km run. I met up with Erik, Peter, and Åsmund and we got in line waiting for our turn to start.

There were 20.000 participants all dressed in the same white T-shirt and accessories. Every 3 minutes of so, 1000 new runners started the race. But after the first 30 minutes when it was finally our time to go there were so many people on the track that the 5 km turned into something like 1½ km of running and 3,5 km of walking. There were no time taking or anything like that, so you could just complete the race as you liked. We decided to take a picture after each of the 5 color stations to see the progress, which can be seen below.

 After pink

 After orange

 After blue

 Afterr purple

 After green

When we finished the race the time was only 10:30 AM, so we joined the party in front of the stage where they played music and every now and then made the whole audience do a color throw. A color throw is when everyone in the audience had a pack of color powder and throws it in the air at the same time. It looks amazing, but shortly after you can barely breathe if you are in the middle of it. But it was fun!

In the beginning of the semester I became aware of a student society called university network of trading and investing. And just recently I saw they announced a trading competition in collaboration with Saxo Bank Australia, and I decided to check out their information session and perhaps meet some of the Aussies I had previously sent emails to from my time in Saxo Bank in Copenhagen. The event itself was pretty basic, but I did get to meet 4-5 of the people from the Australian office, however I did not know any of them. But they knew my team back in Copenhagen, so we talked a bit about that and the 2-week-trading-competition.

I have almost finished repairing my bike, and it has taken way more time than originally expected. But the next time I went to the bike club to finish up the rest, the wheel was turned 90 degrees, and I’m thinking ‘WTF?!’. Fortunately, I could easily just turn it back again.

Continuing my experiment to see how much I can batch my life, I wanted to try and experiment with delivery of groceries. So I went online and started shopping on coles.com.au and stated my preferred delivery time. First time shoppers got free delivery and since I didn’t have to carry the stuff myself I put in a huge order of almost $200. Just 2 days later in the morning it was delivered right to my door – so easy and convenient! Definitely something I can recommend, and it also forces you to think in advance what to cook for the week so you don’t have to go shopping several times a week. The only problem with my huge order was that I vastly underestimated the capacity of our freezer. But fortunately one of my flat mates had an extra freezer in which I barely could fit the remainder of my items – so perhaps I should place smaller orders in the future. But a large part of this order was also due to Occam’s Protocol, the 28-experiment I am currently doing, which required some changes in my diet.

On the 2^nd of Sept I visited yet another Toastmasters club called Professional speakers. This day they had a joint meeting with another club so there must have been 30 people or more. This club also started out with 1-minute impromptu speeches. The person leading this part of the evening was not aware that I was a guest so she asked me to join the stage as there were not many volunteers for this speech. I did not expect this at all, since it was my first visit to this club, but I went. She had given me a picture of a tree with some birds on it, and I had to talk about, but I had no idea what to say so I just came up with a fantasy story that I told for maybe 30 seconds before returning to my seat. It wasn’t the best performance but definitely fun and insightful to try.

Crewing Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within

Finally came the days I had been looking forward to for several months: Tony Robbins was coming to Sydney to host his powerful event ‘Unleash the Power Within’. I had attended the same event in London back in March, and because of this I was now eligible to crew the event in the future, so I had applied 3-4 months in advance and had been accepted on the crew team. For those of you who are not familiar with Tony, he is the world’s leading success and peak performance coach, and he has worked together with people from every walk of life from Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana, André Agassi, and US presidents to some of the most challenged people on earth.

The event itself runs for around 50 hours over the course of 4 days, but the crew also met for an information session on the 4^th of Sept. one day before the event. I think we must have been more than 100 people crewing the event aged between 20 to 75. The first day was pretty much just some basic information about what we were going to do during the event, but meeting all these people who had previously attended Tony’s UPW event was a gift in itself. Everyone on the crew team had given up their time and pushed past obstacles in order to serve and contribute to the more than 3000 participants and help them create changes and transform their lives over the course of the weekend. Just being in this kind of environment surrounded by these kinds and types of people was very unique and rewarding. In this group there were no limitations in life and people supported each other in a way I have never seen or felt anywhere before. To give you a metaphor, they were probably some of the spiritually youngest people in life, who saw the whole donut and not just the hole in the middle as most other people do. When we finished Thursday and I went to bed, my alarm said just 4½ hours since we were meeting again Friday morning at 7 AM.

Friday was the first official day of seminar, and after having done all the preparations in the morning, the 3000 participants started arriving at 9AM. It was quite early as the event didn’t start until 1 PM, but Tony attracts a lot of people and most everyone wants the best possible seats so they stand in line for several hours. It was interesting to see the participants and feel the energy in the room when they arrived. A lot of them were a bit uncertain why they were here, what they could expect, and most of them only talked to the people they arrived together with. But this surely changed already after the first day.

Finally the music started and the dancers went on stage and got the whole audience engaged by having them do the same moves as the dancers. After a short 10-minutes-dance Tony himself made his impressive entrance on stage. He is amazing to watch on stage and even form a far distance you can easily tell he is a very very tall and big man. I wish I could report everything he shared during the event but that would be too long a blog. I will however share this important piece of information form Tony: ‘The quality of your life is determined by the emotions you experience on a regular basis”. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, how successful you are etc. If you keep living with feelings of depression, frustration, stress, and anger, then that is how you will be living and experiencing your life.

Day 1 – The Fire Walk

Friday night is particularly known for the famous fire walk that Tony has all the participants do. The crew team was split in 2 on this day – one group called the fire crew and the other the event crew. The fire crew spent almost the entire day preparing for the fire walk until around 10 or 11 PM when Tony had prepared the participants for the walk.

On stage Tony prepares the audience for the fire walk mentally, physically, and spiritually for several hours, while the crew practices their individual roles during the fire walk. Around 20 minutes before the audience is ready everyone from the crew is in their position and ready to begin the fire walk. Almost 150 people including coaches, trainers, and security were waiting in their positions at the 16 lanes that were set up before the doors opened and 3000 participants all came rushing out ready for their fire walk. The fire walk is a much more a mental game than a physical one, and one must use specific strategies and tools to keep the mind focused on the task and not let the inner voice and self doubt take over your state. Therefore Tony teaches the audience to clap and say yes while waiting in line, so all 3000 people were just clapping and screaming ‘yes!’ – it was beautiful! Then Tony joined from one of the back doors and got in position at one of the lanes and said ‘Let the games begin’. This was the clue for the trainers and himself to test the fire walk by first walking it themselves. After this the game was on and the 3000 participants stormed across the fire one by one. When you have 16 lanes, that means almost 200 people are crossing your lane and I got to see how everyone of them dealt with the fire walk – something most people considered impossible before coming to the event. I saw children aged 5 and adults ages 80 walk the fire walk. It was amazing to see the transformation that happened in those people’s lives right there, and also see how well people dealt with the inner voice inside their head while still conditioning their body to perform ‘the impossible’. After all the participant had had their turn, everyone from the crew had an opportunity to try it. Obviously we didn’t have Tony to prepare us for the event, but since all the crew members had previously attended his seminar and done the fire walk it was assumed that we didn’t need any coaching. I had done it before and I knew also that I could do it again, but still the voice inside my head went ‘Are you sure?’. I waited in line and when it was my turn I made my power move, screamed yes, and blasted to the other side of the fire before celebrating my victory! Wow, it’s amazing, fun, and incredibly addictive. It was such an addictive energy boost that I had to do it again – partly to experience the feeling again but more importantly to see how fast I could condition myself for another fire walk. I ended up walking 3 times in total feeling more alive and energized than almost ever before.

Day 2-4

The rest of the seminar was just as amazing as the first day and consisted of quite a lot of crew things to do but also participating in the seminar. Saturday was the day where Tony’s head speaker, Joseph, among other things taught the participants the ultimate success formula which is:

1. Know your outcome
2. Know your reasons why
3. Take massive action
4. Notice your results
5. Change your approach

A more detailed description can be found here: http://training.tonyrobbins.com/the-ultimate-success-formula/

Sunday Tony was back again for ‘Transformation Day’. This is probably the most powerful day of the whole event – and for most people it far surpasses the fire walk. This is the day where Tony smashes the participants limiting beliefs and shows them what is possible in this world – which is anything. He does so through a powerful 4-hour-long emotional process he calls ‘Dickens’. I won’t go into details and rob you of this amazing experience should you choose to attend one of his UPW events. During this day Tony also shares lessons and stories from his own life to show the participants what is possible and open their minds to another world of endless possibilities. E.g. he tells his story how he came from nothing and now is privileged enough to charge more than $1.000.000 for 12 hours of his own coaching time – and there is an 18-months-waiting list. The reason he can do this is because he produces immediate results.

Towards the end of Saturday Tony asks all crew members to join him on stage to receive recognition for our contribution and he shakes everyone’s hands.

This is the closest I have ever been and he is even bigger than I expected. He must be 210 cm tall, size 50 in shoes, and well over 100 kg. After the event we all went to the crew room where Tony showed up shortly after and we got a group photo with him (unfortunately I haven’t received this photo yet).

On my way home this night I decided to cross along the curb (kantsten) on my bike instead of across which resulted in my getting thrown off the bike and landing on the sidewalk on my left hips and hands. Fortunately nothing bad happened and I was able to continue my way home, however the next morning it did hurt a bit more, but I could still function properly.

On Monday Joseph covered the keys to a vital life and how to operate on an unlimited amount of energy in your life. This included everything from exercise, food, breathing, and much more. This day is likely to be the day where most people’s beliefs and assumptions are questioned the most regarding their own health and well being. They teach you what actually breaks down the body and causes it to age faster, and how you instead can keep the body in balance and enjoy seemingly limitless energy. Obviously I cannot report all the lessons they shared this day since there are way too many. However, as they teach, you should consider your own health the most important subject of your life, because without the energy to perform and do what you want, what else have we got? Tony for instance is 54 years old, but says he has more energy and feels more vibrant and alive than when he was 20. One important distinction they make is whether your body burns sugar or fat. Most people burn sugar, which is similar to a short burst in energy, whereas burning fat is like burning coals – it keeps going and going. After my 28-day Occam’s Protocol experiment I will train my body to burn fat and feel and experience the results.

After the event most of us went to the Novotel bar afterwards to say goodbye to each other. Here I had the opportunity to talk to some of the trainers and senior leaders and ask them about their lives and the impact Tony has had on them. I spoke to one of the trainers, Kym, and she told me that see could see me become one of the senior leaders one day. Honestly, I barely had had a chance to talk to her during the event but her words encouraged me almost more than anything else during the weekend. So thank you, Kym!

All in all it was an amazing event and definitely worth crewing. Tony will be returning to London in March where I will be applying for crew once again.

First Mid-term Exam

I made it back to the Village late Monday night and had a mid-term exam Tuesday the 10^th. During the last 5-6 nights I had slept an average of just 5 hours, but because I had to get up and study for my exam I couldn’t even sleep much more this night. So I woke up and started studying. I only had 1½ to study and learn everything by heart from the first 6 weeks of school. It seemed like way too little time but I just looked through the lecturer’s slides and a little in my notes before I had to go. I was a bit late and when I found the room I thought was the right one I wondered why I was the only one there. Apparently it turned out that I was 1 hour ahead of time, so that just gave me another 40 minutes to study, which was good. It was a multiple choice exam and it wasn’t too bad at all. Interestingly, the difficulty of exams at CBS seems much greater than here at UNSW (and also University of Texas) even though the UNSW business school is supposedly one of the best in Australia. It went quite well based on the amount of time I had put in, but let’s wait and see if the result says the same.

Occam’s Protocol – Part 1

The 31^st of August at 22:30 at the Village, University of New South Wales, Sydney

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

 

Occam’s Protocol

This blog is different from my previous blogs in that the purpose of this blog is to document and track my progress during the 28-day-experiment I initiated yesterday. I have come across and been Inspired by Timothy Ferriss’ book ‘The 4-Hour Body’. The easiest way to explain what Tim does is to describe him as a human guinea pig and one of the world’s best in the field of meta-learning, which is the ability to learn anything. This ability which he has pursued has allowed him to learn several languages fluently, win a national kickboxing championship, set a guinness world record in tango, and much more. All within just a few months starting from ground zero. He puts all sorts of experiments to the test whether it’s within business, the human body, skills, abilities, and learning. It doesn’t matter what conventional wisdom says, he pursues other ways of doing things.

In the 4 Hour Body and on his blog he writes about an experiment he did himself and how he gained almost 15 kg muscle within 28 days – he called it ‘From Geek to Freak’. The online blog can be found at (http://fourhourworkweek.com/2007/04/29/from-geek-to-freak-how-i-gained-34-lbs-of-muscle-in-4-weeks/). I read it and I was quite surprised that it would actually be possible to gain that much weight in such a short period of time. But then again, I have been surprised so many times previously about what’s possible in this world, so I figured I wanted to try it out (if it works I will be saving myself a lot of time and effort in the gym in the future). I have the book in my room which describes everything in a little more detail, but the blog describes it in very short and specific points. In the book he recommends people to start out with ‘Occam’s Protocol: A Minimalist Approach to Mass’. ‘From geek to freak’ is more advanced and something you can do after having done Occam’s Protocol. For this reason I am not targeting a 15 kg muscle gain within the next 4 weeks since I, at least for now, am starting out with Occam’s Protocol. Instead the goal is probably rather around 4-5 kg within 28 days. But 4-5 kg would not be bad considering my weight hasn’t changed within the last 4+ years.

 

Complicate to Profit, Minimize to Grow

At least that’s what one of the quotes in the book says. In the following section I will document all the information about my experiment prior to starting it. The experiment runs for 28 days and involves 2 different workouts, A and B. Both workout A and B consist of just 2 or 3 exercises (the 3^rd is optional, but I do 3 exercises in both A and B). I began the experiment yesterday where I should have been working out, but when I went to the gym in the evening it had already closed, so I worked out this morning instead. My planned workout schedule can be seen below; however, changes might occur as I am crewing Tony Robbins’ seminar from Thursday morning until Monday evening where I won’t be able to work out and I am going on my spring break trip on the 26^th of September. So the conditions of my experiment isn’t completely according to the book, but I don’t think it should have any major influence that I start out with a 3-day-rest-period between workouts instead of 2, which Occam’s Protocol describes.

Below is information and measurements taken on the morning of the 30^th of August (Day 1):

 

And finally the before pictures:

 

I suppose that is everything for now. And just an important note to make: The only supplement I will consume during my experiment is ‘Vital Strenght protein powder – Lean muscle growth’ as well as protein bars.

 

Stay tuned for my regular blogs as well as updates on my experiment. You can also sign up at the bottom of this site to receive an email whenever I post something.