From Monday to Friday you can always find me in my corporate world, sitting at my desk, from 9 AM to 5 PM, maybe sometimes even 6 PM or later. With around 20 days of annual leave and fewer national holidays, I can say I have a limitation when it comes to travel. I have friends that travel for a living, and I wish I could say I envy them, but the truth is, I don’t, I like my life as it is right now. Probably most of you are in similar situations, or maybe not yet, but for sure what makes me a bit special is this amazing journey that allows me to see as much as a human can possibly see on this planet. This is not easy of course, but you can almost always find me researching destinations and planning what to see and where to go, dreaming and buying tickets with months in advance. Hong Kong is the best example, I came home one day after I saw around 4 PM an offer for plane tickets: Amsterdam-Hong Kong for 359 EUR and I just bought them that very same day, even if I boarded the plane 9 months later.

Luckily for you, my dear reader, I decided to share all my stories with you. Why? Because from my point of view there are only a few things that can satisfy the soul as good as sharing an experience that you lived on your own can do it. If you ever felt that you might cry of happiness because of a wonderful landscape in front of you, or if you have ever been in the midst of a conversation and while telling the story of what happened in your summer trip your cheeks started to burn in flames of emotions, then for sure you understand just what things deserve the full storytelling from me.

MY STORY

I started almost 10 years ago when I first left the country without my parents to spend the Easter holidays in Bulgaria. I waited around 4 hours to cross the border and I promised myself one day I will have a passport full of stamps and this will be something super far away to remember. Just 2 years later, I was boarding for the first time in a plane to cross the ocean to live for a year in Miami. It was a new world, I got the travel bug and I almost didn’t want to come back to my home country.

So far, I have visited 32 countries, but I don’t count them, to be honest, I am writing this number for you, not for me, to encourage you. Me? I prefer to keep track of the moments and experiences which I want to share with everyone that is still undecided if they should travel or not.

What is my secret when it comes to trips with less money? I have an interesting theory and I strongly believe that the budget of a trip varies depending on your traveling mentality.

You can be the type of vacationer, focused on her/himself, who comes on holiday with the thought of spoiling her/himself, satisfying all her/his cravings "because she/he is finally on a vacation".

The second profile is that of the traveler; she/he takes the trip to discover the outside world and of course, she/he is willing to pay only for experiences fully aware that she/he will never get the same feeling anywhere else. Well, the traveler can spend two times less compared to the vacationer on the same trip.

If your profile matches the on of the vacationer type, my advice is at least to reserve everything in advance, through all-inclusive packages. You're far better this way!

If your profile is more of a traveler, some tips: plan, plan, plan! Book your tickets early; organize your tours on your own (when possible); get affordable accommodation and as much as possible with breakfast included; eating at the restaurants frequented by locals; do not buy all the souvenirs that come your way!

I also want to speak about the elephant looming in the room: people always try to find excuses on why they don’t travel. Honestly, I am surprised to realize that there are really no real barriers (such as situations where you do not afford it financially, at all); most often it is just about mentality and the desire to stay in the comfort zone, so my dear reader, please go and book that ticket you are thinking about for months. I want to point out something important here – you don’t need to travel from Europe to Asia or from the US to Australia, you can just go to the town next to yours, or visit your own country just as a foreigner would do it.

By traveling I realized that the limitations and constraints we put to ourselves are just our own fault and that we are actually free to choose what we feel, what we think it’s good for us and it’s actually each and every one of us’ duty to live our lives as we want and consider that it is best for us.

That's why I try to be as free as possible, to explore as much of the places I expect to discover and know the people there, to live my life fully. In every trip that I take, I think to myself: if given the opportunity to live there, would I like it? Would I want to move there for a year or two? Why?

That's what you want in the end, isn’t it?