Whiplash! $60,000 in 13 years

If you haven’t already seen “Whiplash”, the movie about a kid grinding his way seeking to earn the respect of his teacher, I recommend it.

How far can you push yourself?

Watching this movie reminds me a part of my life where I was won a 60K AUD (50K USD) scholarship from a state University in Australia.  Now you must be thinking how is this related to Whiplash?  You see, in Whiplash the kid was really competing not with others, not with his teacher, but himself.  Except mine was a lot longer than a 2 hour movie.  It’s a 13 year journey through time and space.  The journey called education, and the journey of oneself.

Helsinki, Turku, Happy Lunar New Year!

These past couple of days I spent some time in Helsinki and Turku.  Helsinki I'm no stranger to, I've been there maybe five or six times now.  It's an awesome city, the Finnish are simply incredible at design and that resonates with me.  Turku in its hay day used to be the capital of Finland, now they have approximately 175 000 residents living there and from the looks of it, a substantial student population during the day I was there.  It's about 200km away from Helsinki and buses and trains run there pretty often.

This time I visited the Natural History Museum, National Museum, went x-country skiing in Paloheinä, Turku Castle, Turku Cathedral and also did a countdown of Chinese New Year from Kamppi.  Plus ate a lot of food of course.

Happy New Year 2015 adios 2014!

Wow what a year!  So much has happened!  2014 was an utterly fantastic year.  I visited Malta, the US, Russia, Spain, the Czech Republic, Finland, Latvia, Spain and of course Norway.  Some of these countries more than once!  In Malta I got to see artefacts older than the pyramids and experience beautiful landscapes.  In the US I went venture capital fundraising in California and visited the inside offices of Twitter and even got to pitch to a person working in Mithril Capital, billionaire Peter Thiel’s (founder of Paypal) fund, walked past the offices of Mozilla, got an accidental tour of Google, and had a stopover at LinkedIn, ate clam chowder (again!), rode a bike over the Golden Gate bridge and (finally after years!) went to watch the incredible Wicked play in New York.  In Finland and Latvia I visited castles, fortresses, went on forest hikes, and went to a countryside wedding.  In Russia I went to majestic palaces and mountains.  In Spain I visited the unique architecture and art of Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and the sandy beaches of Alicante.  In Czech Republic I re-visited the Charles Bridge, Prague Castle, saw the origins of Škoda in the town of Mladá Boleslav and ate tasty duck several days in a row.  In Norway I went forest hiking and mountain climbing.  There’s so much beauty and amazing things to see and learn in this world, yet the majority are more concerned with the trivialities of life.