Not much time left. What is definitely going to be my biggest and longest trip will begin on Monday and I am still not completely done with my preparations. I don't even have a place to sleep yet.
After my long stay in Madrid I left Spain, after some not so nice things. Finally free from all the mad rental situations I was still waiting forever for my last (and seriously terrible) landlady to pay back the security. Finally when I was already considering legal options and after a last (unanswered) mail she paid up and I thought things would go a bit smoother now. However I waited a bit long since I was considering to go visit one last city in Europe before leaving the continent. In the end I booked a flight with three stops and almost 40 hours in total.
When I finally did that I filled out the Visa application and learnt that I had to do a chest x-ray and send the image to the immigration office within 15 days. This is a tough deadline since the image has to go around half of the world and I had to get an appointment to get it done first. All that just because I travelled too much within the last 5 years.
The other thing is that you have to go to one of the doctors on the list you get from the immigration office. So I also had quite some distance to cover just to get to the doctor. My appointment was last Tuesday and I got up at 5:15 to be able to make it because the only bus connection on time was rather early. Then waiting at the bus stop for ever.. There were two girls waiting with me and said I'll go into the airport(the bus stop is at an airport) and ask. I go in and ask around finally at the information booth the clerk called the bus company. When I looked out I didn't see the girls anymore..
The clerk asked me whether I really had been all this time and if others were waiting there. It seems the people at the bus company were confused(they didn't even know about it) about the missing bus as well, but said it should come soon. I went out and was worried that I missed the bus, because the girls had disappeared and just when I was about to give up a bus came .. and the girls came out of the airport. We thinking this was the bus waited for the people to leave and then approached the bus.. With the driver promptly telling us that this was not the bus we were looking for. A similar exchange to the one with the clerk ensued.
The driver then called the company again aaaand told us .. the bus would come soon and then there was an accident and the other driver had just called in a bit late. After more waiting a bus came, but they told us the driver would come later it was just so we could wait in the bus. Then a driver came who drove us to the company headquater where the final driver then entered to tell us the truth:"This is the first time that I overslept this year!". I thought to myself "the first time? so the plan is for more times?" This(admitting it) was obviously not very bright of him to do, because this meant the company was liable in case someone would have gone legal. I was just annoyed that I got up so early just to wait at a bus stop, because a slightly later start would have been perfect for me, well now it was a lot later.
When I finally arrived I didn't have enough time to get to the appointment on time having a relaxed walk instead I had to rush through the city and arrived 2-4 minutes because I didn't find the proper entrance to the hospital immediately. Then I had to wait a short moment and was called, entered the room, stripped down, got roasted in the radiation and then left to wait more. I guess that was about a minute. I waited 10 more to get the image and results and left. The image is huge so my plan was to go to the post office and send it off then visit the city a bit. So 1 1/2 hour later I found a sign at the door of the post office, which said: "We are closed today". They randomly decided to close on the Tuesday I wanted to send off something urgently. Oh well that was to be expected. I scrapped my plan, looked for something to eat, after a while gave up and took the first thing I had seen.
Then I went to the trainstation passed some time there and ultimately went for the next bus back. On arrival I went to the local post office and they didn't have a fitting envelope, then after a short odyssey through the whole settlement a foto store had something accpetable that they would have thrown away. So then just on time before the office closed I managed to send it off for a whopping 42 €uros. Add the X-ray and bus etc. That's a 100 €uros extra because I was honest. (the whole thing is a bit odd though it's to prove that you don't have tuberculosis, but then if they exepect someone to be honest about giving all this data in order to judge someone to be risky, then why the hell don't they just ask for signs of tbc directly, because if you wanted to lie about it you'd do it in the first step and avoid all this costly mess.)
Now I am waiting to see if the image arrives on time. If not I'll have to pay a lot more to redo the chest x-ray along with other examinations.
Another requirement is a health insurance and of course everybody knows that insurerers do everything to not do their job so you should research carefully... but at that point I was just out of time and tired of it all and just read through two different contract text. So without much further ado I just took the cheaper one was done with it.
I can't wait for the flight and it seems I'll be eligible for Dubai Connect, which means I get a free stay at a hotel there while waiting for my next flight.
Friday 29 November 2013
Sunday 24 November 2013
How not to prepare for backpacking ..getting to know 'uncle rhabdo'
A while ago I thought hey, since I'll be traveling again and since I am my own mule it would appear smart to do some ..physical.. preparations. Being an office slave does not have the benefits of being a quarry kind of slave, i.e. you don't become super muscular and start on a quest to destroy the empire of your enslaver to then found your own kingdom.
So I thought it would be beneficial to do something for my back. Having done all this taxing mental work I retired the idea. However randomly a colleague was getting scared of his belly protruding too much and asked me if I wanted to join in with his program. I thought the stars had obviously aligned(but didn't check..!) and this was to be the first step to godhood. As such I agreed already seeing myself wielding .... insanely oversized backpacks. Of course the program was targeting the whole body, but I thought that was an acceptable price to pay and the people in the program plan with every muscle chiseled out didn't succeed to scare me off even though they do look exhausted and out of breath. The colleague assured me that he had started the program before, but then got sidetracked and that the insane amount of repetitions was ok.
After some delays we started midweek and then started all over again the following week. I was sceptical of training over sore muscles etc.. but yeah my colleague had done it before and it's all just bodyweight exercises. So that all went fine until we hit week three of the program.
That was the first time we were supposed to do pullups and 50 pullups at that. Now I thought like: "WTF!?!" .. but yeah colleague ..before. So we went ahead and I just went through with it, surprised it didn't seem as bad as expected. Then during the following 100 pushups, I started to not be able to go for the full range of motion anymore, i.e. I couldn't press myself up completely anymore. According to my colleague the fun would just begin with the sore muscles and that we would resemble T-Rexes. Indeed that was what happened, walking around with arms in a 90° angle, because that was the only option, but then this didn't go away and at some point we suddenly had swollen arms. It looked a bit like we suddenly had gone massively overweight.. in our arms only, but even then there would be some kind of arm shape whereas we looked more like we had some kind of stuffed to the brim giant sausages on our sides.
It took three weeks to disappear all in all I think and foolishly at some point we exercised even with those arms a few times.
So after some point we found out that this most likely had been rhabdomyolisis and we could have suffered renal failure and died.
In other words we had gone too far and caused too much damage to the muscles. Now it turns out this is not uncommon in the so called crossfit scene where this has been dubbed 'uncle rhabdo'. While some people have a disposition for this, the common technique to induce it via execrcise is copious amounts of negative repetitions. Pullups are one of the most efficient means of acquisition.
Of course after this I have completely lost motivation to continue this program ("freeletics") since the program motivates people to keep going no matter what and that everybody could do it. There was no warning at all. For people reading this but who still want to continue their high volume training, please be careful and maybe limit the amount of additional negative only reptitions to no more than the amount full repitions you can do (i.e. 10 full + 10 negative repetitions). Also even if your program says so, don't go with insane amounts of repetitions for a new exercise, instead work your way up. Should you desire to kill yourself, there are way better ways than renal failure!
Now after that it took forever(more than a month) for me to be able to do even a single pullup again, and I am not yet back to the way I was before(in amount of pullups).
So I learned from this, that people I barely know see me walking around all the time in the city(with sausage arms), whereas I rarely see anyone. Further I am weird because others doing this kind of exercising say they feel so great after completing on of those workouts whereas I am just glad it's over. I also don't quite understand how people enjoy to inflict this kind of torture on themselves - what's the fun in having sore muscles every day? And what's the point of all this training when you never have the strength left to do other things after a session?
So I thought it would be beneficial to do something for my back. Having done all this taxing mental work I retired the idea. However randomly a colleague was getting scared of his belly protruding too much and asked me if I wanted to join in with his program. I thought the stars had obviously aligned(but didn't check..!) and this was to be the first step to godhood. As such I agreed already seeing myself wielding .... insanely oversized backpacks. Of course the program was targeting the whole body, but I thought that was an acceptable price to pay and the people in the program plan with every muscle chiseled out didn't succeed to scare me off even though they do look exhausted and out of breath. The colleague assured me that he had started the program before, but then got sidetracked and that the insane amount of repetitions was ok.
After some delays we started midweek and then started all over again the following week. I was sceptical of training over sore muscles etc.. but yeah my colleague had done it before and it's all just bodyweight exercises. So that all went fine until we hit week three of the program.
That was the first time we were supposed to do pullups and 50 pullups at that. Now I thought like: "WTF!?!" .. but yeah colleague ..before. So we went ahead and I just went through with it, surprised it didn't seem as bad as expected. Then during the following 100 pushups, I started to not be able to go for the full range of motion anymore, i.e. I couldn't press myself up completely anymore. According to my colleague the fun would just begin with the sore muscles and that we would resemble T-Rexes. Indeed that was what happened, walking around with arms in a 90° angle, because that was the only option, but then this didn't go away and at some point we suddenly had swollen arms. It looked a bit like we suddenly had gone massively overweight.. in our arms only, but even then there would be some kind of arm shape whereas we looked more like we had some kind of stuffed to the brim giant sausages on our sides.
It took three weeks to disappear all in all I think and foolishly at some point we exercised even with those arms a few times.
So after some point we found out that this most likely had been rhabdomyolisis and we could have suffered renal failure and died.
In other words we had gone too far and caused too much damage to the muscles. Now it turns out this is not uncommon in the so called crossfit scene where this has been dubbed 'uncle rhabdo'. While some people have a disposition for this, the common technique to induce it via execrcise is copious amounts of negative repetitions. Pullups are one of the most efficient means of acquisition.
Of course after this I have completely lost motivation to continue this program ("freeletics") since the program motivates people to keep going no matter what and that everybody could do it. There was no warning at all. For people reading this but who still want to continue their high volume training, please be careful and maybe limit the amount of additional negative only reptitions to no more than the amount full repitions you can do (i.e. 10 full + 10 negative repetitions). Also even if your program says so, don't go with insane amounts of repetitions for a new exercise, instead work your way up. Should you desire to kill yourself, there are way better ways than renal failure!
Now after that it took forever(more than a month) for me to be able to do even a single pullup again, and I am not yet back to the way I was before(in amount of pullups).
So I learned from this, that people I barely know see me walking around all the time in the city(with sausage arms), whereas I rarely see anyone. Further I am weird because others doing this kind of exercising say they feel so great after completing on of those workouts whereas I am just glad it's over. I also don't quite understand how people enjoy to inflict this kind of torture on themselves - what's the fun in having sore muscles every day? And what's the point of all this training when you never have the strength left to do other things after a session?
Tuesday 5 November 2013
Camino de Santiago: Day Zero
So the train started and I quickly realized that sleep was going to be hard to come by that night. Uncomfortable seating, people talking loudly and then ... a baby ... the edition that screams .. a lot ... and that is the story of that night. I sat there, drank water, fell asleep for brief moments but largely stayed awake sipping away the water from one of the many bottles of water I carried in my way too oversized backpack for the camino.
I mustered people in the train and identified a girl who looked like a professional/seasoned camino hiker with walking stick and everything. Also people in the train were talking about the fact that this train was used by the peregrinos(pilgrims) and somehow my backpack betrayed me, so I was labelled as one of them.
Finally the time of arrival was approaching and I put my five fingers on. Since I had never really worn them for longer periods of time(I basically had just bought them) I thought it was wise to have a pair of regular shoes with me especially considering all the warnings that as a beginner you shouldn't wear them for extended per..blalala.
I was ready to go and the train soon came to a stop. It was 6 am and dark. Most of the people who left the train headed to the cafeteria at the station. Mistrusting as I am of places close to 'people hubs' I thought a tea would be nice, but it would be horrible and overpriced in that place and I kind of wanted to get started as well so I got out my pile of printed out pages describing the camino and thought: "Oooops, maybe I should have done some kind of preparation"(I literally just printed out that guide - not reading it - and bought tickets. It didn't say anywhere where it starts.
I decided to just walk on, but after following a dark road for a while I thought that this was possibly not the best approach and decided to head back to the peregrinos who were chilling in the cafeteria. Luckily the professional looking girl from earlier was about to leave and after pondering that it would seem weird to silently stalk a girl down a dark street .. I bested my fears of getting into a crazy religious debate about my lost soul and chatted her up in a very sparse way with my broken Spanish. She turned out to be from Madrid as well and had a good pace for a girl.
Further she had attempted the camino before and had to give up after a while, saying that she hadn't been properly prepared. Another oooooops-moment. I started to be worried, but it was just walking! I In the end however she didn't really know where it started either and we just pressed on cluelessly for a bit, finally we walked around in the streets until we encountered someone who was able to give us directions.
Following those directions I realized that my initial dark street was spot on.
We left the village and suddenly encountered a lot of walking christmas trees ... walking in our direction. Hmm something was not right here they were peregrinos coming from where we were headed... ok we gave in and asked them and yup same plan, only they were obviously christmas trees. In the end we followed their light and noticed that we missed a little bridge to the right. Darkness began to be driven away by the sun so we surpassed the christmas trees and were able to see the markings of the camino, a stylized scallop.
After walking for a while my trapezius muscle began to hurt since the whole weight of the backpack weighed on it, but I didn't want to adjust the straps, so I fought against the pain by holding the backpack up with my thumbs and shifting it around to not have the same area affected the whole time.
We passed a chatty old lady who seemed interesting to talk to, but alas the professional pilgrim girl I had chosen as a walking partner didn't seem willing to talk to people, so I gave up on conversation attempts.
We arrived in a small village and the girl told me we had to get stamps, also her father came from there. Another thing I had no clue about, you have to get at least three stamps inbetween albergues in order to be allowed to use a public albergue. Good thing I hadn't dashed on on my own... For a moment I panicked since I didn't find that pilgrims passport I had to buy in Madrid, but thankfully it showed up after some searching. I also saw that I was already one stamp short, everyone else got one in the cafeteria. Oops again. We got our stamps and kept walking past a lot of people.
Finally I thought the pain was getting too much and .. I adjusted the straps. Woah awesome. I could have avoided a whole lot of pain, but at least now I just had to survive this day and the next day would be better. So we walked on and I think we didn't really rest even once. Then roadside advertisements began to appear advertising hot and 'deserved' showers after all this hard walking and even massages. At that point I began to realize how big an industry this whole St. James way thing is, especially in this first stage(afterwards a whole lot of people realize that walking is too much of an effort).
Finally we arrived in Portomarín and uh my quiet companion headed to the funky looking church.
I was afraid that this would be a religious moment and she would start to talk about faith, but luckily she just entered for a moment and kept to her regular quiet self. I think we arrived at the albergue about an hour earlier before it opened, but there were like 4 people before us and we all had to neatly line our backpacks up so that everyone got his rightful spot in the line to get the abono for the albergue. When it opened I was quite surprised at how many beds there were in one room. It might have been 40. Since we were among the first we were able to pick and I decided to pick an upper one in the far corner of the room, wisely thinking that that way I would avoid having the noise of someone above me(although I had heard that on the camino you'd get so tired that you'd be sound asleep no matter what).
A little group of Italians arrived after us carrying an ukulele, yup the typical kind of 'artist' using an instrument in order to score girls. So they sat outside doing their little show to harvest the attention of most of the girls, forming a party to besiege the village. Well this was the part I was utterly unprepared for, whole afternoons of nothing to do in small villages. I had a book and sought refuge in my bed reading a scifi story. Then I received a few angry SMS from the person I care most about(making me be worried for the rest of the trip) and afterwards checked out the village a bit. Being hungry I tried a pilgrim's menu -expecting a fulfilling and savoury meal - and ended up with a weird joke of a meal (it was a small portion of spaghettis with ketchup and a fried egg).
Somehow I got into conversation with a 'bicigrino' which is a pilgrim on bike who told me it was awesome to do by bike you just have to cover twice the distance every day. Then I went out to finish my book(unfortunately) at some point my quiet companion showed up and we went to a small supermarket to buy food for the evening and morning and she told me she loved cold cuts and asked me whether I liked them as well. I found that to be an odd question, because what the hell it's a category of food. I then decided to 'rest' and in the bedroom overheard the Italian gang planing to party and keeping a window open to overcome the curfew. For a brief moment I considered to be mean and close the window but then thought that I couldn't be that cruel and so decided to ignore it.
Little was I to know about the menace that would bring over my nighttime.
I mustered people in the train and identified a girl who looked like a professional/seasoned camino hiker with walking stick and everything. Also people in the train were talking about the fact that this train was used by the peregrinos(pilgrims) and somehow my backpack betrayed me, so I was labelled as one of them.
Finally the time of arrival was approaching and I put my five fingers on. Since I had never really worn them for longer periods of time(I basically had just bought them) I thought it was wise to have a pair of regular shoes with me especially considering all the warnings that as a beginner you shouldn't wear them for extended per..blalala.
I was ready to go and the train soon came to a stop. It was 6 am and dark. Most of the people who left the train headed to the cafeteria at the station. Mistrusting as I am of places close to 'people hubs' I thought a tea would be nice, but it would be horrible and overpriced in that place and I kind of wanted to get started as well so I got out my pile of printed out pages describing the camino and thought: "Oooops, maybe I should have done some kind of preparation"(I literally just printed out that guide - not reading it - and bought tickets. It didn't say anywhere where it starts.
I decided to just walk on, but after following a dark road for a while I thought that this was possibly not the best approach and decided to head back to the peregrinos who were chilling in the cafeteria. Luckily the professional looking girl from earlier was about to leave and after pondering that it would seem weird to silently stalk a girl down a dark street .. I bested my fears of getting into a crazy religious debate about my lost soul and chatted her up in a very sparse way with my broken Spanish. She turned out to be from Madrid as well and had a good pace for a girl.
Further she had attempted the camino before and had to give up after a while, saying that she hadn't been properly prepared. Another oooooops-moment. I started to be worried, but it was just walking! I In the end however she didn't really know where it started either and we just pressed on cluelessly for a bit, finally we walked around in the streets until we encountered someone who was able to give us directions.
Following those directions I realized that my initial dark street was spot on.
We left the village and suddenly encountered a lot of walking christmas trees ... walking in our direction. Hmm something was not right here they were peregrinos coming from where we were headed... ok we gave in and asked them and yup same plan, only they were obviously christmas trees. In the end we followed their light and noticed that we missed a little bridge to the right. Darkness began to be driven away by the sun so we surpassed the christmas trees and were able to see the markings of the camino, a stylized scallop.
After walking for a while my trapezius muscle began to hurt since the whole weight of the backpack weighed on it, but I didn't want to adjust the straps, so I fought against the pain by holding the backpack up with my thumbs and shifting it around to not have the same area affected the whole time.
We passed a chatty old lady who seemed interesting to talk to, but alas the professional pilgrim girl I had chosen as a walking partner didn't seem willing to talk to people, so I gave up on conversation attempts.
We arrived in a small village and the girl told me we had to get stamps, also her father came from there. Another thing I had no clue about, you have to get at least three stamps inbetween albergues in order to be allowed to use a public albergue. Good thing I hadn't dashed on on my own... For a moment I panicked since I didn't find that pilgrims passport I had to buy in Madrid, but thankfully it showed up after some searching. I also saw that I was already one stamp short, everyone else got one in the cafeteria. Oops again. We got our stamps and kept walking past a lot of people.
Finally I thought the pain was getting too much and .. I adjusted the straps. Woah awesome. I could have avoided a whole lot of pain, but at least now I just had to survive this day and the next day would be better. So we walked on and I think we didn't really rest even once. Then roadside advertisements began to appear advertising hot and 'deserved' showers after all this hard walking and even massages. At that point I began to realize how big an industry this whole St. James way thing is, especially in this first stage(afterwards a whole lot of people realize that walking is too much of an effort).
Finally we arrived in Portomarín and uh my quiet companion headed to the funky looking church.
A little group of Italians arrived after us carrying an ukulele, yup the typical kind of 'artist' using an instrument in order to score girls. So they sat outside doing their little show to harvest the attention of most of the girls, forming a party to besiege the village. Well this was the part I was utterly unprepared for, whole afternoons of nothing to do in small villages. I had a book and sought refuge in my bed reading a scifi story. Then I received a few angry SMS from the person I care most about(making me be worried for the rest of the trip) and afterwards checked out the village a bit. Being hungry I tried a pilgrim's menu -expecting a fulfilling and savoury meal - and ended up with a weird joke of a meal (it was a small portion of spaghettis with ketchup and a fried egg).
Somehow I got into conversation with a 'bicigrino' which is a pilgrim on bike who told me it was awesome to do by bike you just have to cover twice the distance every day. Then I went out to finish my book(unfortunately) at some point my quiet companion showed up and we went to a small supermarket to buy food for the evening and morning and she told me she loved cold cuts and asked me whether I liked them as well. I found that to be an odd question, because what the hell it's a category of food. I then decided to 'rest' and in the bedroom overheard the Italian gang planing to party and keeping a window open to overcome the curfew. For a brief moment I considered to be mean and close the window but then thought that I couldn't be that cruel and so decided to ignore it.
Little was I to know about the menace that would bring over my nighttime.
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