#0 Reboot – Sometimes I don’t know who I am

If you look at the last post before this one, you will see that it has been over a year ago. It was supposed to be the start of a series of posts about my last long trip from Japan to Germany where I took a flight from Tokyo to Vladivostok and then went all the way to Kaiserslautern in Germany by train and bus. Like my blog, it was meant to be the start of an epic collection of posts that I -as you can see- never really finished. Now is finally the time for some necessary change!

Today, while sitting on a long-distance train, I realized that I actually started blogging ten years ago. So, I guess I have a little anniversary to celebrate. Do I? Ten years ago, when I started this website, I was so excited because I was planning a world trip that should take me once around the globe. I thought I travel from Kaiserslautern back again to Kaiserslautern, but I’ll take a long way – the longest way home. Whatever “home” means anyway. Eventually, this way led me through 23 different countries and took nine months. Before the trip, I had a massive vision regarding this website. I wanted to show people that a tiny person like me^[1]I’m less than 1,60m and have no idea what that might be in feet – look it up and let me know in the comments can travel the world. I had a great start, reported about the trip, and the blog steadily grew more and more. I introduced new kinds of blog posts like cost estimations, ideas for walking tours and hiking. In 2014, I even started a YouTube channel, but just like my blog, I abandoned it. So, here is what happened:

I had no idea about blogging or YouTube; I had no idea about writing and wrote whatever I found interesting. That’s something I really enjoyed showing my perspective since I never considered myself to be the “standard traveler” or “backpacker” that explores the main sights in “no” time. But then, something changed: all of a sudden, I had an audience. People were actually reading what I had to say. While I liked that, I liked it too much, so that I started to spend time researching how I could grow my follower base even further. That, in turn, completely changed the way I wrote articles, and by that, it completely changed my relationship to writing, blogging, and my videos. But that is not the worst thing; it also changed the way I travel. I felt the urge to visit specific places and try particular food, which slowly but surely killed my passion. Of course, I still enjoyed traveling, but somehow -and that is quite difficult to explain- I felt kind of responsible for some anonymous audience. To get my passion back, I abandoned blogging and everything related to it. At some point, I could have made a living from having this blog, but that would have meant even more sacrifices^[2]I decided against that because it would have shifted everything. Now, you -the readers, my audience- are my main focus, together with my style of writing. Monetization would mean that I have to adapt … Continue reading.

At the same -my blog slowly started to die since my passion for blogging died- were also changes in my private life. I graduated and started a fantastic job that I still love to this day – spoiler: my job also includes traveling and even longer stays abroad. Earlier this year, I even moved abroad again. My job also gave me the perfect excuse to let my blogger life die out completely. Of course, I reported some trips from time to time that included the series from Japan to Germany mentioned above. I let this happen because my passion for blogging died; I let this happen because there were times and still are where I don’t know who I really am. Not as a blogger but as a human being. That might sound a bit drastic, but it is the best way to describe how I feel. Why do I realize this just now? During yet another long-distance train ride where I could have done many things instead of writing this post. At least in my perspective, difficult realizations come when you experience that some parts of your inner values evidently fail. This experience for me was yesterday. For now, it does not matter what happened; what matters, though, is that it felt like one of these rare situations in which I experienced a butterfly effect. Yesterday was the start of something bigger – a new journey showing me where I am. This blog definitely is part of that and will be for a long time.

So after ten years, some failed blogging attempts, some series that I started and (so far) never finished, going round in circles and making the same mistake over and over again, it is time for a reboot. So, let’s do this:

Hi, there. I’m Alise; that isn’t my real name, but “Karola” is so difficult to pronounce, and I like the story behind Alise. I love traveling and exploring, but I travel slowly, by bus, by train, and I like walking a lot. I visited over 50 countries and lived in four of them. I love our nature, being in a forest or near water or both! I’ll not delete the posts up to now because they are part of a journey that I started a long time ago. This journey is part of me. Sometimes one has to make another turn to stop going round in circles. For you as my reader, that means that the structure of my posts will change; I also deeply want to include part of “my” story, how I got into travel, what makes it valuable to me, and what I hate about it. And you? If there is anything that you want to share with me about your journey, your unexpected turns, and butterfly effects, let me know.

Don’t Panic (that phrase will probably never change)