I am half way to finish reading this book – ‘Rich Dad and Poor Dad’. The first time I heard about this book was in high school. A friend recommended to me and said it would change my life. So I bought the Chinese version and started reading it. It wasn’t as magical as my friend described, but maybe because I was too young to understand those ‘asset’ and ‘liability’ concepts in Chinese, or because the translation was not good enough to attract me.

Two days ago, after seeing my friend off, I walked pass the bookshop in the airport and randomly picked this book again. After glanced a few pages, I found some lines are actually quite interesting.

Maybe because it’s in English, some ideas are more original and easy to understand. One reason that I don’t like reading translated book is that translation is always second person’s writing, thus more or less contain another person’s idea. The author Robert Kiyosaki tried to use simple language and easy-to-understand chart to tell the story of understanding money and cashflow, as his rich dad did. But the Chinese version I read before had too many academic terms which took my interest away.

It’s an interesting book, I will write down my thoughts when I finish.

After seeing my friend Koji off yesterday, our 26 days journey was finally finished. It was an interesting trip, not only because of the number of places we have been to, but more because of the people we met and also the conversations with Koji. It’s a great pleasure to travel with him, I learned a lot and thought a lot.

There are a lot interesting cultural shocks for Koji, like shops closed at 5:30pm or staffs clean and putting chairs on the table while there are still customers having coffees. Those can never happen in Japan, he said. But the most shocking still the train services. When we left Windermere, and train was late for about 15 minutes as indicated, but as arriving time approaching, the delay time kept counting. “Expected arrive at 7:56, then 7:57, and then 7:58…”,Koji couldn’t believe what he saw. He said trains delays are worth to be reported on TV news, I joked that here might be opposite.

Anyway, it was a very interesting journey and I will post more little stories that we had in the journey. The following is our route and “photo of the journey - jumping boys”!

Route:
Oxford → London → Bath → Stonehenge → Cardiff → Caernarfon → Lake District (Windermere) → Edinburgh → Loch Ness → Durham → Oxford

Photo of the journey - jumping boys

I’m in a hostel in Cardiff right now waiting to take a train to Bangor in two hours. Then we (my friend Koji and I) will move to Lake District, Scotland and then back to England. We don’t have an exact route; all the next destinations are decided three days in advance only.

We will return to Oxford on 25th September and my friend will flight back to Japan on 26th. Until then I might not be able to post any updates, but I will definitely write down the journey once I get back.

Looking forward to new destinations.

Haven’t got time to update the blog since last post. I have been working quite hard lately mainly because my travel plan needs financial support, and also partly because of the visa application.

As I said before, I was planning to travel in Europe for 20 days. I applied to Belgian Embassy for a schengen Visa. However a few days ago I received the result and they refused to give me a visa because “my main destination is not Belgium”, in another words Belgium is not the country which I am going to stay longest in my journey. It’s complicated story and I am not going to write down every detail here because I tried to explain to my friends before and none of them could understand how much hassle of applying a visa. “Why do you need to buy a ticket before you apply?”, “why do you need to book all the hostels when you don’t even know whether you can get a visa or not?” etc. etc. I’m tired of explaining, after all, it’s unnecessary.

The Europe plan is over, but travel plan is still on. My Japanese friend koji (I should call him Inomata-san) is coming over and we are going to do a bit travel around England. I have been living in this country for about 3 years now and haven’t actually travelled around and explored it. So I’m going to take this chance and see a bit more about Britain.

About my work at BK, tomorrow is my last day. I took my camera with me today and got a few photos with other staffs there. Although it’s hard work, but most staffs there are very nice and friendly. I will upload some to my Flickr later on.

I will be out most of the time in September with Koji, hopefully we can really get some good travel experiences. I am going back to Durham on the 30th. There are lots of things waiting to do once I get back, but I am really looking forward to it, and can’t wait to see all the friends back there.

That’s all for now. Lastly I’ve a question: Which is your favourite place in Britain?