Misc

I was chatting with my colleague this afternoon about traveling, in Europe. Suddenly he asked,

Do you know about blind booking on German Wings?

I was like huh, blind booking? Yes, I know about German Wings. I’ve actually planned to get one of the flights before. But nothing about blind booking. FYI, German Wings is Germany’s version of Air Asia.

And he came over to my laptop, opened up the main website, and here’s what it says about blind booking.

We guarantee our low prices and take you either to the beach, to great cities or to the best shopping.

Exactly where you end up flying to remains a surprise until you complete your booking. You decide when and from where you depart from and what suits you.

Simply choose your departure airport and your desired travel theme by clicking on one of the themes “City”, “Metropolis” or “Beach and More”.

It basically costs around 52 Euros from Cologne-Bonn airport to cities like Barcelona, Lisbon, Munich, Stockholm, Dublin, London, Reykjavik, Vienna, Rome, Milan, Zurich, etc. You get the idea.

But here’s the thing.

You only select the depart and return date.

You won’t know where you’re going to until you’ve completed the payment. That’s why it’s called blind booking. There’s a list of cities that you can go to. But you have to pay 5 Euros to exclude any cities in the list.

He then gave me a few tips for this blind booking.

Exclude cities in Germany – Berlin, Munich and Liepzig. In most cases, those cities will turn out to be the destination.

Check the normal prices of all the destinations. Don’t exclude the cities that has high prices because there’s no way the system will give it to you anyway. Saved 5 Euros.

Anyway, this sounds fun, isn’t it?

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It’s now late at night. And I had nothing better to do.

So, instead of going to bed, I took out my passports (old and current) and started to flip it over to check out my new, spanking German visa for my upcoming trip later this week.

When I first got my passport (the old one) back in 2004, I thought that I would never utilize half of it, leave alone finishing all 32 pages of it. My mum once said that it’s a waste of money paying RM300 for a passport when you only stamp it once or twice in it’s entire 5 years of validity.

True to what she said, the only stamp I got was to Singapore.

That was before I started to work.

Little did I know that this would change until I landed my first job in mid 2005. Somehow, I managed to get not only half, but all 32 pages of this old passport filled up nicely and neatly in the next 2.5 years.

During the job interview, they told me to prepare myself to travel up to 75% of the time. Otherwise, it’s not advisable for me to accept the job offer as I would resign sooner or later.

Traveling and being away from Malaysia for long period is the challenge. Not the job itself.

But, they didn’t keep their promise.

I didn’t travel up to 75% for my entire time when I was there. When I flipped through my old passport, I realized that I only traveled 60% (18 out of 30 weeks) in 2005 and 71% (34 out of 48 weeks) in 2006

It looked something like this :

2005
China – 6 weeks
Indonesia – 5 weeks
Pakistan – 4 weeks
Sri Lanka – 3 weeks

2006
Sri Lanka – 3 weeks
Thailand – 28 weeks
Vietnam – 2 weeks
Indonesia – 1 week

Then I changed my job towards the end of 2006. Since I loved to travel in my previous company, I’d make sure that I’ll get to do the same in my new company. But, it wasn’t really heavy traveling back in 2007. It was only about 31% of the time (15 out of 52 weeks) that I was out of Malaysia.

This was how 2007 went by for myself.

2007
Bangladesh – 1 week
Finland – 6 weeks
Hong Kong – 1 week
India – 4 weeks
Germany – 1 week
Japan – 2 weeks
Singapore – 1 week

By the end of 2007, the passport I was holding was already fully stamped. There isn’t any more room for new stamps and I had to make a new one. This time, it’ll be 64 pages.

I know it would get full before it’s 5 years validity period ends.

I thought 2008 would be a year where I would be out of the country most of the time, and it happened to go this way. This is how 2008 will look like.

2008
Japan – 2 weeks
Egypt – 6 weeks
India – 9 weeks
Germany – 19 weeks

By the end of the year, I would have been out of the country for 70% (34 out of 52 weeks) of the time.

My next trip will take me to Germany and various parts of Europe for 19 weeks and it’ll last until next year at least.

So which is the best place that I’ve ever been to date?

A few, actually.

I’ll keep that for later and off to bed for now.

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