Tieske's Adventures

My alarm goes off early on this Easter Sunday. Although I got back to the Netherlands just a few days ago, it is time to grab my bags and hit the road. An eight hour flight takes me to Chicago, where I'll be attending both an internal meeting with our department as well as speaking at our annual customer conference Macola Evolve. Afterwards I'll be flying of to New Orleans; not necessarily  around the corner from Chicago, but after crossing the Atlantic ocean distance becomes relative. The flight to Chicago is uneventful and I order an Uber to go to the Hyatt Regency downtown, where the conference will be held. The driver tells me about his life: about how he moved from India to the United States to provide better education for his children; about how he started a store in men's shoes, expanded that business to four stores and how that all came to a sudden end, when he had to undergo an open-heart-surgery after multiple heart attacks. "I had to sell my house and...

“How do you feel about taking your AirBnB adventure to Malaysia?" my manager texts me in October. "Sure," I reply, "how about December?"  My AirBnB hosts are waiting for me in the lobby of their apartment complex in Bangsar ( a suburb southwest Kuala Lumpur's city center).  I’m their third guest and they go out of their way to make sure I’m comfortable. They show me around the complex; educate me on the train and bus system ; point me to the nearest ATM and even take me out for a quick bite. “Welcome to Malaysia!” It feels like a warm summer night and I walk over to Bangsar Village, a local area with plenty of restaurants and a mall, while listening to some feel-good music. I get some monopoly-like money from the ATM and a familiar feeling brings a smile to my face: a new adventure! Where in the world did I end up this time? I sit down at an Indian restaurant to order some food. “It is spicy, is that OK?” Having spent eighteen days in Thailand l...

Fog machines blow smoke into the crowd, hard beats follow each other rapidly and thousands of hands are in the air. It’s a little after midnight and we are on Koh Pha Ngang, partying at the Half Moon Festival. Multi-colored strobe lights offer extra effects, entertainers are dancing with fire and black-light emphasizes beautiful colored body paint. Paint is all around us. On our bodies and by accident on our clothes. Some people look like Native American, others like Mexican death masks. A handful of tough guys have the Superman logo painted on their chest. It just started drizzling and the sand underneath my bare feet is getting muddy. It doesn’t matter. Nobody seems to care. The party continues. We came here with a group of people. In Koh Samui we met Nikki and Maartje, two Dutch girls who are here on an internship to learn about castrating dogs. They are fun to be around, but I keep a safe distance, planning to start a family one day. Then there are Piotr and Kasha, ne...