Author: <span>Matthew Harris</span>

Daily Life

Day 200: Kommitted to kumpir

I am choosing to celebrate this full card. I set a goal and I worked towards it.

It does mean I have spent over 70 EUR on baked potatoes since I arrived in Cologne though ??

They are just so tastyyyyy!

I actually had already been there about 4 times before I noticed the card and realised I was going to be a regular so if I’m honest I would say this has been a 100 EUR addiction since I arrived. They do other stuff as well like huge salad bowls and dirty burgers (for my world-wide friends a dirty burger is a good thing).

My completed loyalty card!
Kumpir Tandoori
Kumpir Greek Falafel
Kumpir Mediterranean (My Favourite)
Daily Life

Day 200: Zimmermanns – Burgers that are so good…

Hahaha.

I walked past this burger joint called Zimmermans yesterday and managed to translate part of the sign in my head. After I went trundling past it again today with my suitcase I decided to treat myself to a burger for brunch.

I just translated the sign with Google Translate:

“Burgers that are so good that it does not matter what’s on the sign outside”

Digital Nomad

Day 195: Making a NumLock-locker

  • Posted on:
  • by Matthew Harris
  • City: Cologne, Germany

Geek Happiness Level: 100%

For the last 195 days I have been catching the num lock key all the time when I am typing. There is no light on it so I never knew if the numpad would be numbers or arrows when I pressed it. Annoying.

After some searching I finally found SharpKeys which lets you remap keys on your keyboard. So I have set num lock to always-on at boot and then disabled that key totally.

Now I can press it and know it will be numbers – like any sane person would want.

Download it here:

Fitness

Day 195: Jogging in Hiroshima-Nagasaki park

Managed to get my first jogging session in for Germany today. I looked on the map and found a nice green space not too far away from my hostel called Hiroshima-Nagasaki park.

What I didn’t realise was that I was walking straight through the middle of some kind of college area as there were about 30-50 youths all stood around on the streets. I was dressed all in blue thinking I was fly but the temperature was most definitely not t-shirt and shorts weather so I had all eyes on me as I strutted down the street 😛

I haven’t been jogging for almost a month so I took a leisurely pace:

In the middle of the park was a large square man-made lake which served as a focal point for the joggers; I passed several of them going different directions in laps around it. There was even a really old silver-topped gentlemen bombing around the place and a sweet old lady with two hiking sticks getting her power walk on.

The place is right next to some busy streets and you can see the traffic but its set back enough to give you a feeling of being in nature. The circuit around the lake is flat ground but there is a bit of a hill if you go end to end of the park.

There was a lot of ducks napping by the edges of the lake. They ignored me as I jogged by each time so after I had done my 5k I slowly walked around and tried to take some photos. The duck got wise to me:

 

The geese didn’t really care and actually just walked in front of me several times.

After I had finished I stopped to get catch my breath and a snap a few shots, my favourite one is the little ramp they built for the ducklings to be able to get in and out of the lake 😀

Story Time

Day 191: My first digital nomad enemy

Made my first digital nomad enemy… Haha. Sorry Alison!

This hostel you just get assigned a room and pick your bed when you get there. The whole room was fresh when I got here, all beds unmade, no names on the beds, no personal belongings, no locks on any lockers, no luggage underneath.

I can only assume she is travelling light and the cleaning staff got confused and reset the whole room because when I arrived this was a clean, fresh, available bed. Obviously, when she left his morning it was hers but she left no trace behind.

Hope she doesn’t murder me in my sleep…  ??

It took me a long time to figure out what was going on with the angry face. If you tilt your head to the left its an angry monster, but if you tilt it to the right it looks more like one of the kids out of Ducktales.

Review

Day 100: In The City co-working & co-living space review

Nomad friendly? Yes!

I was the first off-the-street guest at In The City Hostel. I found out about it after the owner of Overstand Coffee mentioned it in a Chiang Mai digital nomad Facebook group and booked the same day.

It turned out that he wasn’t actually supposed to be announcing it quite yet as MJ, Pii Pum and the team were still putting the final touches to the place. They rose to the challenge though and welcomed me in with open arms. What started out as a simple 2-day tester-booking quickly unravelled into a 12-day adventure, seeing me right through to the end of my time in Chiang Mai.

Here is the original review I posted on Facebook at the time:

Extremely nomad friendly hostel. It has a coworking space downstairs which you get FREE access to during your stay; saving 150bt a day. The coworking space has the “best internet in the city” with connection speeds clocking 150mb up and 60mb down. Breakfast is included and filter coffee is available throughout the day. There are spacious desks, comfortable office chairs with lumbar support and chilled beats being played in the background.

And that’s just the start of it! The staff at In The City go above and beyond. The team will look after you throughout the day, bringing fresh fruit to your desk, refilling your coffee and making sure the fans are pointed optimally.

Like to celebrate after a hard day on the laptop? This hostel is in the northeast corner of Old City, which is easy walking distance to the local party hotspots Zoe in Yellow and Loi Kroh Rd.

During my stay the owner MJ and her staff treated me like one of the family, taking me to local thai bars, restaurants, cafes and out-of-town spots like Huay Tung Tao Lake and Kafe Bannok Coffee Roasters.

Many hostels have glowing reviews but In The City combines price, coworking, community and location to make an experience that will soon be on every nomads bucket list.

As you can tell, I was enthused by the place. And that was after spending almost two weeks strolling the empty halls and sitting around on my own. I thought I saw the true potential of combining a hostel with a coworking.

It turned out that during this visit I was only scratching the surface of what In The City would offer me.

Curious? Step forward in time to 2018 and read about my 2nd experience at In The City Hostel.

Story Time

Day -47: How I became a digital nomad

“I just did”. While I was setting up this blog that was all that I wrote in the draft placeholder. Now I come to flesh it out I think it actually answers the question succinctly. Becoming a digital nomad was a major life transition but it went so smoothly that I was already in Cologne on day 180-something before I realised I had actually really done it.

If you had met me even as close as 2 months before I set off and asked me about becoming a digital nomad I would have said: “What’s a digital nomad?”. I stumbled across the concept of it totally blindly. I was at a stage in my life where a change was badly needed but at this point, I had never lived outside of the city I was born in. I had never travelled alone, in fact, I used to put off going to the shops to buy socks unless I had a friend to walk in with.

But I wanted to go on holiday and my friends were not making the right noises about a group holiday so the idea started to form that I would go and stay in a hostel somewhere for a week and do it for myself. It was not a welcome idea. I was wracked with concern that the whole idea would be too scary, that I would be bored, that solo travel somehow was not for me.

A few of my friends had been travelling like this before and they insisted there was nothing to worry about, they had been fine, in fact, better than fine. Still, I told myself, this was some kind of special case for them and it still wasn’t for me.

Through the wonder of the all-seeing-eye that is Google, I have just traced back the exact point where a search for hostels turned into the beginning of a new life and “digital nomad” entered my lexicon. It was on 17th July 2017 at 7:34pm. Over the next few weeks, I would slowly internalise the idea and find myself consuming epic amounts of YouTube videos on everything digital nomad and mostly Chiang Mai.

A friend of mine had been to Bangkok and she had put a video up of her travel day. I watched as she packed her suitcase. I could do that. Got on a train to London. I could do that. Got on a plane. I could do that. Landed in another country and got in a taxi. I could do that. Then she checked into a hotel. I could do all of that.

Apart from the fear I couldn’t see what was holding me back.

For the first time in my life, I was internalising actually visiting Asia. With the high flight prices, it was never on the cards for any normal holiday. I was aware that side of the world existed but I didn’t ever connect the thought and think that I would actually go to it. Now the dots were falling in to place and I was picturing myself there; it was exciting.

37 days later on a sunny July lunchtime, I booked my flight to Bangkok. If you’ve booked online you will know that flight companies like to create a sense of urgency by threatening to time-out your booking and make you start again. I filled out the form and then sat there several times until the order reset me back to the homepage. All I was thinking and worrying about was the vast unknowns of going to the other side of the world on my own. Could I do it?

Seconds before the third time out I tapped my finger down on the mouse and the flight was booked. It was happening.

The idea had been formed. I was calling it “100 days of digital nomad – an experiment in lifestyle design”. I was going to set up this blog. I was going to start a YouTube channel. I was going to get an apartment in Chiang Mai. I was going to hire a scooter. So many plans made in the excitement of the run-up. The actual trip turned out vastly different – as things normally do – but this wasn’t a bad thing at all.

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