Reflections - After a little time on the road, away from the routine, and a break to think about my plans...

So, it's been interesting so far. I am not in anything like the same kind of situation before. I have to say up front that to some degree, my decisions recently have been entirely arbitrary and voluntary. I simply was tired of being stuck in Sofia, with no real prospect for moving forward without a substantial amount of money landing in my lap.

I was looking down the barrel of the likely prospect of being back on the street there, and while it wasn't so bad, there was certain things that were better in Amsterdam, but not for a long term situation.

After all my experiences, I think I am now in a mind space where I can really finally go straight at what exactly I actually want, and stop getting distracted.

I was not in Sofia because I wanted an 'easy' time on the street, per se, but more because that when help would come, it would go a lot further, with rents, utilities and food bills about 1/3 of Western Europe and any given english speaking country.

Despite this, I was unable to get enough help. Or it was given but by the means of its' being given, it was far less effective.

Even then, I don't even know what I would want to do. After two degrading, and frankly, exploitative employment situations in Sofia, I was not keen to go back to that, and in any case, it was not going to be easy to make it happen without more capital to start up.

I am starting to feel like a black hole here...

About Sofia

First rule of working in outsourcing in Sofia: Do not accept overtime hours - you won't get paid more

The contract I had at the most recent job, which was owned and even run by english people (I point this out simply because it's not just a Bulgarian management culture), had a neat little clause in it which basically said, it was a salary, for 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday.

But, if hours were worked outside of this framework, they were to be 'summarised' by the manager into this 9-5 framework. In other words, for 10 and 12 hour shifts at night, it was as though I only worked 8 hours during regular work ours.

Well, there was two sides to this.

Firstly, the night shifts were pretty easy. About 10 minutes work every 2 hours.

But you had to regularly monitor everything, and be ready to escalate issues if they came up, the idea was that we could be helping them get systems back online before open of business. This happened infrequently, but usually it was hard to know exactly what to do, because it was not something I had been trained in.

The thing is, that vigilance is more taxing than on-demand work. It certainly is worth equal the cost of the daytime work, in fact, sometimes overall there was more to do at night than in the daytime.

So, anyway, the point here being, that I made the same mistake in my job as I did the last time. In the previous job, working at a call centre, I took on more hours, and night shifts also. My pay was only slightly increased, but the stress was massively increased. As it was I was already dealing with a bully in a supervisory role, who made sport of scaring the shit out of me when I was concentrating on my job.

The training she gave, was also hardly to be called 'effective'. It was really just a 3 day long briefing.

Not only that, but the computer system we were using, in every way possible, seemed to be designed to impede effective work while on the line with people with telephones that they probably were thinking about the cost of the call, and impatient to get their plans moving along.

So, that was work, about the life:

I was behind on rent, but not hugely, and besides this, the landlord just closed a sale before I left that put 60.000 euro in his bank account... But grandiose alcohol-fueled generous offers faded in the cold light of day, and I was not feeling comfortable in that little loft, and when the drain on the bathtub clogged up, there was no real way to wash either myself or my clothes, and I'd almost been a month without a wash of clothes, and the last wash I had, 3 days before leaving, did not drain out.

I made a big mistake when I was earning what was a very substantial amount of money in Sofia. I speculated, instead of saved. It worked out really well for the first month, in fact I doubled my money, and then within 6 weeks after that, I was literally down to zero.

The whole thing took such a toll on my nerves that I am now officially allergic to trading.

Writing for Steem is somewhat speculative also, but it's mainly my time that it is costing, and it's earned me more than enough to cover my costs doing this work.

So then, someone gave me a ticket to SteemFEST

Well, what should I do about this? I could have said no. But I was quite drunk at the time, and had just found a very nice chatroom where I was enjoying the company of most of the people in it. I even decided to sing an Australian folk song for everyone, I was so excited.

So then, the plan was to get back to Amsterdam. Possibly if I'd actually just stayed there in sofia and then booked some bus tickets via Volanbusz in Hungary, the cheapest bus service I know of, I actually pretty much had the money at the time. But I had this crazy idea that I wrote about, which was to ride there. But also, I was having problems with the dropping temperatures.

So instead I spent the money getting warmer clothes. It may have been an influence on my thinking, in terms of dedicating more money to more immediately satisfying things, like, being warm. At the time I was starting to get quite cold in that little loft, and I had no adequate clothes to keep, particularly my legs, warm.

It's not even slightly unrealistic, by the way. I had already done about 1200km through northern Italy on a nasty, heavy bike, and then a much nicer bike through Slovenia, albeit, through some very very hilly country. 2000km through what I know is largely quite flat land, would be nothing. With a little money along the way, to let me be able to stop in once a day and make a report of my goings on, and probably earn enough to be able to keep doing that.

But I didn't have enough come in to get the bike. Maybe another 50 euros was all it would have taken, but it wasn't there.

After the drain plugged up in the house, I was out of options. I had to figure out how I was going to get to SteemFEST, and maybe this is where I should explain the Plan B that is what I do if this event does not yield any option that lets me work, live somewhere and stay warm and fed during the winter.

Plan B

So, some of you reading this probably already know, I have Netherlands citizenship. As a consequence, I am elegible for a welfare payment when I am 'dakloos' - homeless, without a roof, literally. I had been getting it before for a few months, but when I had my passport stolen, and then arrested in Hungary and compelled to go see the embassy, they informed the welfare agency, who then cut off the payments. Not that it mattered that much, since I had no way of getting that money.

The account was created in my changed name, and as things turned out, the foreign affairs ministry issued the replacement passport in a different name (my birth name, not the changed one), which meant there was no way for me to receive the emergency payment they have, because the payment has to be in the account name, and match the ID.

I literally had to go back to the Netherlands, and they'd just cut off the payment anyway, because the embassy informed them specifically (yeah, thanks guys, the waiting on the streets of budapest, the 50 euro transfer fee, and the issuing of a passport that would not let me get my money out of my dutch bank account, though like it mattered anyway, with the foregoing).

I did not want to go to the Netherlands. I did not want to be back in that winter shelter, let in at 5pm, subjected to a full bag search and pat-down every night, even though the junkies get fast-tracked to housing assistance, and the drugs were more or less legal, but not technically legal.

This is why I left for Italy in the first place. Hoping to get some work picking fruit or vegetables in the warm winter of Napoli or so. Warmer weather and money I earned myself. I really don't like being on welfare. I was trapped on it in Australia. I had been trying to start my own business, and was relatively successful, but I was stuck on the problems of marketing and logistics (getting clients and getting to their locations).

So obviously I refused to submit to all of this. And it was thanks to their 'help' during the process of me getting my passport re-issued, that I was forced to learn how to beg, exposed to the body lice infection, the scamming meth-heads who tricked me out of my smartphone, that I'd only just finally got its charging port fixed.

In other words, every festering last bit of contact I had with these pigs, soured me so much against it, and forced me to get used to things that nobody would voluntarily choose, and I preferred to not have contact with them, than to eat cold, sometimes dirty food out of bins, out of spite, more or less.

About the blogging

I had been trying to write a blog on facebook, through all this. In fact, the theory was that my crazy stories would get enough attention that I would maybe even be able to actually do my crazy plans, or, if not, maybe some help to get me out of the weather, and into a job and a house.

After first Budapest, and then Bucharest, and the journey in between and the time stranded on the street, I was exausted, my feet were numb, I had definitely lost some weight, and I was chronically sleep deprived.

I still persisted with it, and even recorded some videos, a most notable one that you can find in my blog a little ways back, linked from facebook, of me rather drunk, showing people what life was for me, visually, not just talking or writing about it.

Still, nothing. In the end it was someone who I was already friends with, a dutch crypto enthusiast expat living in Ukraine after falling in love with some rather good concert pianist due to his association with Ba'hai (or whatever way it's apostropheed).

But he even made things more difficult than necessary by refusing to send me cash and instead directly pay for things. He ended up spending enough money helping me that would have covered the 4 months of rent payments that would have had me in a good accommodation in Sofia. But because that requires my cash handling, it was not going to happen.

So I was applying for jobs, and of course, I landed one in under a week, because english and IT skills are in high demand in Sofia. But even still, and this is just to reinforce the point I made before, I was still living on the street for the first month.

I had a couple of times slept on a couch out the back of the workplace, and then was told this was not ok. Well, great, except I don't get paid until a month of work, and I am supposed to somehow be able to work a full day after sleeping on concrete in an underpass... Eating out of bins, still, of course.

This was the first month at the job. It did not translate to a very good introduction to me for my manager or co-workers, and there was literally nothing I could do about it.

And so, back to now

I despair of any prospect of anyone fronting enough capital that I can get into a substantially remunerated job without some caveat that makes the whole thing nearly worthless. For all the money people have thrown at my case, it's not made any difference really, I am in fact more or less still at the place I was before.

Ok, this was partly due to bad decisions to speculate instead of save. But the job was getting to be a big problem in the end, with me accepting these long hours, so I as I thought would earn more. Nope.

So, as much as I am hopeful that actually meeting the people at SteemFEST will show them that I am a worthwhile investment, I kinda am starting to really get tired of this grind. I know that I can get a welfare payment, with much pain of waiting, in the Netherlands.

I know that in 6 weeks time in the peak of winter, until about mid February, I will have a warm place to sleep, even if I have to put up with being patted down every night, smuggling in little chunks of hash, putting up with noisy arabs and africans, and at the end of it, I will get 680/month, probably first payment in January, which I will pile into my Steem account and immediately power up, and live as though I only have what comes back from the power down. Maybe enough to buy some hash and beers, some decent, waterproof shoes, and this sort of thing. As well as pushing my vote power up by a very substantial amount every month.

So I very much appreciate the system we have here in Steem. I can pile up capital, and then slowly dispense it. This is very good for me, because it limits my ability to spend it on silly things or getting scammed by someone.

After a few months of this welfare payment, I might even have enough coming in that I can rent an apartment in Novi Sad, just coming out of my power down payouts, I would be aiming towards this goal.

I am quite sure that also people will vote on my stories about the street life in Amsterdam. I know it very well and I am already friends with quite a number of people involved in it, and I'm sure that they would be happy to have me writing about them.

Hungarians are actually quite kind people

I don't understand why they have such mean rules about homeless people sleeping in parks and smoking, especially because half the country still smokes as well. They are generous givers, both to beggars and to hitch-hikers.

All the Hungarians I have met, certainly would not have voted for these dumb rules. Hungary is not really a poor country, nothing like Serbia, Bulgaria or Romania next door.

Within 10 minutes of getting a sign made, which I put a lot of effort into, with a nice sans-serif roman style (I am not sure, I think this is technically called Gothic), I got a lift, from a Hungarian. He is traveling all the way to the other end of Austria. I'll be jumping out at Salzburg, because I figure it's probably the best spot for me to stop for getting as close as possible to Amsterdam.

So Bratislava is off the agenda. I am already tired of living on the road, without a bicycle it is not nearly as much fun. I just want to get to Amsterdam, where I know where I can get internet and coffee, where I can smoke cheap moroccan hash, and sleep reasonably well, without fear of police coming to ticket me...

But once I have managed to pull together enough money, I am going back to Novi Sad. Serbia is now my favourite country, where before I was divided between Bulgaria and Slovenia. Serbia is like the best of the two, in one. Novi Sad even has something of a similarity to Sofia in that there is a lot of artists there, but where Bulgaria is a country of scammers and artists, Serbia is more like a country of scammers and engineers.

@deearchi is an architecture student, but she's not just brainy with the architecture and all the visual skills it involves, she revealed in conversation that she was quite good at linguistics as well. She was born and grew up in Montenegro (Cherna Gora) but she never fit in there, similar to me in my experience in Australia. She moved to Serbia 6 years ago and she said that the culture there much more sympatico with her temperament... I am also something of a mad scientist, with that rare mix of aesthetic and engineering talents, which is far more common there.

So, I have a plan, and sitting here in this ride with this kind Hungarian man, I wanted to talk about it.

I am not looking forward to bearing through the next 4 months of my Plan B, and I hope that maybe Plan A, that of finding people who consider me the perfect person for a startup they want to get up and running, in some function for which I am capable of performing, pans out instead.

But I have to be realistic, and anyone who has been through the kind of life events like I have, you basically have to become Stoic, because every time you start to get comfortable and lazy, you end up being forced once again to make a choice between a declining situation or to jump into something difficult and unpleasant again, for the possibility of making a better option available later on.

I didn't really consider it exactly to be Stoicism, but it basically is. And I am starting to think that anything that looks good, will turn out to be bad, and it's better to go after something that seems bad, because it will turn out good. Well, and then it gets a bit confusing.

So, if all else fails, maybe late february, early march, I will be jumping on my scavenged Amsterdam bicycle, which I will augment a little with some better carrying equipment, and riding back to Novi Sad.

Plans for the future

Fear not, my adventure is far from over yet. After I have some success getting this to all happen, and with my work as a writer here, I am not going to try and settle until I am in a position to fund the two main projects I have - the electromagnetic/gravity stuff, and the distributed network systems project. I don't need that much to do either.

@deearchi also pointed out to me there is awesome little flea markets around Novi Sad where as well as lots of awesome village grown cheap food, there is often old junk... such as for example, an old electric motor, with the wiring on that I can build tesla coils for my experiments, and ferrite blocks maybe here and there, and all sorts of other random things I might find and be able to make some use of.

For me these things, this work, to be able to actually do it, this would be the holiday that I've been wanting, and it's really not that hard to make it happen, it just requires me to go through a bit more stuff. Having been down too many wrong side paths for the last 3 years, I am tired of this. I am going to plot my path to the direct destination. Also, really, it was not going to happen in Bulgaria either.

Given 4 months more time working on here, and the 6 months of 680 euros from the welfare payments, all stacked up, I would have effectively a Steem Pension, with sufficient rate of pay from power down to cover costs plus this speculative work to fill my time and realising my dreams.

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_{We can't stop here! This is Whale country!}

_{Loki was born in Australia, now is wandering Europe again after 9 months in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist. Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration, preferably while living in a beautiful mountain house somewhere with a good woman, and lots of farm animals and gardens, where he can also go hunting and camping.}

_{I'm a thoughtocaster, a conundrummer in a band called Life Puzzler. I've flipped more lids than a monkey in a soup kitchen, of the mind. - Xavier, Renegade Angel}

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Uploaded images hosted at postimg.org}