I got an email sometime ago from Andy Stoll. He’s a friend of my from my days at the University of Iowa. While I toiled away at KRUI, he did more constructive things, like be president of the student government or raise money for children with cancer. He even did a bunch of stuff for the school and Iowa City after he graduated. You can’t keep the guy down.
We also co-hosted, along with Chris Linn, a weekly community affairs talk show on KRUI for a little over a year. “It’s like Entertainment Tonight on a ten dollar budget” and “It’s like David Letterman, but not as funny” were our slogans. And boy did we live up to the hype. Odd thing was, there was this guy that I kept running into at various music shows in Iowa City that was the biggest fan of our program. He could recite those slogans by heart, and this was three years after the fact. Charming, but weird.
Back to Andy, and to exemplify the fact that you can’t keep this guy down, he’s on a round the world adventure. The reason? Just to see as much of it as he can.
You can check out No Boundries.org as he documents his venture. He left the Midwest in August and has spent most of the time at this point in China and Japan. We’ve emailed back and forth a little bit, and my hope is to get him on the podcast to talk about some of his experiences.
He’s been a little relaxed on posting updates, so hopefully this will inspire him to post more often. There has also been a challenge issued to me by Andy to make some comments about tips or things that I have learned about blogging. I’ll get to that soon, but here is a public challenge back to Andy to blog more about traveling around the world.
Thanks for the shoutout man, I’m just trying to make my blog 1/2 as good as yours (or your 3). Yes, we’ll hook up a Skype-link and do a podcast interview one of these days, and I’ll tell you the story about life in a capsule hotel in Tokyo (did you ever try that when you were in Japan?).
Being in Hong Kong does not qualify as being ‘in’ China. Please do tell where you have been, other than the ‘fragrant harbour’
Call it a poke with a sharp stick, Andy. 😉 And no, never did the capsule thing. Shoestring budget and a college student? No way I could pull that off. Humega, indoor wave pools are trippy though!
GZ – I do know that he spent sometime in Macau. Check out his site for more.
GZ you are 100% correct though Hong Kong does not qualify as being “in” China, I think it is meant more in a technical sense. (Cause it, like Macau—as I am certain you already know—are technically part of China.) Though it is interesting to me to find equal number of people in Hong Kong who define them self adamantly as Chinese, and an equal number who try very hard to distance themselves from it. All and all: identity-crisis is one of the words that sums up HK for me. Other stops so far on the trip include Chicago, San Francisco, Beijing, all across central and western Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Hakone. & some points inbetween), and Macau. Next will be parts of mainland China and SE Asia.