Why Overtourism Is a Capitalist Crisis

August 25, 2026 — Leave a comment

The tourist didn’t design the system that made travel a substitute for a life worth living.

A new form of environmental propaganda has quietly become mainstream.

Every week, another headline appears telling ordinary people they are responsible for climate change, then hands down the same list of penances. Drive less. Fly less. Stop buying this. Stop enjoying that. Recently, Le Monde highlighted that tourism accounts for around 9% of global CO2 emissions.

The number itself bothers me. It’s huge, and mass tourism is something I have no patience for.

The framing bothered me even more.

Once again, the spotlight was placed on ordinary people instead of the system that shapes almost every decision they make.

It’s becoming increasingly common to hear the same message.

You’re responsible.

You’re the polluter.

You’re destroying the planet.

Study. Work. Pay your bills. Repeat. But if you finally manage to save enough money for a vacation, you’re suddenly made to feel guilty for that too.

That is not environmentalism.

That is misdirection.

Anyone who reads my essays knows I take my environmental footprint seriously. The choices behind that, the minimalism, going vegan, the way I get around, weren’t picked up to look good or fit in. They came out of years of reflection.

I’ve been a minimalist for nearly a decade because endless consumption makes neither people nor the planet happier.

I’m vegan because I care about animals. I also recognize the immense environmental cost of industrial animal agriculture, from habitat destruction to food waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

I buy second hand exclusively and repair things before replacing them. I don’t buy new clothes. I’d rather walk or take public transportation than drive, and I’d rather borrow or share something than own it outright, because half the stuff we buy individually just sits there waiting to be used once a year. I’ve taken a nine hour bus instead of a forty five minute flight to the same destination, more than once, because the extra hours felt like a small price for the difference in footprint. I believe we should leave this world better than we found it.

None of that makes me exceptional. It just means I got lucky, or stubborn, enough to question habits most people never get the chance to question, because those habits get taught before we’re old enough to notice them.

Unlike wild animals, humans cannot realistically leave no trace at all. We build, consume, and transform our surroundings. But we can choose to leave as little trace as possible.

That responsibility matters.

What I reject is the idea that environmental collapse is primarily the consequence of millions of individuals making bad personal choices, as if those choices appeared out of nowhere.

They didn’t.

We’re born into a world that treats consumption as the default. Questioning it comes later, if at all, because most people spend their lives just trying to survive rent, survive the cost of food and shelter. Then, once that survival eases up even a little, we try to make up for lost time. We overconsume to compensate for what we never had, the same way anyone leaving poverty tends to, emulating the people who always had the means. “Treat yourself. You earned it. You worked hard for it.”

Individualism finishes the job from there. Look after your own happiness first, leave everyone else’s problems to someone else. That isn’t a flaw people are born with. It’s a job someone trained us for.

So yes, individuals are responsible for what they do. But the system is responsible for how most individuals were shaped to behave in the first place, and pretending otherwise lets the actual architects of the mess off the hook.

The system was built so individuals would fit inside it, and it worked well enough that the individual is now a piece of the machine that keeps breaking us. That’s what makes escape so hard. It isn’t one bad law or one greedy company standing in the way. It’s advertising, employers, housing, food systems, culture, and habit all pulling the same direction at once, thousands of small parts that don’t need to coordinate because they all reward the same behavior. No amount of individual willpower gets the masses out of a system built from that many interlocking pieces. You can opt out personally. The system barely notices.

Now, does tourism have environmental impacts?

Absolutely.

Mass tourism damages ecosystems. It strains local infrastructure. It raises housing prices. It pollutes coastlines. It turns historic neighborhoods into amusement parks. Entire cities are transformed into products designed for visitors instead of homes for residents.

These are real problems.

But they’re not caused by tourists wanting to see the world. They’re caused by an industry that’s turned that desire into something to sell as much of as possible, to as many people as possible, regardless of what the planet or the destination can absorb.

That distinction matters.

And here’s the part that should actually worry us. Right now, only a small share of the world’s population can afford to travel the way tourism gets discussed in Le Monde or anywhere else. If everyone on earth consumed the way the average French person does, we’d need close to three planets to sustain it. Live like the average American and the number climbs higher still.

The uncomfortable truth is that the planet is only holding together because most of humanity is still too poor to consume like the wealthy world does. As more of that population gets richer, and some of it will, that 9% doesn’t stay at 9%. It grows, the same way every other consumption metric grows when purchasing power spreads. We’re not looking at a stable number. We’re looking at a preview.

I also have for a long time questioned whether much of what we call tourism today is even about travel anymore. My work attests to that.

For many people, traveling is just another form of consumption.

They fly somewhere, stay in the same spots, eat at the same chain restaurants, shop in the same luxury stores, and return home with thousands of photos that exist mainly to prove they were there.

The destination changes.

The lifestyle doesn’t.

Social media has accelerated this transformation. Many destinations are no longer visited because they offer something meaningful. They’re visited because their images perform well online.

Travel becomes content.

Experiences become status symbols.

Places become backdrops.

This isn’t the industry malfunctioning. It’s the industry working exactly as designed. Travel companies exist to grow. Growth means selling more trips to more people more often, and the easiest way to do that is to sell travel as a reward, a treat, a thing you’ve earned and deserve, the same script used to sell everything else. Advertise the escape, not the destination. Call it self care. Call it living your best life. The vacation guilt the headlines produce and the vacation obsession the industry produces come from the same machine. One hand points the finger, the other hand keeps the conveyor belt running.

I think it reflects something much deeper than the shallowness of the masses.

Many people feel disconnected from their work, their communities, and even themselves. Life often revolves around earning enough money to repeat the same routine next week. Under these conditions, vacations become less about discovery and more about escape.

People aren’t always searching for another country.

They’re searching for relief.

Give people meaningful work. Give them stronger communities. Give them time with family. Give them parks, culture, nature, and purpose close to home.

Many would feel far less pressure to chase an escape valve on the other side of the planet every summer.

There will always be genuine explorers.

Some people are naturally driven to understand different cultures, ecosystems, languages, and ways of living. They travel to learn, to question their assumptions, and to return home with ideas worth sharing.

I’d guess that’s a minority. Watch how travel actually gets consumed, the itineraries, the photo spots, the same five restaurants recommended to everyone, and it’s hard to conclude that curiosity is the main thing driving most of it.

Historically, travel served the purpose of learning through exploration rather than consumption. People left home to study, exchange knowledge, observe other societies, and bring back innovations that improved their own communities.

Travel wasn’t simply about extracting something from a place.

It was about growing through them.

Today, too much tourism encourages the opposite. It treats landscapes the way it treats products, something to use up and move on from. It’s also flattening a diverse world into sameness.

That isn’t a failure of human nature.

It’s a predictable outcome of an economic system that turns everything into something to be bought and sold.

So yes, I oppose mass tourism. I absolutely do.

I oppose cruise ships that poison the oceans they sail through before dumping their waste in port cities and leaving.

I oppose short weekend flights taken simply because they’re cheap.

I oppose cities being redesigned for visitors while residents are priced out.

I oppose zoos and circuses that trade animal suffering for entertainment.

I oppose beachfront developments that sell the view and never mention what it cost to build.

I even oppose ecotourism, most of the time it’s just greenwashed tourism for the rich, another way to price out ordinary people while the outcome stays the same.

None of that makes the tourist the offender. An industry built to sell escape, and paid handsomely for doing it, is the one that turned a personal desire into an ecological liability.

The system is the culprit.

The environmental crisis will not be solved by making people feel guilty for taking a vacation. Most don’t even care.

It starts with education, teaching people to question the conditioning instead of just living inside it.

From there, it will be solved by degrowth. Not for the nation building its first hospitals or its first clean water system, that’s need. Degrowth is for the societies that already have what they need and keep manufacturing new needs anyway, the Emirates building another amusement park in the desert, Nevada building another casino with a golf course attached. One is need. The other is appetite dressed up as progress.

We already own enough clothes to dress the world for generations. The pile sitting in circulation right now would outlast most of us several times over, yet the fashion industry keeps manufacturing seasonal trends to convince us otherwise. That’s the target. That’s where degrowth should appear.

Less consumerism. Less unnecessary work. Eating plant based, living with less, minimalism as a norm rather than a lifestyle choice for the few. More shared economy and less of the individualism that trains us to treat our own comfort as the only thing worth protecting.

Degrowth looks like communities that function without a car and a credit card for every errand, hobbies that give something back instead of costing something, planting trees and cleaning rivers instead of shopping malls and card tables in casinos.

It looks like people who no longer need two weeks a year on the other side of the planet to remember they’re alive, because the other fifty weeks stopped feeling like a sentence.

Until we are willing to confront that reality, the headlines will keep telling you to fly less while the industry keeps telling you to fly more, and both of them profit from you never noticing it’s the same voice. Guilt won’t shrink a system built to keep expanding. Only pulling its foundations out will.

That’s the trip actually worth taking. And unlike the one on the brochure, nobody’s selling it to you.

Teekay

How to Read a Rainforest

August 20, 2026 — Leave a comment

On the plants, poisons and people who turn the jungle into a pharmacy, a grocery store and a home

I didn’t realize how little I knew about the forest until our guide started pointing things out.

Our trek through Taman Negara, near Kuala Tahan, covered around 8 kilometers. We started at 10 in the morning and got back around 5pm, with a break at Teras Waterfall before the boat ride back to town.

The trail demanded attention from beginning to end. Mud, wet rocks, exposed roots and shallow streams meant every step had to be placed carefully, and in several spots ropes were fixed to the hillside to help hikers climb or descend slippery slopes. Waterproof hiking shoes with good grip aren’t optional here. They’re the difference between enjoying the trek and spending the day sliding through the mud, if not something worse.

But the distance and the terrain weren’t what made the hike memorable. It was realizing that most ordinary-looking plants are much more than they let on. By the end of the day, I wasn’t seeing trees and bushes anymore. I was seeing functions.

Our guide walked us through plant after plant, and one stuck with me more than the rest. It was used to treat snake bites. When cut open, it’s applied directly to the wound. According to the guide, the inside of the plant would turn yellow as it absorbed the venom, and fresh pieces were applied until the inside stayed white, which is believed to mean no venom is left. Whether or not modern medicine backs that up, it’s a testament to thousands of years of people experimenting with what grows around them.

Other plants did other jobs. One relieved asthma. Another became shampoo, soap and mosquito repellent all at once. I didn’t catch its name, but all it took was rubbing a few leaves together with water before a rich, citrus-scented foam appeared in the guide’s hands. It smelled better than most commercial soaps I’ve used.

The forest also supplies drinking water. Those thick vines made famous by Tarzan actually hold water inside them, and so does bamboo. In a place where rivers aren’t always close, knowing which plants can quench your thirst can matter more than you’d think.

One of my favorite discoveries was the stingless bees. They build their nests inside hollow tree trunks, with only a narrow wax entrance reaching outside. The honey stays protected deep in the wood, out of reach of most predators. Seeing a colony hidden inside a living tree was something I’d never come across before.

There were still plenty of reminders that we were sharing the forest with wild animals. At several points, the guide stopped because he could smell them before seeing them. The scent, he said, likely came from monkeys or maybe elephants that had recently passed through. We also found deep claw marks running up the side of a tree, almost certainly left by a sun bear climbing toward a hollow trunk where bees had built their nest. As if that wasn’t enough, he showed us a recent photo of a local man who had survived a panther attack, a humbling reminder that this rainforest still belongs to its wildlife as much as its visitors.

After hours of humidity and sweat, reaching Teras Waterfall felt like a reward. The cold water washed away the heat before we made our way back to the river and boarded the boat home.

The boat dropped us off for the last stop of the day, and we walked up a slippery, muddy slope to reach the Batek camp. Right at the entrance sat a pile of freshly cut bamboo, maybe for a new hut. The camp itself had several huts, built entirely from bamboo with roofs made from local palm leaves, arranged around a central fire pit. One small hut off to the side served as the “shop” where they sell crafts to visitors. Off by one of the huts, a group of unmarried men sat together, just talking among themselves, in no hurry to be anywhere.

The Batek are one of the Indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia and have lived in these forests for thousands of years. Physically, they reminded me of Papuan people, though generally taller. Their entire population today is only around 2000 people.

The camp felt almost entirely integrated into the forest. The only domestic animals I noticed were three chickens running around near the huts, apparently kept for special occasions rather than everyday meals, a small sign of how much even their world has started trading with ours.

One man showed us how they start a fire using nothing but what the forest provides. He worked in near silence, and it was over in maybe 20 seconds. The second he finished, he just sat back, calm, like he’d done it ten thousand times before, which he probably had.

Then came the blowpipes, and this is where hunting in the forest really came alive for me. The Batek still use these to hunt monkeys, squirrels and birds high in the canopy, and I was surprised by how sophisticated the weapon actually is. It’s made from bamboo, while the darts are carved from what they call water palm trees. Behind each dart sits a small piece of plant fiber that seals the tube, so the hunter’s breath pushes the dart forward with real force. At the mouthpiece is a black bulb that creates an airtight seal and makes the shot more efficient. The man demonstrating it was quiet, maybe shy, maybe just naturally calm. At one point he said something to me directly, but I didn’t catch it. Even Bahasa isn’t really their first language, let alone English.

I got to try it myself. Standing about 15 meters from the target, I took a deep breath and blew as hard as I could. The dart landed dead center, which I wasn’t expecting at all.

The darts get even more interesting once you learn how they’re prepared. Their tips are coated with poison collected from a tree. The bark is cut until a white sap starts to bleed out, then the dart is coated with the latex and left to dry. Rather than killing instantly, the poison weakens the animal over the next 15 minutes or so, and hunters simply follow their prey until it collapses.

Back at the village, the hunter presents the animal to the village leader, who carves another ring into the weapon. Over time, the blowpipe stops being just a tool and becomes a record of experience.

They told us how they live too. Unmarried men traditionally live together until they marry, often young. They don’t follow an organized religion but believe the forest is inhabited by spirits.

When someone dies, the body is placed high in a tree and the family leaves the camp to settle elsewhere.

The Batek have traditionally been nomadic, moving every few months, sometimes because food gets scarce, sometimes because predators like leopards make an area unsafe, sometimes because the death of a family member means it’s time to leave. Their movements follow the rhythms of the forest rather than property lines or borders.

Today they also host small groups of visitors and sell handmade crafts, among them miniature blowpipes and hunting sets, to supplement their income. It struck me that they’ve probably never had to think about whether those objects might get stopped by airport customs. In their world, they’re everyday tools. In ours, they’re something else entirely.

I was the last one to leave the camp, and for a moment I just stood there taking it in. These people would spend that night around the same fire pit, and the next night, and the one after that.

The view from the camp looked out over the river and the rainforest, and it hit me that this might be the oldest rainforest in the world, older than the Amazon, and these people have been living in it, exactly like this, the whole time.

Looking back, what stayed with me wasn’t any single plant or demonstration. It was realizing that the rainforest isn’t simply a collection of species. It’s a pharmacy, a grocery store, a hardware store, a source of clean water, a place of worship and a home, all at once. Without someone to interpret it, I would’ve spent seven hours walking through an endless sea of green. With a guide, I found out that almost every tree, vine and leaf had a story to tell.

This trip was a gift for my wife’s birthday. In the end, it turned into a gift for both of us, one more memory we’ll carry for a long time.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

The Bomb Craters That Became Bunkers Beneath Cu Chi

August 19, 2026 — Leave a comment

On the American War, working with nature and the remarkable ingenuity of the Vietnamese resistance

Of the three things I wanted to see around Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Cu Chi was the one I almost didn’t care about.

It was last on my list. It ended up being first in my mind.

I thought I knew the American War in Vietnam fairly well.

Turns out, I barely knew anything.

Cu Chi is a district outside Saigon where Vietnamese forces and civilians built a vast underground network during the American War. At its height, the tunnel system stretched for hundreds of kilometers beneath the jungle, allowing soldiers and civilians to live, move, fight and hide underground while American forces tried to destroy them from above.

Before I go any further, a special shoutout to our guide, Dragonking. Without his explanations, I would’ve walked away thinking I’d visited a fascinating historical site. Instead, I left with an entirely different way of looking at war, nature and human ingenuity.

The first thing he explained completely changed the way I looked at the tunnels.

Most people imagine that someone simply decided to dig more than 250 kilometers of tunnels beneath the jungle.

That’s not how it happened.

When American bombs carved enormous craters into the earth, the Vietnamese didn’t waste time filling them back in.

They used them.

A bomb crater became a bunker, built in a single night, without electricity, without machinery, without floodlights. The crater became the room. Trees, bamboo and clay hid it from above. Once the bunker was finished, they dug a tunnel to the next crater, then the next, then the next. Little by little, hundreds of isolated shelters became one of the most extraordinary underground networks ever built.

I kept waiting for Dragonking to move on to the next fact, the next date, the next number. He didn’t. He kept circling back to that same crater, that same night, as if the story wasn’t really about tunnels at all.

It wasn’t.

Along this trip, I realized I wasn’t learning about tunnels. I was learning about a completely different relationship with the world.

The deeper he went into the explanations, the more I noticed the same pattern repeating itself, over and over, in everything he described. Nothing existed on its own. Everything worked together.

The clay hid the entrances. The bamboo became pipes, supports and traps. The trees concealed the bunkers. Termite mounds inspired ventilation shafts that disappeared into the landscape. Some exits near the Saigon River even benefited from the natural movement of the tides to help circulate fresh air.

Smoke from cooking, something that could reveal an entire position, wasn’t simply vented into the air. It traveled through long underground channels before escaping so gradually that it blended into the morning mist rising through the forest.

None of it was borrowed and none of it was forced. Every part of the jungle already had a use, and they just had to notice it. Standing there, I couldn’t think of it as people surviving despite their surroundings. They were becoming part of them.

The tunnels themselves followed exactly the same philosophy. They weren’t designed to be comfortable. They were designed to favor the people who knew them.

Three underground levels housed kitchens, meeting rooms, hospitals, workshops, sleeping quarters and armories. Above them lay a maze of narrow passages, hidden doors and deadly traps. Punji stake pits, swinging spike traps and concealed trapdoors meant that even if an American soldier managed to enter, he had no idea where he was, where he was going or what waited around the next corner.

The jungle wasn’t protecting the tunnels. The tunnels were an extension of the jungle.

Then came the underground workshops, and this part genuinely left me speechless. When American bombs, artillery shells or rockets failed to explode, the Vietnamese collected them. They emptied the explosives to manufacture land mines. They cut up the steel to make traps. The enemy’s weapons became the tools of their own resistance.

Again, the same idea. Nothing was wasted. Everything was transformed.

By then, I stopped seeing individual examples. I started seeing a philosophy.

One side arrived with industrial warfare. Bombers. Napalm. Heavy machinery. The belief that overwhelming force could solve everything.

The other answered with clay, with bamboo, with rivers, with trees, with insects, with patience, with an intimate knowledge of the land they called home.

That’s probably why Cu Chi affected me so much. It wasn’t simply a story about winning a war. It was a story about understanding your environment so deeply that it becomes part of you.

Modern warfare usually leaves behind dead forests, poisoned rivers and landscapes stripped of life. Cu Chi tells another story. It reminds us that our greatest strength has never been our ability to dominate nature. It’s been our ability to work with it.

The Vietnamese didn’t separate themselves from the forest. They became an extension of it.

None of that erases what freedom cost here. No one should ever romanticize war, and nothing about those tunnels was easy or bloodless. But standing in them, one thing became impossible to ignore. The Vietnamese didn’t defeat a superpower by having more. They won by understanding something their enemy never truly could.

The land beneath their feet.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Backpacking lost its soul

August 18, 2026 — Leave a comment

On the ego that turned exploration into consumption.

People often ask why I spend weeks in one place when I could be crossing several countries off my list instead. I suppose I’ve never understood how moving more is supposed to mean seeing more.

I don’t travel to collect countries.

I travel to disappear into one.

Backpackers don’t stay anywhere anymore.

They arrive. They sleep. They photograph. They publish. They leave.

Then they repeat the process somewhere else until the trip ends and they return home exhausted, convinced they’ve seen the world because they were physically present in it.

They haven’t.

They’ve consumed it.

That’s what backpacking has become.

Not exploration.

Consumption.

Call me a gatekeeper if you want, but I don’t think making travel accessible to everyone was a good thing.

Some things deserve to remain difficult.

Difficulty isn’t just an obstacle.

It’s a filter.

Backpacking once demanded uncertainty. You hitchhiked because there wasn’t another option. You camped because you couldn’t afford hotels. You got lost because Google Maps didn’t exist. You depended on strangers because there was nobody else.

You didn’t stay three weeks because slow travel was fashionable.

You stayed because leaving wasn’t simple.

That difficulty selected people.

Not better people.

People with different motivations.

People who wanted to understand rather than display.

Then technology removed almost every barrier.

Flights became cheap.

Hostels multiplied.

Google Maps eliminated uncertainty.

Translation apps eliminated effort.

Social media eliminated the need to tell stories because photographs could pretend to tell them for you.

The filter disappeared.

The culture changed.

Today, travel isn’t sold as curiosity.

It’s sold as identity.

The tourism industry doesn’t ask what a country might teach you.

It asks who you’ll become once other people know you’ve been there.

Travel has become one of the cheapest ways to manufacture an identity.

You don’t need to become interesting.

You just need to stand somewhere interesting.

That’s why so many people return with bigger egos instead of broader minds.

Ask them what they learned.

Most will tell you what they saw.

Ask them about the people.

They’ll tell you about the monuments.

Ask them about the language.

They’ll proudly repeat the three words they learned after spending 90 days crossing six countries.

They’re collecting locations, not understanding and certainly not growth.

Tourism has become another branch of consumerism.

Countries are products.

Experiences are products.

Cultures are products.

Even people become products.

Everything exists to be consumed, photographed and replaced by the next destination.

The strangest part is how proud we are of this.

“I’ve been to 25 countries.“

Why is that impressive?

Wouldn’t it be more impressive to deeply understand one?

To speak its language.

To know its neighborhoods instead of its viewpoints.

To have friends instead of recommendations.

To return home with your certainties broken instead of your passport filled.

Movement has become confused with growth.

They’re not the same thing.

Most people don’t travel to become different.

They travel to confirm the person they already believe themselves to be.

Travel becomes evidence.

Proof that they’re adventurous.

Proof of their supposed open-mindedness, despite the racist behavior they display toward locals.

Proof that they’re successful.

It’s ego disguised as curiosity.

The environmental hypocrisy follows naturally.

People cry in front of ancient forests before buying products linked to deforestation.

They snorkel around coral reefs while financing industries that destroy them.

They admire wild animals, then return home and continue consuming the system driving those animals toward extinction.

Nature isn’t changing them.

It’s entertaining them.

People tell me tourism creates conservation.

I think that’s backwards.

Conservation is usually the bill we pay after treating the natural world like a warehouse.

The less we consume, the less there is to rescue.

The same thing happens with culture.

We’re constantly told cultural exchange is inherently beautiful.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it spreads destructive habits faster than wisdom.

The world is becoming culturally flatter.

Walk through enough cities and they begin to blur together.

The same cafés.

The same apartment blocks.

The same shopping streets.

The same influencers taking the same photographs.

We’ve mistaken imitation for development.

We’ve decided that progress means looking like whoever industrialized first.

Traditional architecture disappears because concrete and glass looks richer.

Buildings that evolved over centuries to suit local climates are demolished so cities can resemble places they were never meant to resemble.

I don’t call that progress.

I call it forgetting.

A yurt isn’t inferior because it doesn’t resemble a skyscraper.

An earth house isn’t backward because it isn’t made of concrete.

Architecture should answer the climate before it answers fashion.

A society should adapt to its environment before adapting to global trends.

That’s my definition of progress.

Better adaptation.

Not better imitation.

The same principle applies everywhere.

The easier photography became, the less people learned photography.

The easier publishing became, the less people learned to write.

The easier backpacking became, the more it became tourism.

Convenience doesn’t simply allow more people to participate.

It changes why they participate.

And once the reason changes, the activity changes with it.

That’s what happened to travel.

The greatest journeys aren’t measured by distance.

They’re measured by transformation.

You should come home questioning yourself more than the people you visited.

If all you brought back were photographs, opinions and a stronger sense of your own importance, then you didn’t really travel.

You consumed another place.

The tragedy isn’t that the world became accessible.

The tragedy is that accessibility turned one of humanity’s greatest opportunities for humility into another marketplace for ego.

Backpacking didn’t disappear.

Its soul did.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

How France Became Home

August 15, 2026 — Leave a comment

On migration, belonging and home

People often ask me why I settled in France.

It’s a fair question.

I’ve lived in enough countries that staying anywhere probably seems unexpected. If I met someone who had spent years moving across continents only to settle in one place, I’d ask the same thing.

But I think they’re asking the wrong question.

The real question isn’t why I chose France.

It’s how a foreign country slowly became my country.

Not legally.

Humanly.

People often say a place “feels like home.”

I’ve never liked that expression because it tells us nothing.

Home isn’t something you feel the day you arrive. It’s something you build so gradually that, one day, you realize you’ve stopped looking elsewhere.

That wasn’t immediate.

When I first moved to France, I came to study. Like every newcomer, I was an outsider trying to understand unfamiliar customs, another language, a different way of living. I had no idea that the people I met during my first days in business school would still be among my closest friends a decade later. I didn’t know the colleagues I’d work alongside, the associations I’d join or the teammates I’d train with would become part of my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

France didn’t simply welcome me.

It became a part of me.

I learned its language until it became almost as natural as my own. I immersed myself in its history, geography and culture, not because I had to, but because I wanted to understand the place I was living in.

I studied here, worked here, volunteered here and explored it far beyond what any tourist ever would.

I’ve lived in Lyon, in the east, and on the Atlantic coast, completely west. Two places that could hardly be more different, and I’ve traveled through more than a dozen cities, each adding another layer to my understanding of the country.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being a visitor.

Not because I received a document.

Because I became invested.

What I love most about France.

It isn’t the monuments, though they’re amazing.

Tourists remember monuments.

Residents remember people.

When I think about France, I don’t picture the Eiffel Tower or postcard villages.

I picture birthdays.

Barbecues that stretched long after sunset.

Entire afternoons at the beach.

Summer days by the lake, in the mountains.

New Year’s Eve celebrations with friends who’ve become family.

Late-night conversations that somehow always lasted longer than expected.

Afterworks that turned into debates about everything and nothing.

Association events where strangers became lifelong friends.

I don’t think about France as a collection of places.

I think of it as a collection of people.

Today, almost every part of the country reminds me of someone I love.

Friends in Bordeaux, Lacanau, Lyon, Paris, Strasbourg, Poitiers, and much more.

Family in Angers, Laval, Rochefort, Nice.

Those cities are no longer dots on a map.

They’re invitations.

They’re stories.

They’re people waiting for me.

That’s something I never expected when I first arrived.

France also gave me something I struggled to find elsewhere.

Depth.

I’ve lived in countries where people were incredibly friendly yet relationships rarely moved beyond the surface. Australia is a good example. People were kind, generous and always willing to help, but I never found the deep friendships I was searching for. It simply wasn’t a social culture that suited me.

In France, friendships often take longer to build.

But once they exist, they become remarkably strong.

People invite you into their homes.

Into their families.

Into their lives.

They challenge your ideas, celebrate your successes and stay beside you during difficult times.

That’s the kind of friendship I’ve always valued.

Another reason I stayed is nature.

Anyone who’s read my work knows how deeply I care about the natural world.

After traveling through many countries, I became increasingly aware of how differently societies treat their environment. I’ve seen breathtaking landscapes buried under litter, rivers treated as dumping grounds and forests disappearing with barely a second thought.

France isn’t perfect.

No country is.

But I’ve always felt that people here still recognize that nature deserves protection. National parks, coastal paths, forests, mountains, local environmental groups and countless volunteers reflect a culture that, despite its contradictions, still understands that these places matter.

That matters to me.

Because I don’t just enjoy beautiful landscapes.

I feel responsible for them.

The day you begin worrying about a country’s forests, rivers and coastline as if they were your own, something has changed.

The greatest gift.

The greatest gift France gave me wasn’t professional, cultural or even philosophical.

It was personal.

It’s where I met the woman who changed my life.

Through her, I didn’t just find a partner.

I found another family.

After years of moving from place to place, having a family here changed everything.

Belonging.

People sometimes think belonging comes from your environment.

I don’t.

I think belonging comes from participation.

From showing up.

From learning the language instead of expecting everyone else to speak yours.

From contributing to your community.

From joining local associations.

From building friendships that survive distance and time.

From caring about the country’s future even when you’re frustrated by its present.

France has many flaws.

I hope it becomes safer for women and vulnerable people.

I hope its social model regains the strength that has weakened over the past decade.

I criticize those things precisely because I care.

Indifference belongs to tourists, responsibility belongs to those who intend to stay.

Maybe one day I’ll officially become French.

If that happens, a passport won’t suddenly make me belong.

It will simply recognize something that has been growing for years.

People often ask why I chose France.

The truth is more complicated.

I chose France.

But France chose me too.

Not through luck.

Through thousands of ordinary moments.

Conversations.

Shared meals.

Volunteer projects.

Family gatherings.

Train rides across the country.

Days by the ocean.

Years spent building a life alongside people who slowly became part of it.

I wasn’t looking for the perfect country.

I was looking for the place where my actions mattered more than my passport.

After all these years, when I think about France, I don’t see a map.

I see faces.

And I can’t think of a better definition of belonging than that.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Life in Kuala Lumpur, Mostly Pros and Some Cons

August 13, 2026 — Leave a comment

Cost of living, weather, walkability, safety, let’s unpack everything.

I first came to Malaysia more than ten years ago, on a family trip to Kuala Lumpur, Penang and the Perhentian Islands. It was the last time my family traveled together like that. I came back alone a few months later, younger, rebuilding after two rough years, right around when my anxiety and panic attacks started.

Ten years later I’m back for the third time: a month in Kuala Lumpur, more time in Penang. I still really like this place. Here’s why, and why I still wouldn’t move here.

Cost of living in Kuala Lumpur

Cheap Food, Expensive Rent.

KL makes everyday life easy. It’s safe, affordable without feeling cheap, and English gets you through almost anything.

Food is where that shows most. A meal at a hawker centre or food court easily comes in under 20myr; 25myr gets you a genuinely good casual meal. You’re not sacrificing quality to save money. KL also has luxury restaurants and high-end malls if you want to spend more. The city runs at both ends.

Rent doesn’t follow the same logic. As a foreigner, budget around 3000myr/month for a decent studio with a kitchenette, more or less depending on neighborhood, building and negotiation (in-person deals beat arranging things from abroad).

That’s the real surprise of KL’s cost of living: you can eat for 10myr and cross the city for pocket change, but your apartment still runs several thousand ringgit a month, because KL’s housing market behaves like the international city it is.

Getting around without a car

The rail network (LRT, MRT, monorail, buses, feeder buses) covers most of the city. For a foreigner staying a month or more, the Rapid Bulanan pass is worth knowing: 170myr (not 150 as advertised) for 30 days of unlimited travel across RapidKL’s network. I bought one and used it every day, though I could have gotten by without it.

150myr isn’t cheap, but it’s one less thing to think about. Shorter Rapid Kembara passes exist for visitors too.

So no, you don’t need a car in KL. The problem is the city wasn’t really built for people who don’t have one.

You can also use Grab, which is relatively cheap, but not the best option for the environement.

Is Kuala Lumpur walkable? Not really

This is my biggest complaint. Around KLCC and the newer developments, pedestrian infrastructure is genuinely good. Then the sidewalk just disappears. You cross a road and you’re suddenly walking beside six lanes of traffic with no clear way across.

A 15-minute walk on Google Maps can feel much longer at 32C and full humidity, next to traffic, with no shade.

So people take Grab, or drive, and the cycle feeds itself. Poor walkability pushes people into cars, more cars mean more congestion and heat, and the city gets even less pleasant to walk in.

KL has invested heavily in public transport, which is great, but it’s not the same as good urban mobility. You still have to get from your door to the station, and from the station to wherever you’re going. What this city needs is continuous sidewalks, real crossings, cycling infrastructure and shade. This city definitely needs shade!

Weather and humidity in Kuala Lumpur

Heat doesn’t bother me. Humidity does, and KL has plenty of it, the kind that wraps you in a warm wet towel after five minutes outside. Then you walk into a mall and you’re freezing, because electricity is cheap here and air conditioning runs generously everywhere: offices, malls, restaurants, hotels.

Step back outside and you’re sweating again within minutes.

The city cools its indoors to compensate for outdoor heat it can’t control, then adds more heat back into the air through cars and AC units running constantly.

Noise

KL is alive, and rarely quiet. Cars, motorcycles, construction, modified exhausts, air conditioners, honking. It’s less that any one sound is unbearable and more that there are so many of them your brain never fully switches off.

If you’re used to the quiet of certain places, KL isn’t for you.

Malaysia’s multiculturalism

This is what I love most about Malaysia beyond the food. It’s a predominantly Muslim country, but Chinese, Indian and other communities have been part of Malaysian society for generations, and the religious diversity is something you see everywhere. I’ve prayed in mosques with Taoist temples visible from the windows, walked through Little India surrounded by Hindu temples, and seen Chinese churches standing beside other places of worship. It’s not something you have to seek out. It’s simply part of everyday life. This is far from the norm in most countries around the world.

Malaysia has religious and ethnic tensions, like anywhere, and it would be naive to pretend otherwise. But the everyday coexistence, people working, eating and running businesses together across lines that are treated as much more divisive elsewhere is genuinely refreshing.

Women are also highly visible in economic life here. Managers, entrepreneurs, shop owners, decision-makers. Malaysia has a solid reputation as a safe destination for women traveling alone, and ironically, the worst safety stories I’ve heard came from expat circles.

Remote work in Kuala Lumpur

KL is amazing for remote work.

The internet is fast, reliable and widely available, and mobile data is cheap enough that staying connected isn’t something you really have to think about. Wifi is everywhere you’d expect it to be, from apartments and hotels to cafés and shopping malls.

When we landed at KLIA, we bought a CelcomDigi tourist SIM for 60myr. It gave us 30 days of unlimited internet in Malaysia plus 3GB that could be used elsewhere in Southeast Asia, which came in very handy when we went to Vietnam. Also, we paid exactly the same at the airport as we would’ve paid online or at an agency in town.

No contract, no expensive roaming and no worrying about getting connected when you land.

Then there’s the café culture. KL has no shortage of neighbourhood cafés, minimalist coffee shops and places where people can sit with a laptop for a few hours. You can work, get good coffee, eat something decent and stay connected without anyone bothering you.

The city also has a growing technology sector and is becoming an increasingly important regional hub for tech and data centres. So there’s a good fit between the infrastructure and the kind of work many remote workers actually do.

Car culture

Malaysia’s custom car scene is genuinely amazing, especially if you’re coming from Europe. Japanese and local cars, lowered, rebuilt, repainted, personalized. It’s not about owning something expensive, it’s about making the car yours, and there’s real creativity in it. Didn’t expect to love this part as much as I do.

KLIA and getting out of Kuala Lumpur

KL is a fantastic base for exploring Southeast Asia. KLIA reaches Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar easily. From KL Sentral, the airport coach is 15myr one way (as of August 2026); the KLIA Ekspres train is more expensive, still affordable and faster.

The bus takes 45 minutes to an hour depending on traffic. So convenient!

Vegan food in Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia is one of the easier places I’ve traveled as a vegan, mostly because vegetarian food is deeply embedded in several religious traditions here (Taoist, Hindu, and others), so vegetarian restaurants are everywhere.

The catch: vegetarian doesn’t mean vegan. Fish sauce, oyster sauce and other animal products turn up in dishes labelled vegetarian, so you have to ask.

Our favorite joint is definitely RightSide! Burgers, lobster rolls, tacos, milkshakes, matcha, ice cream, all vegan.

Try Vegelicious JR in Midvaley as well, it’s insanely good.

The plastic problem

Bottled water, plastic bags, cups, straws, takeaway containers, everything wrapped in something. Order one drink and you can walk away holding a cup, a bag, a straw and a separate wrapper.

Plastic is cheap, convenient, and works in this climate. Straws, for instance, often exist so you don’t put your mouth directly on a shared can, not just out of carelessness. But a country with this much modern infrastructure could do far more to normalize refill stations, household filtration and reusable containers. They’re there, but nowhere near widespread enough.

For anyone who thinks about waste, it’s hard to ignore.

Why I wouldn’t live in Kuala Lumpur

The weather would wear on me. The noise would wear on me. The plastic would drive me up the wall. And the lack of walkability would frustrate me more with every year. I want to walk out of my front door and just go, not along a six-lane highway, not 20 minutes to the nearest crossing. I want quiet, trees, nature, and an easy way out of the city. KL doesn’t offer any of that, unfortunately. Neither do most cities of this size.

Is Kuala Lumpur worth living in?

KL has almost everything. It’s modern, safe, multicultural, well connected and tech-forward. It’s also not finished figuring itself out, and I like that about it.

Would I live here permanently? I love my life in France, but even without that, KL wouldn’t be at the top of my list. The walkability, the noise, the plastic pollution, the air, the heat, none of them are dealbreakers on their own. Together, though, they add up to the one thing I won’t compromise on: my health.”

Would I come back? I already have, three times, and I doubt this is the last.

Thanks for reading,
Teekay

Living in Bordeaux, mostly pros and some cons

May 19, 2026 — Leave a comment

Bordeaux was never the plan

I never planned on living in Bordeaux.

Like, at all.

I never thought it would become anything close to “home” either. Actually, I don’t even really know what home means.

Not in a fake deep way.

Not in the cliché traveler way where people say “home is wherever the heart is” and then post a picture of an airport window or whatever.

I mean it literally.

I’ve moved too much, traveled too much and lived in too many different places to tie that word neatly to one city, one country, one childhood street or one fixed point on a map.

Some people have that.

A place they come from.

A place that explains them.

A place they can point to and say, yeah, that’s home.

I don’t really have that.

So when I say Bordeaux became important to me, I don’t mean it became home in the normal sense.

I just mean it’s one of the rare places where staying made sense.

And for me, that’s already a lot.

What living in Bordeaux is actually like

I’ve lived in and around Bordeaux for years now, after living in places like New York, Barcelona, Lyon, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Addis Ababa, Penang and Hong Kong.

So this isn’t a tourist guide.

It’s not a “48 hours in Bordeaux” thing.

It’s not about where to take cute pictures, where to drink wine or which square looks best on Instagram.

This is a personal look at what living in Bordeaux is actually like. The beauty, the comfort, the cost, the rain, the summer heat, the transport, the vegan options, the access to nature and the strange feeling of a city that somehow made sense to me.

Somehow, over the years, Bordeaux ended up being the place I stayed the longest.

Funny how these things play out.

What’s also interesting is that it wasn’t because I woke up one day and thought, yes, this is the city where I’m going to build my life.

It just kept making sense to stay a little longer.

Then a little longer again.

I’ve been in France on and off for around 20 years now, which is actually mad when I write it down. At one point I studied in Lyon and listen, Lyon is beautiful. I’m not one of those people who pretends a city is ugly just because I didn’t connect with it.

Lyon has history, architecture, culture, food, all that heavy old French city stuff.

But I never felt that comfortable there.

In fact, when I left Lyon, I genuinely thought I was done with France entirely.

Then one day I drove through Bordeaux and that was kind of it.

Immediate click.

No long intellectual analysis.

No checklist.

No “let me compare quality of life, transport, rent and cultural infrastructure.”

Just a feeling.

Like, ok, I get this place.

That’s it.

And I don’t get many places like that.

The feeling of Bordeaux

Bordeaux is beautiful, but not in a loud way.

That’s probably one of the main reasons I like it.

It doesn’t scream at you.

It’s not trying to be Paris. It’s not trying to impress you with giant towers, endless glass buildings or some fake futuristic skyline.

There are no skyscrapers eating the sky.

No weird corporate city-centre energy making you feel like you accidentally walked into someone’s LinkedIn profile.

There’s light.

There’s air.

There are streets that don’t feel like they’re closing in on you.

If you’ve lived in big cities, you know how quickly you can lose the sky. Everything becomes concrete, traffic, glass, noise, pigeons, people walking too fast, cars everywhere, buildings blocking every bit of openness.

Bordeaux doesn’t feel like that.

At least not to me.

It feels softer.

The town hall is genuinely beautiful. The old churches too. The bridges, the stone buildings, the river, the way the city catches light when the weather changes.

Walking around the centre feels visually calm in a way most cities don’t.

Not perfect.

Not magical.

Just soft.

And I like that.

The best things about living in Bordeaux

One of the best things about Bordeaux is that it feels small enough to understand, but not so small that it feels completely closed.

A lot of people in Bordeaux aren’t even really from Bordeaux. They come from nearby towns, the Arcachon Bay, Paris, other parts of France and sometimes somewhere else entirely, like me.

So the city has this mixed energy.

It feels medium-sized, but socially bigger than it looks on paper.

Not too provincial.

Not too massive.

Not too stuck in itself.

That works for me.

Culture is everywhere too, but again, not in a try-hard way.

Montaigne, Montesquieu, Mauriac, universities, opera, theatres. That whole old intellectual background is just there. And yeah, that sounds a bit like something from a tourist office brochure, but you do feel it.

Not every day.

Not every second.

But it sits in the background.

Also, random fact, Bordeaux was the capital of France three times.

Most people don’t know that.

I love facts like that.

Nature, ocean and weekend escapes

Honestly, one of the best things about living in Bordeaux is how easily you can leave it.

Which sounds like an insult, but it really isn’t.

The ocean is just over an hour away.

And not the kind of beach where you’ve got buildings stacked behind the sand, overpriced ice cream stands and people sitting on top of each other.

I’m talking long Atlantic coastlines, dunes, pine forests, surf towns, wind, space.

A completely different rhythm.

You leave the city and suddenly your body remembers that life doesn’t have to feel so tight all the time.

Further south you’ve got the Pyrenees. Sure, they’re about a 3-hour drive away, but still, close enough for a weekend getaway.

Mountains, lakes, hikes, waterfalls, caves, little villages.

A totally different landscape again.

And if you drive inland, say to the Dordogne, you find quiet villages, old mills, open plains and places where everything slows down without asking for permission.

Bordeaux is one of those cities where a short drive can completely change your environment.

That matters to me.

I need nature around me.

Not as an aesthetic.

Not as a weekend hobby.

I genuinely think I get tense without it.

Transport, walking and cycling

Travel is surprisingly easy for a city this size.

You’ve got flights to a lot of major European cities. Paris, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Istanbul and more.

North Africa is close too, especially Morocco.

Then the TGV gets you to Paris in about two hours, which still feels a bit unreal when you think about it.

From there, everything connects.

You’ve also got trains to Toulouse, Nantes, La Rochelle and other places, plus coaches if you want to travel more slowly into Spain or Portugal.

The city gives you options.

I like places that give you options.

Inside Bordeaux itself, public transport is decent.

Not perfect.

Rush hour can be annoying. The tramway gets packed. Buses can be a bit much sometimes.

But overall, it works.

And the city is walkable, which changes everything.

A city you can walk through is not the same as a city you only pass through.

Cycling is easy too. You can get almost anywhere by bike, which makes owning one feel less like a lifestyle choice and more like common sense.

Just lock it properly.

Actually, lock it very properly.

Bike theft is real.

Weather in Bordeaux

The weather has its own personality.

It rains a lot.

Like, a lot.

People complain about it, but I’ve never really hated Bordeaux rain. Most of the time it doesn’t feel violent or miserable. Not to me anyway.

It feels more like a reset.

Like the city needed to rinse itself off a little.

Summers though?

Yeah.

Summers can be rough.

Sometimes too hot.

I usually leave during peak heat when I can, because Bordeaux in a heatwave is not my favorite version of Bordeaux, that’s for sure.

That’s one thing people should know before moving here.

Bordeaux can look soft and elegant for most of the year, then suddenly become heavy, hot and uncomfortable in summer.

Still beautiful.

But sweaty.

Daily life in Bordeaux

The centre has character.

Small local shops, thrift stores, cafés, concept stores, cobblers, vinyl shops, second-hand electronics, markets.

There’s even a monthly vegan market, which is rare enough to matter in a city this size.

It’s relatively clean and relatively safe too.

People argue about safety a lot, especially online, because apparently everything has to become a dramatic debate now.

But in normal day-to-day life, compared to many urban places, Bordeaux still feels fairly balanced.

There’s greenery as well. Parks, trees, open little pockets of space.

Not enough trees in the very heart of the city in my opinion, and still too many cars, obviously.

But the base is solid.

It’s a city where you can have a normal day without feeling like the city is attacking your nervous system.

That might sound small.

It isn’t.

Cost of living and rent in Bordeaux

Now, let’s not romanticize it too much.

Bordeaux has problems.

Rent is ridiculous for what the city offers in terms of work.

That’s probably one of the biggest contradictions of living here.

The city became desirable, people came, prices went up and now you get this strange gap between the lifestyle Bordeaux sells and the economic reality many people actually live with.

It’s beautiful, yes.

It’s comfortable, yes.

But comfort is never neutral when people are priced out of it.

That’s the thing with cities like Bordeaux. They look soft from the outside, but they still carry all the usual pressures underneath.

Rent.

Work.

Class.

Tourism.

Gentrification.

The slow replacement of ordinary life by polished lifestyle.

It’s not Paris-level brutal, obviously.

But it’s there.

And if you’re thinking of moving to Bordeaux, you should know that the city can be expensive compared to the job opportunities available locally.

Beautiful cities always know how to charge for their beauty.

Vegan life in Bordeaux

Vegan life in Bordeaux is manageable, but limited.

That’s probably the most honest way to put it.

You can find options. You can eat out. You can shop. You can make it work.

But if you’re coming from bigger cities with stronger vegan scenes, Bordeaux will probably feel small.

Not impossible.

Just not abundant.

There’s a monthly vegan market, which I appreciate, and there are some good places around the city, but it’s not the kind of place where vegan food is everywhere without thinking.

You still have to look.

You still have to plan a little.

And sometimes you still end up eating fries and pretending that’s a meal.

It happens.

The downsides of living in Bordeaux

So no, Bordeaux isn’t perfect.

No city is.

Rent is too high.

Transport isn’t cheap.

Bike theft is very real.

Summers can be intense.

Vegan options are still limited compared to bigger cities.

There are still too many cars.

The centre needs more trees.

And there’s this strange seasonal emptiness where a lot of people leave during summer, especially since many residents aren’t originally from there.

The city kind of exhales and partially empties out.

Some people hate that.

I get it.

It can feel peaceful, but also a bit strange, like everyone quietly agreed to disappear at the same time.

Bordeaux can also feel a little too comfortable sometimes.

That might sound like a fake complaint, but I mean it.

Some cities push you. Some cities rough you up. Some cities force you into movement.

Bordeaux doesn’t always do that.

It can soften you.

Which is nice.

Until it isn’t.

So, is Bordeaux a good place to live?

Yes, if you want a beautiful, walkable, culturally rich French city with decent public transport, strong access to the ocean and nature, enough social life to not feel isolated and a softer rhythm than Paris.

No, or not easily, if you need cheap rent, strong local salaries, big-city vegan options, endless nightlife, reliable summer comfort or a city that feels fully alive all year.

For me, Bordeaux isn’t perfect.

But it’s one of the rare places where staying made sense.

And for someone like me, that’s not nothing.

Would I live in Bordeaux again?

Honestly, yes.

In fact, we’re just over an hour away.

I go back almost weekly to volunteer, see friends, run errands or just walk around for a few hours.

And every time, there’s still something.

Not home exactly.

But Bordeaux is one of the few places that ever made me understand why people use that word.

Maybe that’s enough.

If you want to read about another french city I lived in (Lyon), check this article out.

Peace!

Teekay

A place without clocks

March 25, 2026 — Leave a comment

This isn’t fiction. It’s called the African Jerusalem.

People there don’t need clocks. The bees tell the time.

As my readers know, I’m vegan, so I don’t take from animals, not even honey. That hasn’t changed. But in the highlands around Lalibela, I noticed a different way of living with them, one rooted in respect and faith.

Reasons why we don’t eat honey

I spent four years of my teenage life in Ethiopia, then returned again at 22. Some places stay with you in a way that doesn’t fade, and for me, this is one of them.

Not far from Lalibela, in rural areas often referred to locally as Gueorgis, beekeeping isn’t just a livelihood. It’s something older, something spiritual. Among Ethiopian Orthodox Christian communities, bees are not seen as simple insects. They’re often regarded as pure creatures, sometimes described as reflecting the discipline and harmony of angels. Not because they’re divine, but because they’re part of a creation that follows a precise order, one that humans are meant to observe and respect.

That idea of order shows up everywhere, especially in how people relate to time.

The concept of time

There’s a belief I heard more than once while I was there. The bees give the time three times a day. In the morning around what we would call 10, then at midday, and again in the afternoon around 3. These are the moments when their activity peaks, when they leave in visible waves to gather nectar. It’s not a clock in the modern sense, but it becomes one in daily life.

And in many of these rural areas, that matters more than any watch.

Because the reality is that in remote parts of Ethiopia, especially around Lalibela, people have historically lived without precise, mechanical timekeeping. Time is read through the sun, through patterns. Morning begins when the light settles a certain way. Midday is when the sun stands above you. Evening arrives when shadows stretch and the air cools.

People don’t meet at exact hours. They meet in moments. And everyone understands those moments.

There’s a cliché you hear often about Africans being fashionably “late,” about Ethiopians not caring about time. I don’t take that at face value. Without claiming it as a proven explanation, I think it says more about the observer than the people being described.

If your entire system is built around minutes and precision, then anything outside of that looks like disorder. But what if it’s just a different structure?

For instance, in Islamic cultures, time is extremely precise. Daily prayers are tied to exact solar positions. Fasting begins and ends at defined moments. The lunar calendar governs entire cycles of life. Time there is something to be measured carefully and adhered to strictly.

In contrast, in many rural societies, time is lived before it’s measured. It flows with what God has set in motion, rather than being cut into exact units. So what looks like “lateness” might simply be life unfolding without the pressure of the clock.

And Ethiopia takes that even further in a way most people don’t even realize.

It doesn’t just live time differently. It counts it differently.

There’s what we call international time, and then there’s Ethiopian time. In Ethiopia, the day starts at what we would call 6 AM, roughly sunrise. That’s hour one. So what we call 7am becomes 1 o’clock. Noon becomes 6. What we call 6 PM becomes 12. It’s not confusion. It’s consistency with the sun. The first hour begins when light begins.

It’s a system that actually makes a lot of sense. It aligns the clock with lived reality rather than abstract convention.

The calendar follows the same logic.

Ethiopian calendar has 13 months, not 12. Twelve months of 30 days, and a thirteenth month of 5 days, or 6 in a leap year. That last month, Pagume if my memory hasn’t failed me, is short, almost like a pause between cycles.

Thus, the new year doesn’t begin on January 1st. It begins around September 11th. Right after the heavy rainy season, when the land resets, when the skies clear, when life begins again. It’s agricultural, but also spiritual. A renewal that actually follows the environment people live in.

And because of how this calendar was preserved, based on older Christian calculations of the Annunciation, Ethiopia is about 7 to 8 years “behind” the Gregorian calendar. So while much of the world is in 2026, Ethiopia is in 2018.

It’s not that one is right and the other is wrong. It’s that one remained rooted in its own continuity, and I love and salute that.

Beekeeping in the African Jerusalem

That continuity matters when you look at places like Lalibela, often called the African Jerusalem. Tied to Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, whose name is understood to mean “the bees recognize his greatness/sovereignty”, it reflects one of the oldest continuous Christian traditions in the world. Christianity has been practiced in Ethiopia since at least the 4th century, long before much of Europe fully adopted it.

So when people bring honey to churches, when priests bless bees and beekeepers, it’s not symbolic in a modern sense. It’s continuity across centuries.

And that continuity is visible in movement too.

During honey harvesting seasons, some people from extremely remote villages set out for the markets of Lalibela, carrying honey in hand-crafted clay jars to sustain their families. They walk for days, not hours, days!

They move across the highlands, guided by the sun, by memory, by instinct. No maps, no schedules. Just direction.

Along the way, they stop at churches. Some of them centuries old, carved into rock. They offer part of their honey. Priests receive it, bless it, sometimes bless the bees themselves. It’s not commerce. It’s passage.

When night falls, they stop.

No tents. No inflatable beds. No modern equipment. They sleep outside, on the ground, with whatever they carry. Then at sunrise, they continue. Dozens of kilometers, step after step, until they reach the central market.

And this still happens today.

Part of what makes this possible is the geography of the Ethiopian highlands, historically known as Abyssinia. Compared to neighboring regions in Kenya or Tanzania, which are home to large populations of dangerous wildlife, the high plateaus around Lalibela are relatively safer. Fewer large predators, different ecosystems. It doesn’t mean there’s no risk, but it makes long-distance walking without protection far more viable.

The beehives themselves are adapted to this environment. Made from hollowed logs, woven fibers, and natural seals, they protect the bees from temperature swings and pests, and can survive in remote areas with minimal attention. Over generations, this system has allowed Ethiopian beekeeping to continue for at least 1500 years, deeply tied to the rhythms of the land.

The climate shapes everything too. Much of Ethiopia doesn’t follow four seasons, but cycles of rain and dryness that vary by altitude. Life organizes itself around what is given, and when it’s given, whether for people or for bees. In this context, priests play a role. Honey and candles are brought to churches, blessed, and prayers are offered for people and their bees.

Provision ultimately comes from God, and humans participate within limits they cannot control.

Even so, tension remains. People treat the bees with care and respect, but taking honey is still taking. Even when done carefully, it remains a form of exploitation. It may be necessary, it may be balanced, but it must also be acknowledged.

What stayed with me after all these years and despite how much I traveled was the alignment. A place where time is not just counted differently, but felt differently. Where a day doesn’t begin at midnight because a clock says so, but when light actually appears. Where a year resets not in the middle of winter, but after the rains have passed. Where journeys are measured in effort, not in minutes.

In a place like Lalibela, you start to question what we consider “normal.”

Maybe precision isn’t always clarity.

Maybe being “on time” isn’t always being in sync.

And maybe there are ways of living, still existing today, that haven’t forgotten that time was never meant to be owned, only followed.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Neighbors of Lacanau Océan

February 2, 2026 — 1 Comment

Small worlds at the edge of the ocean.

Living near the ocean and surrounded by forest comes with a quiet gift: the constant presence of small, living worlds brushing past my own.

In 2024, my wife and I moved to Lacanau Océan almost by accident and immediately fell in love with the area, especially during the off season, when silence settles in. Beyond the calm and the sense of space, what stays with me most is the wildlife I encounter on my daily walks near the ocean and through the forest.

Below is a little gallery of animals I come across regularly, depending on the season. I’m probably forgetting some.

A list of land animals

Wild boars
Roe deer
Rabbits
Hedgehogs
Red foxes
Bats
Red squirrels
Frogs
Moles
Butterflies
Dragonflies
Snails
Lizards
Ducks
Cats of course
and dogs

And then a bunch of birds too

Kentish plover (the funniest birds itw)
Ravens (my faves)
Blackbirds
White storks (lucky if you see them, but they’re around)
Tawny owls (the shy ones)
Common buzzards
Common kestrels
Eurasian magpie
Eurasian siskin
Seagulls
Cranes

Pretty awesome, right?

Thank you for stopping by.

Teekay

Realizations after 9 years of living and traveling in Europe

May 18, 2025 — Leave a comment

Suddenly, the world feels so small.

It’s funny how easily we take things for granted once we’ve lived them.

I hadn’t set foot in continental Europe until I was 17. I was never particularly fascinated by it, but I was curious, mainly because I’ve always been a football head (aka soccer). My understanding of Europe came almost entirely through football. It’s surprising how much you can learn about a place through the way it presents itself to the world.

For me, football was Europe’s Hollywood.

Sure, I’d read books by European thinkers like Rousseau, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Adam Smith (dad’s an economist), Marx (capitalism’s greatest critic), Montesquieu and plenty of Greek philosophers, but most of them weren’t contemporary thinkers. They wrote about their own times, their realities. Football, on the other hand, made Europe feel present, dynamic, real. It gave me a window into the continent’s character.

For instance, I knew about the English and their pub culture way before I had set foot in England. I already knew they loved to drink before games, loved to sing in the stands and viewed the sport almost like a religion.

The Dutch, with their total football philosophy, played the game differently. Organized, intelligent, team-oriented, their football reflects a society that values structure and versatility.

The Germans famously love their beer. Bayern Munich holds a photoshoot every year to promote Oktoberfest, which I only knew about thanks to their events.

The Turks are loud and proud. Fireworks in the stands, packed stadiums on a weekday, and fans who treat football like life or death, it perfectly depicts their character.

The Spanish, on the other hand, are just as proud, but more divided. The Basques, Catalans and Andalusians all bring their own flair to the game. They also have their own holidays, like San Jordi (Catalan Valentine’s day), and you learn about those through football too.

The Italians are perhaps the only ones who proudly exposed the ugly face of their society through the beautiful game: their racism toward Black players, their theatrics and machismo are ever present on the pitch and off of it. Their passion is unmatched and unapologetic, but so is their cheating. Not great, thank God people outside of football are different.

Anyway, last but not least, the French. It was already striking to me how different people within the country were. France is so diverse, which I already knew then, but which became even clearer the second I set foot here.

I’ve been to more than 20 European countries since moving here, and visited over 100 cities in Europe. I’ve made lifelong friends who became family. I studied, partied and worked with them. Better yet, I ended falling in love with a European, who then became my wife and lifelong partner. Who would’ve thought?

And yet, I take it all for granted now.

I love living in Europe, and there is nowhere else I’d rather be, but traveling around Europe doesn’t excite me as much as it used to. It feels like I’ve seen it all, which, of course, isn’t true.

It’s strange how easy it is to feel indifferent to things you once dreamed of.

Gratitude, I’ve learned, isn’t just a feeling. It’s an action. A choice.

Our next trip in Europe will be to the Balkans, and Greece. Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia are on our list. I hear the culture there is very different to Western Europe, which is super exciting!

Thank you for stopping by.

Peace!

Teekay