I wanna travel for the rest of my life. I hope this is not a phase. I hope this is not “travel as much as you want before you have kids because once you do, then it’s over” kind of thing. Bandi shares the same vision with me and I know that’s what’s important.

Family means no harm, we know that. We fully understand that as Asian kids, we have to take our family as consideration in our decision, no matter how liberal our thinkings are. Trust me, we could’ve just gone, resign from our jobs, withdraw our investment and just go. But we don’t do that, do we? we balance our love to travel with being good asian kids. Working, have stable income, sending money home and make our parents proud. That’s the only way to make Asian parents proud. Oh and yeah, to have baby, which is a little overdue now.

I was not that kid of person, I do care about my mom, but I used to not care about what she thinks of me, but Bandi has thought me that you can have strong character and still make other people happy, that I should not be extremely stubborn, that idealism can be flexible.

Bandi made me a better person, I’m still selfish, I’m just less selfish. And together, we are good. I feel it. With him, I feel good. I feel that we can actually go around the world, with our own timeline, with our own ways.

And we never think to actually stop having income and travel around the world like hippies, because everyone has different way to travel. We’re just taking our time, one city at a time. We still want to travel comfortably, but still on budget though. We don’t spend much money on other things, really. I don’t have any other hobbies that cost a lot of money. I borrow books from library, I stop buying them, and I write. Bandi plays football with his friends, which doesn’t cost anything, really. So, how come we have so much money for traveling? Because we don’t spend money for other stuffs.

I wanna travel for the rest of my life. There are so many things in this world I wanna see, there are so many places in this world I wanna visit. I don’t wanna stop now, I don’t wanna stop when we have kids, I don’t wanna stop when we get old. I don’t wanna stop ever. I wanna keep living life like this. This is not a phase, this is not a “hobby before kids”, this is our life. When we stop travel, we stop living.

And when we have kids, we will still travel. How? I don’t know, we’ll figure it out. There were so many things happened in my life which I didn’t know how to handle, but I figured it out. Now with Bandi, I’m sure we can do it. We have figured out so many odd things. We survived freaking long distance relationship, so I guess we could always try, as long as we’re together.

Nothing is being on hold because we still want to travel. we are not “still want to travel”, we are traveling for life, not still, not then. We’re gonna keep going, because we love it.

Malang, East Java, Indonesia, 31 January 2017.

May.