How Beautiful Mostar in Bosnia & Herzegovina Made Me Question Humanity
Remember to click the pictures to see the full size image.
After we had seen the beautiful Croatian coast it was time to head to Mostar, which is the fifth-largest city in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and famous for its old bridge “Stari Most” that was built in the 16th century during the Ottoman era.
When we arrived to the city we were not quite sure what to expect, and the first thing that caught my attention was that there were still scars of bombings everywhere, even though the war had ended over 15 years ago. It’s kind of funny how you feel a little sketchy in a new place if the surroundings are not clean, new and polished everywhere, or maybe that’s just me as a Finn, but I found out very quickly that there was nothing to be afraid of. Read the rest of this entry »
Driving Along the Stunning Croatian Coast
The Old Town of Dubrovnik
First, I want to thank one of the most amazing persons I know online – Lori from Jane Be Nimble – for the support and motivating words by dedicating this little travel story for her. Hearing positive feedback from nice people is what keeps me writing, and she’s such an awesome person that I suggest you check out her blog right away. The welcome will be warm. Thanks again, Lori.
Now back to the road trip (click on the photos to see them in full size).
When we left Venice, it was still early noon, so we had plenty of time to drive before dark, which was a good thing because we had decided to drive quite long way that day. We had heard that the coolest places in the coastal Croatia were Split and Dubrovnik, that are located in the Southern part of the country, so we decided to head there as soon as we could, keeping in mind that we had only two weeks time and so many beautiful places to see.
It would be impossible to drive directly to Split from Venice, so we just figured out that the best option would be to drive as long as we could and then choose a nice little town with a little help from our Lonely Planet book to stop for one night.
Driving from Venice on the highway was a little bit easier this time because now I knew how to use the pay toll, so we didn’t end up arguing with the pay toll workers this time. Read the rest of this entry »
Continuing the Road Trip to Venice, the Floating City
As we arrived to Venice at 1 AM in the night, exhausted, thirsty, and hungry, there weren’t really too many options for finding an accommodation. You can’t actually drive into the old town, because there are no roads – just canals and tiny streets for pedestrians.
By the way, before getting to Venice we had a funny incident on one of the pay tolls that can be found in most of the European highways: I had never driven in a highway with pay tolls before, so when we entered the first highway in Italy I didn’t really know what to do or what to expect.
When you’re leaving the highway, you are supposed to insert your ticket in a machine that then counts how much you have to pay, but of course I hadn’t realized that we were supposed to take the ticket when entering the highway.
There was this one guy speaking for us through a shitty loudspeaker that I could not understand at all. I just kept repeating “sorry, I don’t understand what you are saying” as he shouted louder and louder and got more angry.
I couldn’t understand a single word of his bad Italian accent as he tried to punish me through the loudspeaker and finally he gave up and opened the gate and let us through it without a cent after ten minutes that felt like three hours. Read the rest of this entry »
The Balkan Road Trip: Amazing Sceneries of Slovenia
The Julian Alps
As you may have noticed, I was on a road trip in Balkan countries for two weeks, and just came back to Finland on Sunday.
The trip was nothing short of incredible, since we were able to see so many cool places in just 14 days and the feeling of freedom when you can drive around in completely new areas without any specific plan is something that I can never get bored with.
The first destination on our trip was Slovenia – a small European Union country right next to Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia – and this first blog post regarding the trip will be all about that lovely and beautiful small country.
Just to give a sneak peak in advance of what I’m going to cover in the next posts, the whole road trip went like this:
Ljubljana – Bled – Bohinj (Slovenia) – Venice (Italy) – Crikvenica – Split – Dubrovnik (Croatia) – Mostar – Sarajevo (Bosnia & Herzegovina) – Skopje (Macedonia) – Thessaloniki (Greece) – Belgrade (Serbia) – Zagreb (Croatia) and finally back to Ljubljana again.
So there’s a lot of places to cover – I hope you don’t mind if I try to write a separate post about each of the countries we travelled through. Read the rest of this entry »
8 Myths in Life You Should Break for Success
“If I’d observed all the rules, I’d never have got anywhere”
- Marilyn Monroe
Do you follow every rule in life, whether the rules are set by your employer, law, or your peers?
Most of the time people try to make new rules to make life easier for us – think about for example how dangerous traffic is in countries where rules are not obeyed. However, there are also some rules that most people obey even though the rules are based more on limiting beliefs than actual laws or facts.
Here are some rules and myths that are eagerly waiting for you to break them if you want to succeed in life:
1. You need a master’s degree or an MBA to become successful in business
Getting a respected degree from a university was probably an excellent choice about 40 years ago, when there was less competition and everyone who graduated was almost definitely going to get a decent job with a nice salary. You didn’t have to worry too much about getting fired – there was always a new job around the corner.
Times have changed, and now almost every second person has a master’s degree, so where’s competitive advantage now?
You must be the best of your class with a perfect job experience to get full benefit from your degree, so I am not sure if studying very hard for five years is the best bet for success anymore. At least you don’t need it in order to achieve great things in life.
Most of the successful entrepreneurs have skipped university almost completely and nothing has stopped them later in life. Talk about Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg for starters. Read the rest of this entry »
What Would You Do If You Didn’t Have to Work for Money?
“Live with your whole being all the days of your life. Your reward will be true happiness”
- Rebecca Thomas Shane
One of the best questions you can ask yourself if you are looking for a new direction in your life is “what would I do if I would get enough money each month without doing anything?”
What are the things in your life you love to do – things that make you feel good and make you forget time?
Every one of us has a lot of things we like to do without getting paid for doing them, so if you are not sure what to do with your life and you are bored with your present job, you can’t spend your time better than making a list of those things.
For me the list looks something like this:
- I would spend every Winter somewhere where it’s warm
- I would help other people to find meaning in their lives
- I would take photographs, draw, and paint
- I would play different sports and exercise almost every day Read the rest of this entry »
How to Get 3 Seats on a Plane For the Price of 1 (and Sleep Well the Whole Flight)
“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”
- Dagobert D. Runes
I’ve been traveling quite a lot during my adulthood, and one thing I have learned is that it is very difficult to sleep in planes nowadays because the space between seat rows is optimized and there’s really no extra space for your legs or to bend the seat backwards to a sleeping position (if someone is sitting right behind you).
I’m flying to Slovenia very soon for a little vacation, so I thought this kind of little tip for getting three seats from one plane would be nice right now.
Usually the planes are not fully booked, and there are empty rows of three seats somewhere in the plane. It really doesn’t matter where you sit on the plane, because your ticket is not checked after you hop on the plane, unless you are sitting on someone else’s seat.
Often the problem is that you just don’t know in advance where the empty seats are. Read the rest of this entry »
Time to Change the Layout a Bit
As you can probably notice, I have changed the layout of Happiness Hunters a little bit. What do you think, is it going to the right direction? I’d appreciate some feedback in the comment section, because it’s so hard to know what kind of layout you readers would like to see. 
I’m Taking the 7 Link Challenge Today
I stumbled to this idea first briefly in Twitter, but only after seeing the amazingly cool fellow blogger Joshua Noerr take the challenge at his blog at www.joshuanoerr.com, I decided to take the challenge as well.
This challenge has been started by Darren Rowse from Problogger and the idea is that anyone who takes the challenge should publish a post that is a list of 7 links to posts that you and others have written that respond to the following 7 categories.
Without any further jargon, here is my list:
1. Your first post
How to Find Your Life Purpose in 10 Minutes
OK, 10 minutes sounds a little optimistic (I guess I tried to make a catchy headline there), it will probably take a little bit more time, but if you just focus on the right things, you can find your passions and life purpose quite quickly. After all, no one else but you can really realize your purpose in life.
2. A post you enjoyed writing the most
7 Amazing Productivity Tips for Lazy People
Yes, it must be this one, because I remember I was just about to escape to the beach when I decided to write this post, but remembered how good I would feel on the beach after I would have done something productive first.
Also, I really think those tips are very useful for getting a lot of things done in a short period of time, which gives more spare time for people that enjoy freedom, just like me and you. Read the rest of this entry »
Would You Like to Have a Life without Failures?
“I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong”
- Benjamin Franklin
Fear of failures is one of the biggest drivers behind most people’s actions. It makes them to always look for situations where they know the possibility of failure is minimal. In other words, they miss most opportunities of their lives.
What if I told you that there is no such thing as a failure?
That is how I genuinely see the world nowadays.
Everyone in this world has their own experiences and a unique perception of everything around them. The concept of failure is a man-made thing and every person sees the idea of failure differently.
People who choose to see even the smallest setbacks in life as big failures often end up being afraid of doing anything that forces them to step just a little bit out of their comfort zone, whereas people who see failures as great learning opportunities and as a possibility to develop more confidence and strength, are ready to take whatever life gives to them and always willing to challenge themselves.
While some people only see a failure, others will find the lesson in it, and while some people just focus on the pain, others will focus on the strength that just increased when something unexpected occurred.
The first way of looking at things is negative, self-destructive and limiting, while the latter one is positive, builds self-confidence and opens up new opportunities in life. It is up to you to make the decision how you want to see the little things we all have in our lives. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Save Money (to Do Something Fun Later)
“The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.”
- Kin Hubbard
Many people don’t have a lot of extra money and they use pretty much everything they get. Okay, the fact is that we are not going to get our money with us when we die, but I think it’s much less stressful to always have enough money on your bank account to take a break from your day job and go traveling for six months, for example.
I thought it would be useful to list a few tips that can help you to save money quickly. It doesn’t really matter what your salary is – if you just live by your means and decide to save money, it is more than possible to save enough money during the next few months to have a break and spend a few months abroad, if that’s your dream.
At least it is mine, so let’s get to the seven great tips for saving money quickly: Read the rest of this entry »
5 Habits that Will Make You More Intelligent
“Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.”
- Victor Hugo
Genetics have a lot to do with your potential IQ, but intelligence is not only about the ability to understand and learn new things – the more you know about things the more intelligent you appear to be and the easier it is for you to master things.
You can become more intelligent by certain habits that most intelligent people have, and although our genetics may set us some limits, we are often not even close to those limits, and by training regularly it is quite easy to become a faster learner, and reason and understand things quicker, which on the other hand will help us in many aspects of life, such as work, business, and social life.
Here are the top 5 habits that intelligent people have: Read the rest of this entry »
How to Make Your Photos Look More Professional
“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”
- Aaron Siskind
Photography is one of my biggest passions, and one good photo can make me happy even after many years, when I find it again on my computer.
I have been taking photos for a long time, but it has taken me some time to figure out how the professional photographers can make their photos look so intriguing, vivid, and… well, professional.
The most important thing is of course composition and the idea you have in the picture, but there are lots of other small things that make some photos really stand out.
Knowing how to use your equipment, for example if you have an SLR camera is really important, but in this article I am only going to focus on the simplest post processing techniques, because post processing was one of the most difficult things to figure out for me, and I am still learning it all the time.
Here’s a photo straight from my camera (you can click all the images in this article to see them in a bigger size): Read the rest of this entry »
4 Plus 1 Unconventional Methods for Waking Up Earlier
“There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.”
- Author unknown
Waking up early is almost impossible for me.
Getting a cat would probably be a solution, but as I don’t want to go that far, I hope that there are other solutions that work as well.
I need quite a lot sleep, at least 8 or 9 hours to feel normal, and 9 to 10 hours of sleep to wake up without an alarm clock. Some people enjoy going to sleep early and waking up early, too, but I often like to do different things in the evening and prolong going to sleep, which of course makes it harder to wake up in the morning.
If you are on a vacation, it doesn’t necessarily matter when you wake up, but I have noticed that waking up early makes me feel better (if I have slept enough) and it is then easy to get more things done during the day and still be able to catch a little bit sunshine after the workday is over.
I am not working for anyone else than myself at the moment, so no one is expecting me to wake up in the morning, which gives me the full responsibility to take control of my own sleeping patterns. It is both good and a bad thing.
For me, tips like “just wake up the same time every morning and go to sleep when you feel tired” don’t work at all. Read the rest of this entry »
5 Huge Time Management Mistakes You Should Avoid
“It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?”
- Henry David Thoreau
I just love time management techniques.
The reason for that is not that I would like to be the most efficient person in the world and become a workaholic who works efficiently for 12 hours a day, but rather the fact that with a right kind of time management you can achieve the same things in two hours that most people spend eight hours a day for.
Imagine that your workday would last only two or three hours, and you could then relax for the rest of the day without any stress regarding things that are still undone. It is all possible if you skip all the irrelevant things and focus only on the most crucial things as effectively as you can.
Unfortunately in a regular job you are not always rewarded for being efficient – usually your boss just gives you more work when you have finished everything. Maybe a good technique at a workplace is to finish the crucial things quickly, but tell the boss that you are still working on whatever you are supposed to get done, so that you will not be punished with additional tasks.
However, here are the biggest mistakes that people make with time management – avoid these and you will have more time for yourself: Read the rest of this entry »
