Well, here I go: this is the first entry dedicated to 'travelling' in this blog. As a passionate explorer, I often hear friends telling me I should have a travel blog. Well, as much as I love travelling and talking about my trips, I am definitely not going to be writing a diary-like description of my vacations.  So yeah, my travel tips won't be telling you how awesome famous landmarks and destinations are. They will be dedicated to those travel experiences, which I consider special, yet not really to be found in every guide book - something more like little secrets and unusual destinations.Disclaimer: as...

Friends and other people who follow me on social media often ask me: “How do you manage your time?” referring to my apparently restless lifestyle and routine which combines a full-time office job, a freelance home-based job, a distance learning degree program at a University of Applied Sciences, running a social initiative (the Free Hugs Vienna group), rather frequent travelling, constant partying and gathering with friends, a highly active social media life, more than enough ‘me-time’ and well, taking care of my cute little Chihuahua, Besty.My straightforward answer to this question...

Helping people in need is an authentic and noble sentiment among people. Be it through acts of kindness, charity, volunteering, or any other means of providing something of value for people who lack that what we possess in excess or have at least enough to share.Many thoughts cross my mind on the subject “charity”: one can be quite critical on things such as “how selfish acts of charity can be”: do people give for the sake of giving or in seek of the reward for being acknowledged as the ‘giver’ – the one in possession of a certain kind of power’? One can also be critical on “how...

The last couple of days I’ve walked to work facing the same headlines in the newspapers. All of them had it printed in large: “900 dead”. The refugees’ catastrophe in the Mediterranean Sea has cost 900 lives! [And as I write it, I can’t avoid the goose bumps and the urge to shed a tear again].This is not the first catastrophe of this kind in the Mediterranean. In the last couple of years only, these numbers have been accumulating drastically: June 2011 (270 deaths), August 2011 (125 deaths), June 2012 (54 deaths), October 2013 (366 deaths), July 2014 (150 deaths), September 2014 (500...

Social Anxiety is one of those things I only managed to give a name to after I figured out that it was more than just simple inner voices transforming my social freedom into a social challenge.Having overcome a time in my life, in which I made use of all kinds of extreme techniques to literally ‘trick’ people into liking me, I realized that no matter how hard I tried and how ‘successful’ the social outreach was, I always ended up with this awkward feeling telling me how truly unconfident I really was.I was so focused in ‘selling the whole of me’ that I forgot to apply one of the most...

"You only matter for as long you give others what they want from you" – this is one of these hard-core rules of life I’d be happier living without, BUT, there is a way to make this down-side of life turn it into a source of rewards. I once read in a parable that I see fit in this context:--------- A guy has just been shot and is laying on the floor when suddenly someone comes up, looks at the injured body laying on the floor and, picking up a pocketknife, says: “- We need to operate him immediately!”He bends himself over the body and the people around him say: “- Hey, STOP! Are you a doctor?”He...

In business life, here and there we come across situations in which numbers and figures must be communicated from top downwards or vice versa. Having dealt with situations like those in my life, I have noticed that business people, specially the most important decision makers, are just addicted to numbers and cash accounts - and there is something wrong about it!Numbers do give us the information necessary to evaluate performance and financial results; it also gives enough insights on changes in both the internal and external dimensions of a company. Good figures are great and are certainly...

According to scientists and experts, one out of ten individuals in the world is a homosexual. The statistics mean that worldwide, approximately 700.000.000 men and women are gay! This really invites for a second thought the next time someone calls the gay community ‘a minority’, doesn’t it? After all, SEVEN HUNDRED MILLION people are more than twice the whole population of the United States of America or almost four times the population of Brazil. Anyways.Some people say that homosexuality is a new age’s phenomenon. Wrong! Modern-life did not make people suddenly become gay. Instead,...

3D means a lot! One often reads that James Cameron’s movie “Avatar” was ‘the’ break-through into the 3D era. While it might have indeed started a ‘3D-revolution’ for both the whole entertainment industry and consumer markets, technologies that broke the barrier of the three-dimensional space (3D), such as Avatar's ability to create 3D simulations on a 2D surface, are not new. The first 3D movies using color glasses released to the general public, for instance, can be traced back to as early as 1915.As a ‘technofreak’ myself (!), I could not avoid the ‘wow effect’ when...

When reading the economy section of any news portal, we often run into monthly, quarterly and yearly figures on 'economic growth'. More often than not, these figures refer to measurements of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Such standards in the calculation method of 'wealth' (nominal values) and 'growth' (real changes) allow international comparisons and aggregations. GDP, a measurement of the value of a country's production of goods and services, combines in a single figure what the news report as 'growth', 'expansion', 'development', 'improvement', 'increase', 'progress', 'boost', 'success', 'rise',...