This is a girl with a really nice bouncy bum whom we met on the train to Hamburg. God knows what’s her name.

This is my friend on the right. He bought a group ticket for us to go to Hamburg, but there was one seat free on the ticket. So he offered to take her (a total stranger) at a station along, as long as she paid her share of the ticket (which was 5 Euros).

Defining Characteristics: The girl freely admits that her nose is crooked due to an old bout of kickboxing, and that she had been in a police station before. She picked up kickboxing to defend herself from overly aggressive guys at the club, whom, she assures me, always pester her. Now she’s supposedly studying to become a barber – Germany and France seem to be the only countries where you need accreditation to be a barber – I was very surprised! She also owns an old iPhone, which supposedly was a gift from her ex-boyfriend. It was so beat up, I wonder if she actually treated him right.

Character: rather fun and probably would’ve been even more friendly if it weren’t for the fact that she was about to cheat her way out of the group ticket. Rather reluctant to be photographed, but eventually relented after realizing that there was no way to get out of it without seeming a bit suspicious, and probably also because Google doesn’t do facial recognition (although it does do an image search which still seems by and large based on the text accompanying the image).

What Happened: got up, said she had to go to the toilet, would buy drinks for all of us on the way back, and asked us what we wanted. I, for my part, asked for a cup of hot chocolate. I have yet to receive it, and my friend has yet to receive his 5 Euros.

Yours truly is a Malaysian studying in Germany! In a year or two my studies will be finished.

The point is by then I will have already learned how to be financially independent while at the same time be ready to go fully location independent. In the meantime I will treat Germany like a country I’m visiting, and blog about my struggles to become financially independent, preparing for location independence, and my experiences within the country, and perhaps a bit about life in general, not just German life.

Here are a few tools that I imagine will become a staple of my nomadic lifestyle:

The LG Optimus One was a cheap smartphone (which is now half the price which I bought it for merely 9 months ago!) which does pretty much everything. I wouldn’t use it to type up a blogpost though. It even includes a camera! It’s my first handphone ever to include a camera! But the built in camera has such horrible colours I mostly prefer its B&W output.

You’ll always need a flashlight. The cool thing about this one is that it’s solar and handcrank rechargeable. The problem with it is the battery never seems to sit securely in the socket, so it appears like it’s out of battery when it isn’t.

My heart is torn between lugging around the heavy Corsair Graphite 600T, with its overclocked and severely overvolted Phenom II X6 1055T, an overclocked+overvolted GTX470, 12GBs of RAM, 2TB of storage and a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2E SSD, and between the other one, a svelte little Sempron 145 in a Antec Three Hundred with 4GB of RAM running Windows XP and only 220GBs of storage to its name.

And as you all know, once you go multimonitor, you can never go back. It really is a hard decision.

No matter which desktop I lug around with me, this laptop will always come along. This ancient Compal GL31 has been with me since 2007, when it was new, and it’ll stay that way. The only problem is its battery lasts only 5 minutes.

Benzoyl Peroxide for an acne free complexion. Really it miffs me that I have to apply a chemical onto my face to keep it acne free, but it is on the WHO’s list of Essential Medicines, so at least it should be cheap and plentiful wherever I go.

The Nikon F5 is huge, heavy and guzzles batteries, but there’s no way I’m letting this piece of photographic history go. With a cheap 28-80 G lens? yup, because I can’t afford the next step up, the 50mm f/1.8D just yet. And a Canon Powershot A560 with a Gorillapod.

Panasonic SR-TEG10 rice cooker with steaming tray. Rice should be cheap and plentiful wherever I go, and the steaming tray means I just have to dump defrosted meat there and go about my business without worrying about preparing an extra dish! The cooker does tend to sputter at the steam vent – the steam cap is not very well designed.

This is the rest of my room. As you can see I need to downsize a lot. Can you spot the Playstation 3 60GB I flexed my entrepreneurial muscles to afford, and now barely touch? Yeah… myself from 3 years ago would kill me, but I suppose this is what you call “growing up”.