Careful planning is often the key to success. It’s also something that can ruin the fun of traveling to new places, situations and meeting strange and wonderful people.

So I decided to go for the middle-way here, I wrote a list with things to bring and after a kind person informed me of Beijing’s temperature (about 5-10 degrees colder than Gothenburg) I bought a couple of winter shoes. Then to spice things up I made sure that the actual packing would be done after the christmas party at work.

I ended up throwing random items in my army bag in panic after realizing the alarm had been on for 45 minutes. The dimly lit room combined with the fact that I had slept for one or two hours tops and still was drunk surely threw in a surprise or two when I later check my luggage. I’m now on the train to Stockholm where I’ll crash at Ulf and tomorrow it looks like the plane leaves for Beijing.