On the road. The Longest Way

Three years of presentations

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Plzen, Czech Republic. This was the last one for now. And it was a good one.

Presentation in PlzenIn the last three years, I have traveled to cities in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, China and the Czech Republic, and I have given more than 30 presentations in 3 different languages.

The presentations were always about the same topic: The Longest Way, my attempt to walk from Beijing to Germany back in 2007/08.

One and a half hours or more like two?

I would bring my pink laptop, grab a mic and throw some 180 photos and maps on the screen. I would talk for about 90 minutes to two hours, except for that one time in Frankfurt where I got really carried away with my own jokes and talked until the place was about to close. Great fun!

Sometimes I would talk in front of small audiences. I did a lot of bookstores, Confucius Institutes and libraries. The smallest audience I ever had were ten people in the mountains of Switzerland. It was very nice since we were snowed in and the place had a very romantic Alpine feel to it.

Presentation in PragueThe photo you can see here is from a presentation I did in a shopping mall in Prague. I was nervous at first – with people running around to do their shopping, and with the language barrier, would the presentation work out at all?

It turned out to be just fine. Czech people have a tendency to describe themselves as rather serious and easily depressed, but I have gotten to know them as some of the most fun audiences ever!

Big and small audiences

The Longest Way presentations weren’t always small though. Sometimes I spoke in front of 400 or 800 or even 1000 people. I always got very nervous when I had to do that. But hey, gotta be tough if you want to be a man, right?

Presentation in FrankfurtRight now I am taking a break from the presentation thing for a while. Needed to free up some time for writing and – maybe, hopefully – some walking.

I’ll be back in 2017 though, with a bunch of presentations already in the pipeline. I’ll add them to the tour section as soon as I can confirm the specific dates and venues.

See you then!

Here’s a short time-lapse I shot while I was in Pisa for a presentation:

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