Hi there!

Before starting to talk about me, I want to thank you!
You, stranger, that got stranded on this page and decided to actually read the about me section, are amazing…

Then I was ready: 8 months, 5 destinations, 5 projects and 3 continents were waiting for me

I am TVA, Vanas, Gonzalez,… or at least that’s what my friends call me. Belgium is my first home and I grew up and lived most of my life in Dilbeek. This is a (for Belgian standards) pretty big town right on the edge of Brussels. I was the youngest of two brothers when I was born in Leuven. Right before I came into this world, and before any of my memories stuck, my family moved to a dead-end street on the edge of town. My entire childhood and teens was spent on that street in that town.

Passion for Music

None of the sports I did ever stuck and I mostly got out when they became to competitive (I am a sore loser). I tried out athletics, judo and badminton in various clubs. Despite my initial struggle learning how to swim, I started enjoying it a lot eventually. During my late teens and early twenties I stuck to swimming and running, mostly on my own.

The only hobby that ever really stuck was music. I went to the local music academy, starting at age 8 and persisted for 10 years, until I graduated from my mid-level in Piano. Unfortunately when I went to university, I stopped playing and now I need a serious refresher, since I can’t play anything anymore. That stop did not diminish my passion for music however. Quite the opposite: I’ve always enjoyed concerts and festivals a lot. The offer of which, I now realize, us Belgians (and more specifically Brusseleirs) are very spoiled with. I can enjoy anything from a classical Piano concierto in the Bozar in Brussels to the DJ mega-festival of Tommorowland in Boom.

If you are still reading, you might wonder how the very normal small town kid developed a passion for travelling and exploring? What is it about me that changed? Well the story is probably not unlike everyone else of my generation…

The Family Trips

My parents always worked hard, enough to allow our little family to travel abroad almost every time during the school holidays. The fact that my dad worked for a travel agency for a while definitely helped as well. We spent summers in Italy and France, renting a house or even a house-boat to explore the regions. But we also flew to other places in Europe, Asia and North Africa: like Egypt, Morocco, Israel, Turkey… We were even lucky enough to go cross-atlantic and visit New York and Disney World in Orlando.

By the time I was twelve I had been in planes, buses and cars more than most kids my age. Although still very young, I had visited already many different countries and places. The disadvantage, however, of traveling so much when you are so young is that you lose a lot of those memories over time. I still remember a lot of random separate highlights of our many trips. However, I can almost never pinpoint them to a place or even country without the help of my parents.

Fun with Friends

When we got older, going on trips with our parents started being less interesting to me and my brother, in favor of trips with our friends. So my dad decided we would do one last big trip, something we could really not say no to: a three-week tour of the US West Coast. You know what cliché I’m talking about: LA, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Yosemite, Zion, Las Vegas, Lake Powell, San Francisco and many more places before going back up to LA along the coast. It was a trip none of us will ever forget.

Meanwhile I had started going on some smaller eurotrips with my friends. Our first big journey, however, was “The Trip” (as we so aptly named it): a hitchhiking journey from Marseilles to Barcelona along the Mediterranean Coast of France and Spain. A trip that definitely merits a post of its own one day. After that, something really started itching and something about me had changed (my slightly more hippie friends would probably call it wanderlust). I started organizing a lot of trips, with as many friends as were willing to go along. A highlight of these travels was a road trip with 18 guys in two minivans across Europe and through Croatia.

The Big One

My first plan was to find a friend (or friends) to go along. However most still had to finish their studies, didn’t have the money or already started their first job.

In university, many of my friends took advantage of the Erasmus program. They took of to study half a year (or even a year) in a different European cities or even on a different continent. For some reason that never attracted me enough to actually apply. I guess I was too lazy or too comfortable where I was. I did really enjoy my student years in Leuven a lot. So much so, I decided to study an extra Masters in AI after I had finished my Industrial Engineering studies about Internet Computing. So much so that I had no clue what to do after I finished. The infamous void after university… What now?

So I bailed, quite literally: I booked trip around the world. My first plan was to find a friend (or friends) to go along. However most still had to finish their studies, didn’t have the money or already started their first job. I decided to go alone and make this trip about me and found an organisation called WEP (World Education Program) to help me (You can still see me wearing one of my WEP backpacks in the featured picture of this post). They have contacts at different volunteering projects around the world, so I took their world map and started circling. Soon I was ready: 8 months, 5 destinations, 5 projects and 3 continents were waiting for me.

A changed man

Needless to say, it was the best decision I ever made. You cannot go on a trip like that and come back unchanged. Everyone that has done something similar will certainly agree and all my friends probably thought something had changed about me (I got even more weird). But I did come back (not everyone does), and I found a job in Belgium not long after. During the second interview at the company, the boss of my future boss asked me the following question: “Would you mind traveling a lot and eventually even living in another country for some time?”. You cannot imagine how many green lights started going on in my head right then and there.

I signed on of course, and here I am: living in Madrid since October 2016. I fly to different places every other month, either for work or because I feel like it. I’m exploring my new home and the country that adopted me every day a little bit more.

Who knows what the future will bring? One thing is certain, the scratch map that hangs on the wall in front of me is not nearly as revealed as it should be…

Thanks for reading, now go explore!