Oliver Roup’s Blog

I have realized that I really enjoy acquiring new skills, especially physical ones. While I find diving very enjoyable, I will admit that after a certain number of dives, all the coral and beautiful fish and even fantastic sea turtles start to blend together a little. You start to wonder then if you should continue paying rather steep prices to keep diving. It’s fun and exhilirating but you also start to feel like you’ve seen it. Or at least I did until I tried night diving.

Night diving is something new entirely. There are added elements of danger since it’s easy to become disoriented, lose your partner or ascend or descend too quickly. There are new skills to learn like how to signal in the light. Familiar sights look very different when diving at night and the beam of your flashlight has this very other-worldly quality about it.

The real magic comes though when you shut off the lights. Like in air, your eyes adjust to the darkness and you can pick out other divers off in the distant gloom with their own lights. More special still is the phyto plankton: Swirl your hand in front of your face and sparks trail off behind it, exactly like casting a spell in the movies. It’s a pretty intense and special feeling.

Rio feels a lot like New York City, or the place New York would be if it were consistently a lot hotter and the divide between rich and poor were even more insane than it is. It definitely takes a few days to get your travel legs. Challenge #1 getting money from an ATM, not as easy as it sounds. Hint: Just because it has the Cirrus logo does not in fact mean that your Cirrus card will work there…

I stayed the first two nights in a hotel just to get my bearings, but on reflection I would not recommend this. Meeting some English speakers is what takes this place from feeling harsh and expensive to the truly wonderful place it is. I stayed in the “Girl from Ipanema” hostel for R$30 a night an really enjoyed it, lots of friendly people. Alex the guide will tell you where to go to see some great stuff. I actually tried to push my flight to Fortaleza out a few days so I could catch a Futebal match, but alas the travel agent I used was closed all day Sat and Sun…

I ended up meeting some folks who are finishing up at Stanford GSB (what an incredibly small world) and hanging out with them one night. There was supposed to be a big party at the Jockey Club which unfortunately was cancelled (and there were a lot of decked out and pissed looking Brazilians standing outside). We went to “Club Zero Zero” a nightclub that could compete with any I have seen.. not the most Brazillian of experiences but a lot of fun nonetheless and we brought two fantastic women we met standing outside the Jockey club. Even if the drinks seem a little expensive, keep an eye on the guy pouring. They tend to come VERY strong so you may drink a lot fewer than you would back home..

One of the fascinating things about Brazil seems to be the amount of internal tourism they have. Even at the most touristy of touristy place, almost everyone is speaking Portugese and seems like they come from Brazil. I met a number of people who were just travelling inside Brazil, from Sao Paulo or Brazilia. Of course this is only the wealthy Brazillians who can afford to do this.

My flight out of Brazil is in Rio at the end of the month so I will pass through again and check out some of the stuff I missed the first time. Now it’s on to Jericoacoara.

Rio

It’s amazing how much work it is to sort out and shutdown your life in a city. Packing, shipping, change of address, goodbyes, etc… Especially if you’re planning on being out of the country for a few months, there’s a lot of crazy stuff to do. A few things I discovered in my preparation:

• Remote Control Mail is a company that you can have your mail sent to and they will scan it, PDF it and let you read it on the web. It takes a while to get set up (You need to send a notarized permission slip to the US Postal Service) but once it’s going, it’s very cool. The interface is a little crude and not tuned for low bandwidth connections but still it’s a great service. This is a business I looked at starting at one point so I’m glad somebody is making a go of it. Now they just need to get indexed by Google (but only for you…)
• Onebag.com is really marvelous about telling you how to pack light for a long trip. In particular the MEI Voyageur bag they recommend is fantastic. It’s sort of a pain to get (You have to call the guy who makes them) but it’s really fantastic. Being able to carry everything you have on your back easily makes a big big difference to how you travel.
• A stick of body glide is a great investment. If youre in 120 degree heat and 100% humidity and walking carrying 40lbs or so, skin in some sensitive places can start to get a little tender.
• Moleskin notebooks are perfect for sticking in your pocket and writing down addresses, people’s names, thoughts that occur to you etc… If you’re in a place you don’t speak the language you can often show a taxi driver a written address and he will take you where you need to go.
• Make sure that your guidebooks are recent. I have a 2004 Let’s Go (whoops) and things have changed a little.
• I brought black leather shoes “in case I want to go somewhere nice” and right now that feels about as likely as going to the moon.
• Do not, under any circumstances, lose your ATM card. Seriously.

Today, I did something crazy.
I announced that I’m leaving my job, a job that I really like and that others would kill to have, a job with a great team on a project I enjoy and helped start, a job for which I am well compensated and at a company that is probably unmatched in its ability to take on these kinds of hard problems. Who would do such a thing?

Even if every step of a path feels good, it’s important to pause every once in a while and look at where it leads and understand if that’s really where you want to be headed. Much as I love my job day-to-day, I look forward five or ten years and I think that there are some things I’d like to do in my life that my current path is not equipping me for. So, scary as it is, I’m stepping off this path and choosing a new one, even if the destination of the new path is much less clear than the old one and there are no guarantees that I’ll be happier with where it leads.
I’m taking six months off to travel and see the world and then in the fall I’m moving to Boston where I’ll be attending Harvard Business School to get an MBA. There are plenty of people telling me I’m crazy and they absolutely have a point. But I’ve thought about this long and hard and I believe in both following your dream and putting your money where your mouth is so I’ve decided to do both.

I’m trying to say my goodbyes privately, but if I miss you somehow, let me say it here. It’s been an amazing five years in Seattle and four years at Microsoft.  I lived in Seattle from the ages of 26-31 - some pretty critical years as far as figuring out who you are and what you want out of life and the people I’ve spent time with have changed me profoundly. I’ve grown to love this city in a way that I never suspected I would; so much so that I certainly wouldn’t rule out moving back here if the circumstances are right. So not goodbye then, but à bientôt.