Having Quarter Life Crisis and spending my 25th birthday on a plane

 
waiting for transit in Moscow airport

Just a month before my 25th birthday, I felt like I was in some sort of Quarter Life Crisis seriously. I am not a fresh-grad from university anymore; I am repaying my student loan; I start saving money; I have a so-called decent job in media. I shall have nothing to feel confused or depressed with.

"Turning 25 years old is really just nothing. People do get old everyday." I once told myself.

My family and friends back in Hong Kong always think I travelled too much. Maybe, they are right. I have backpacked to 20ish countries before I reached 24 years old and I am not even a rich kid. There was a moment I thought I should stop travelling for a while, just to urge myself to get a "real life" and settle down, instead of wandering around the world.

But my travel bugs really got me. I travelled on-and-off in the past 4 years and I enjoyed doing that. I want to do the same for my 25th birthday as well. I definitely won't want to do the quit-job-and-travel-around-the-world-within-just-a-year-can-heal-everything thing, because I am the type of person that needs time and space to learn and absorb new things.

So I started to plan a not-so-ordinary birthday trip in late-August. After some researches had done, I decided to re-visit Balkans and try Caucasus region for the first time with Chechnya to be my final destination. Sounds ambitious.

I then bought a last-minute open-jaw ticket from Aeroflot. The deal was €630EUR(tax inc.) for a flight from Hong Kong to Budapest via Moscow, then Moscow straight back to Hong Kong. Quite a deal indeed.

That's how I ended up spending 16hours flying across Eurasia continent on my 25th birthday.