First content: About me (the story)

As I see things now, there will be two main categories under which my future blog posts can be divided: content and design.
Probably they more or less speak for themselves. In the content section I’ll post ideas about the content of the website, with articles and photos. In the design section I’ll post everything about the design of the website. Can it be any easier?

So here’s my first content post.
All websites seem to have an “about the author” section, here’s mine:

About Nicolas De Corte (the story)

Hi, my name is Nicolas and I'm addicted to blogging.

But in my defense I would like to explain to you how things got that far:
It all started the 18th of April 1982, when I saw light for the first time in some hospital in the city of Ghent (Belgium). After peeing on doctors and nurses for about a day or five, they finally decided to send me home, together with my parents of course. Those days "home" was an apartment in a small town called Laarne. I was a peaceful child, only waking up a couple of times each night, mostly because of a shortage on love and food.

Time went by, I grew older and I developed some kind of natural laziness. As school was equal to hard work, it's no wonder that until I was seven, I cried every morning when my mother tried to bring me to school. Somewhere around the age of seven or eight I accepted the fact that I had to go to school anyway, and I became more or less a good student. Friendly as I was, I also tried to explain my opinions to fellow students, which produced me a lot of punishments. In the title song of the Simpsons, there's a part where Bart is writing on the board in detention... Story of my life.

And then there was high school. I'm still wondering why people expect so much from you during your puberty. Can't they just leave you alone for a couple of years? Anyway, what I remember of those days is that I spent all my time experimenting, getting drunk and trying to get laid. So school went kind of downhill, especially because I found that it needed some experimentation too. Instead of sticking to the same classes, I tried it all. From economy to electricity to mechanics to gardening to biomechanics, until (eventually) I tried IT, and finally I found something I really liked doing. Was it the fact that I was doing something I was interested in, or that my puberty years were over? I still don't know. But things started to go up hill again.

After high school, I went to college to try to get my bachelor degree in IT, and guess what? I got it.
So there I was, ready to jump in the working world... Luck was on my side, and the first job I applied for was mine.
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I'm an SAP Netweaver consultant. If you're thinking about hiring me, please find my CV here

It was also around that time that I started some serious thinking about travelling. In previous years I hadn’t traveled more than a couple of city trips and a week or so in Spain, and now I wanted something serious, I wanted to cross at least one ocean. My girlfriend, those days, wasn't very fond of low budget traveling, so we booked a round trip to Cuba. This way we would see the whole country, and we wouldn't have to arrange anything, and we were sure about air conditioned transportation and hotel rooms.
That trip was really great, I liked the country and the culture shock, but I really missed some kind of adventure. We only saw the tourist spots and “picture points”, the rooms were too clean, we didn’t get sick of the food once,… It felt kind of boring. For me, the best days were two extra days we’d booked in Havana . Then we were out there on our own, discovering it all by ourselves. For my girlfriend those were the worst days.

When we were back home, I knew what I wanted: I wanted to travel, I wanted it to be adventurous, and I wanted to do it all alone.
So one year later I found myself closing my eyes, pointing my finger on the map, and after a couple of retries (I didn’t feel much like traveling to the South Atlantic or the North Pacific ocean) I booked a return ticket to Guatemala. That was my best holiday ever, en since then any kind of group travels or pre booked hotels are totally out of the question.
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I’m a backpacker.

Now let us fast forward to the beginning of the year 2009. One day I was looking at some of my pictures and I thought by myself: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could make those really nice pictures?” Next thing I knew I drove to Rotterdam to buy myself a SLR photo camera, and I subscribed for a 3 years photography course.
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I’m a wannabe photographer.

While traveling, next to photos I also like to take notes of what I see, do, experience, mostly because it’s great to read it after a while back at home. It’s like a diary.
Some time ago, when I got back from travels in Iceland, I wanted to share my experiences so much that I took my notes and started to create a real story: Iceland for beginners
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I’m a wannabe writer.

Writing that one story got me so much going that I started to read a lot of other travel stories and blogs, until I finally decided that I wanted to create a whole website about the things I like. And what’s a real website without a blog?
Hi, my name is Nicolas, and I’m addicted to blogging.

Any comments are more than welcome!