In 2013, my friend Olli and I went on an epic dream collecting journey across Europe.
As I started planning this series of 30 Travel Memories, I realized I had some explaining to do. Many of my stories would take place in summer 2013, when my friend Olli and I were traveling around Europe, collecting 1,000 postcards of people’s dreams for the future.
And well, I think that’s the kind of thing that can raise more questions if you casually mention it in the middle of something else.
“This happened while I was at Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, asking people to write their dreams for the future on postcards…”
“As we were collecting people’s dreams, we met another group who were also collecting dreams, just the different kind…”
No, that wouldn’t work. So let’s rewind back to the beginning.
Unelmien Tiellä / On the Road of Dreams
Unelmien tiellä (Finnish for ‘On the Road of Dreams’) was a travel project and a travel blog me and my friend Olli had in 2013. Our tagline was “2 Men, 20 Days, 1000 Dreams”. My graphic designer friend Markku – who’s also responsible for the art on this website – made our logo:
As the tagline implies, our project was about us traveling for 20 days, and collecting 1,000 dreams on postcards.
We would travel around Europe by train with 1st class ticket sponsored by Finland’s national railway company VR. Our goal was to get 1,000 people to write or draw their dreams for the future on postcards for us. We also updated a Facebook page and a travel blog where we wrote about the trip and our thoughts and also published all the dream cards.
Yes, we were extremely busy during the trip. And the preceding spring wasn’t cakewalk either. We gave a few interviews to the media while Olli organized tiny dream exhibitions around Finland. The idea of collecting dream postcards came from Olli’s own project Post Our Dreams, and together we formed the idea for a dream collecting euro trip.
20 Days on the Road
The trip was very intense, stressful and memorable. We reached the goal of 1,000 dreams in Zurich on the last day of the project.
For me, the most horrifying part of the trip was the collecting of the postcards. I can still be an anxious person, and I was way more shy back then. Interrupting strangers was not easy for me, and I had to do it hundreds of times!
After the project was over, we went to Milan to meet a friend of Olli. From there, I flew to Nepal, although I ended up staying in Oman on the way.
But that’s another story.
