Literally Going Round the World to Save $1000
So this is $1000. And the question today is how far are you willing to go to have an extra $1000 in your bank account? My answer to that question is that I'm literally gonna try to go around the world in a 100 hours for this. So I'm in Dhaka, Bangladesh right now, and in the next 100 hours I'm gonna try to go from here to South-east Asia, then to America, then to the Middle East, and then back here again for this.
Let's see how it goes. So I'm in my parents apartment in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the first thing you're probably wondering is how exactly am I making.. or saving $1000 here.
I'm gonna explain that in a second, but first I'm going to head to the airport because.. I am running late. - What? Aren’t you gonna come to the airport to drop me off? - (laughs) Like a commendable mom should.. - You know I am working tonight (laughs) I am taking just one bag with me, because I literally can't take anything else. You'll see why later in the video.
It’s 40°C here right now. It's like more than 100°F. - I will be tracking you the whole time with location sharing. (laughs) Goodbye. Now we’re taking an Uber to the airport, which took a while to get because, it's very in demand right now I guess.
Okay, so I just went through immigration and I had like the.. wildest start of the trip. So while I was going in, I lost one of these mics while going through security check-in, because I just dropped it somewhere, with all the luggage and stuff because I was running late. And then the security staff for the airport turned out to be my fans, so they literally went out with me, looked through the streets..
And then eventually they helped me find this thing. And I'm so happy right now. Finally, found the mic. - And Nadir bro was lucky. Yeah (laughs) Life in airports is so much easier when you don't have any checked luggage. This is actually how I used to travel.
Okay, I didn't get this part on camera, but the security check people, that check your luggage turned out to be my viewers as well, so they stopped to take some photos too. And then the same thing happened with the boarding staff from my flight. As we flew off towards the first destination of this trip, the first hour of my attempt to go around the world in a hundred hours started. So I was sleeping for basically the whole flight, and we’ve arrived at Singapore Airport, which is ranked the best airport in the world every year for I don't know how many years. It's often called the Garden Airport, and you can see why.
I'm in this area with actual plants around me, and I'm standing on this walkway, it's like an aquarium with like, fishes and everything. So the main attraction of this airport is this place, which is like a 40 meter high waterfall, which is the biggest indoor waterfall in the world. I would have to go past immigration to go see that. I don't have time for that. So I'm just gonna go see the other attractions that you can see without even like going past immigration while you're still in transit. So each terminal in the airport has its own special garden.
This one has basically a sunflower garden, as you can see. This is so pretty, with the sunrise also happening over there in the distance. So what makes this airport the best airport is not just that it's green and pretty, It's also got a lot of nice facilities, a lot of places for people stuck in transit to sleep in, and people are just spreading out all over the place and taking naps.
So I'm going to take the Skytrain to the next terminal. I was actually in Singapore in the late 90s. That was my first country that I went to outside of South Asia, back in the days, and it was really one of my favorite countries, but I don't remember the airport being this fancy back then. It's crazy how much greenery there is even just outside the airport.
There is a reason Singapore is called the Garden City. So this airport also has a free movie theatre, with the latest movies playing. And they also offer a free tour of Singapore for people who have a long enough layover to go see the city, but I did some research on what I could do without crossing immigration, and the best place, without crossing immigration has to be this one. Okay, there definitely wasn't a designated butterfly garden in this airport last time I was here.
There's a special area where they have like these pineapples and other flowers for the butterflies. They're all coming in just chilling here, and it's really beautiful. I don't know if you can tell, but it's so hot outside, my hair got drenched like.. in a minute. The start of the trip was so wild, with losing this mic.
Hopefully no more of that.. going forward in this trip. Unfortunately, I was very, very wrong, as you'll see later in the video. This airport basically has, like, this fancy food court with all kinds of delicious South-east Asian food, and I walked right past all of it, went to a 7-Eleven, got myself iced cappuccino and Kitkat. This is basically Thailand all over again.
Okay, now I can talk about how I'm saving the money, because I have like 45 minutes till the next flight and I can have a breather, finally. Because you probably want to save a thousand dollars too, but you probably can't do what I'm doing, unless you have the exact same needs as I do at the exact same time. So I am a full time filmmaker, video editor, or whatever you call it. And I need this for everything, this laptop. And my GPU just got fried, which means I needed a new laptop. And I was visiting Bangladesh, I was visiting my family there.
I needed a MacBook Pro. I needed a 8 TB SSD. The MacBook Pro that I wanted in Bangladesh..
was going to cost me, if I got it within two weeks, which is all the time I had, was going to cost me.. almost $7,000. And that was just so ridiculous because I could find the same thing refurbished from Apple in the US for like.. $4,500, roughly from what I saw without taxes. So I was like joking with people at first. I was like, okay, I could just go to the US and come back and save money doing this.
And then I looked at the flights, and when I saw what spots I would go through that I am gonna show you in this video, I was like, okay, I have to do this and I have to make a video out of this because this is gonna be sick! And I would save $1,000 on a computer that I need for work ASAP. So I just booked my flights, that was like 5 or 6 days ago. Here I am. But, you know buying a Macbook is not all we are gonna do in this video. There’s a lot of fun stuff planned along the way, that you will see if you stick around till the end.
Now, I got to catch my next flight to San Francisco. So I accidentally saw the flight information for a different gate (flight) going to the same city.. so I was at the wrong terminal. So I need to go back to terminal 2 ASAP.
30 minutes left till the flight. Hopefully that should not be an issue. So I got on this train and, baaaarely made it to the longest flight of this whole trip. So I literally had to run to my gate basically. Right after I got on, they announced that “We've finished boarding, now we're gonna leave.” And it was a rough 15-hour flight because, my seat didn't recline, but I still managed to sleep I think for eight hours solid, at the end. I was rewatching Narcos Mexico, basically.
I was trying to read a little bit, didn't read much, and then, just fell asleep because I was so sleep deprived at that point. Something funny about time zones is that I left at 9 a.m., or we took off at 9 a.m. on the 3rd of May, And then we landed here at like 8:15 a.m,
after like a 15-hour flight, so we technically went back in time. That's something weird that happens when you go across the Pacific, Eastwards. If you go the other way, you like full on skip a day sometimes, which is what happened to me one time when I was going from US to China. So now I have landed in San Francisco. Now I am gonna try to go past immigration and figure out the next move after that. But I took a break to watch my team the 76ers get knocked out of the NBA playoffs by the New York Knicks.
So the immigration guy was like so confused when he saw my trip plans and everything, He was like, “Okay, so you're going to be here for..” “less than two days total.” “And how long did it take you to get here?” “and how long is it going to take you to go back?” And just kept asking the same questions again, because it didn't make sense, because he didn't know what you know about the laptop. And then I eventually just told him about the laptop and he's like, “Oh wow, they cant just ship it there for cheaper than you coming here.” I mean even if they could, I didn't.. I didn’t tell him
it's for a YouTube video because that is even harder to explain. But I think he just let me go and he didn't stamp my passport, and then I looked it up and apparently they don't stamp passports at immigration* anymore. So I guess I'm in the clear. Now, it's 10:20 and I have to get on a flight that's leaving in 40 minutes again to the other side of the country.
And you know, the crazy part is that this flight I'm about to get on is going to be one and a half times longer than the flight that I took from Bangladesh to Singapore, which is.. a long distance and has like three big countries in the middle. There's like Burma or Myanmar, then Thailand, then Malaysia, and then there’s Singapore.
And this flight's going to be longer than that, and I'm not even gonna leave the country. You know, what’s crazy? This is the first time I’ve been in California since May 2020, exactly four years ago, when I left all my luggage in storage in L.A. because I thought I was going away for a few months to Hawaii, and then I just never came back. And all my stuff, except for the two backpacks that I left with, are literally still in Los Angeles.
And I don’t think I’m gonna have time to go get it this time because I've a flight in like an hour, But it's crazy to think it's been four years since I've been back home.. or what used to be home I guess. So it was time to move again. And I made my way to Flight no. 3 Said my goodbyes to California again, did a little bit of cloud watching on the way, and arrived to one of my favorite cities on this planet.
And you're not gonna believe what I managed to do right after landing. So this is gonna sound wild but after losing the mic-transmitter in Dhaka Airport, So wild with losing this mic. Hopefully, no more of that. Hopefully, no more of that. I lost my mic-receiver (here). It was just dangling off my camera and fell off somewhere when I was walking to the Uber area.
So I'm filing a lost-and-found report. Hopefully they get it. Thank God I have a backup mic with me. So I've arrived in Manhattan in New York in time for a very special reunion.
(excited noise) - My brother. - My “famous” brother. (laughs) Good morning people. I finally got to sleep in a bed for like 10 hours straight. So let me update you on what happened last night when I came to New York. I got to meet up with one of my..
best friends. Like literally my best friend from university. One of my favorite people that I'm staying with here. Let me show you something..
So when I travel, I basically travel with this, like, you know, folder of, like, important documents and stuff. And in that I carry with me a few pictures. This is a picture of me and my mom, of course. Me and my sister and my cousin. Me and my sister. And this is me and Devan, Christmas 2012, when he took me to a NBA game..
we're both like huge NBA fans.. to see Vince Carter and like the Oklahoma City and the Thunder. We've been like best friends from since before then. Okay. So, of course we had that little reunion. And then he's very camera shy, so I didn't really vlog with him around me. But basically we went out and got some food and just chilled.
And he had to leave this morning because he has this like, family function to attend to with his girlfriend's family. But, you know, I say, I came to New York just to buy this new laptop and save $1,000. But a big part of coming here was also to, like, see one of my best friends that I hadn't seen in five years, because we used to hang out a lot. I saw him in Europe last time, like when he came to visit me in Poland.
And then Covid happened and no one saw each other, and then I had to leave the U.S and he doesn't really get a lot of days off work. So it was really nice to like, see one of my best friends again after so long. And now I'm going to go to one of the most iconic spots in the US.
Man, vlogging right here in New York City feels so wild. This is what Casey Neistat must do on a daily basis. So according to some mental math I did, I definitely spent over 50 hours in the New York Metro a decade ago, mostly going between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I have to say things look very familiar.
But this part was new. You guys wanna be in my vlog? - Yea sure. - Oooh These people wanted to take a picture with a random stranger. And I was like, ‘Okay, sure.’
So you should have figured out by now, I'm going to Times Square. So right now I'm in Times Square, which is.. a commercial hub, a tourist-and-entertainment hub the middle of New York City. I am sure you have seen it in the movies. It's more like a very touristy place than where locals come but it's pretty cool.
And I don't have a lot of time to show you the rest of New York. So this is going to be it. Once again I was back on the metro and on the Q Train this time, this line that goes over the East River that I had taken so many times back in the days and I still managed to accidentally get off at the wrong station. So I missed the stop where I was supposed to get off because I was busy filing a lost-and-found item report for the receiver that I lost from my mic yesterday, but got back on the train and got off here at like Sheepshead Bay. And I'm gonna meet up with my uncle and aunt who are super close to me, like super close, even closer than like any real uncles I have.
This is actually my dad's best friend from, like, back in high school, and even when I had, like, winter breaks during college in Oklahoma, I used to come here and just, like, stay with them for like a month. So I'm like super close to these people. And I know this area very well because, you know, I was here in Brooklyn a lot.
By the way, guys, we have left Manhattan, the busy streets with the high buildings and come to Brooklyn, which is a lot more chill. So this is like a solid 1 hour or 20 minutes away from the center of Manhattan. Five minutes later, I was at my uncle's place where I used to stay back in the days.
As-salamu alaykum - How are you? (Bangla) Okay, I just had lunch with the family, and now they're driving me to the state of Delaware, and they're going to Virginia. Now if you're confused about why I'm going to Delaware.. That is a very good question.
Why would anyone go to Delaware on vacation? But you'll find out why. This is going to take two hours to go by car. Thank you, uncle and aunty for driving me there. It was a nice little drive on this gloomy New York day but definitely long enough for a coffee-break where my uncle and aunt were trying to force-feed me everything that was in the store. Stopping for a little coffee-break. Okay, so after a 2- hour drive, we have come to Delaware to Christiana Mall, where I'm going to get my MacBook because it's 0% sales tax here.
It's pretty chilly compared to Bangladesh. So after literally coming halfway across the planet, it was time to take care of business. It was time to pick up my new laptop from the Apple store. The adapter? Okay.
Okay, this is it. And you know, by buying this from here, I saved literally over $400 because the sales tax in New York City is over 8% and it's like 0% in Delaware. So this was like a business decision to save a lot of money- driving over here for two hours. Okay, this wasn’t a part of the plan but since I was in a mall, it only made sense to go shopping for the things I need. So every year I have to get a new pair of jeans.
I got like the one I'm wearing right now from Levi's too in the Philippines, but basically my phone that Samsung gave to me for free is so big and so sharp, it like literally tears a hole in the corner over here, every year. No matter what pair of jeans I get, it like tears a hole. So I'm going to try to buy another pair of jeans from Levi's as well. So I'm going to say this looks like a pretty good fit. - (laughs) I think I met the first person in the US, who ever recognized me.. from my videos at least.
- Thank you man. Hope to see you again. - Yeah. Nice meeting you. What's your name? - I'm Claire.
Claire? Nice to meet you. - Yeah. This next part was somehow.. even more exciting to me, probably, than getting the MacBook. Okay, now I'm having dinner at literally my favorite fast food restaurant in the whole world.
Of course I got the exact same order that I used to have everyday. No exaggeration. I literally used to eat Chipotle 30 days a month. At one point, my Tinder bio literally had just three words, ‘I love Chipotle’. Time to eat it. There's so much cheese on it.
No, no, no, aunty. Please! (Bangla) Tastes exactly the same as four years ago. - When is your train? (Bangla) I was going to take a cheap bus all the way to New York and then take the metro. Turns out there is no cheap bus in the evening, from Wilmington, at least.
So I'm going to take a train, an Amtrak train, and this is costing me like $72, not the cheapest thing. It's gonna to go to like Manhattan again. Because it was so cold outside, I waited till the last minute possible to get up to the platform and get on my train. And then I boarded my first train of this entire trip. Alright. So, I am on the train again.
It's going to take, like, two hours to get to New York. So, turns out this train actually took me all the way to a very iconic place in New York. Okay, so I'm in front of Madison Square Garden where the Knicks play. There would have been a game seven here if my Sixers had not lost in game six. This place is host to more than just Knicks games. A lot of historic fights by Muhammad Ali and all.
But to me, it's, about the NBA. So I've used Uber probably more than a thousand times, but this ride was special. So, my uncle is making me take an Uber..
to Brooklyn because he's convinced I'm going to get robbed on the way, if I take the Metro. First time on a Tesla Uber. - Actually, you have apps like Netflix. - It doesn't work whenever you’re on the drive. Yeah, that makes sense.
So Daniel here is about to show me the autopilot feature but it's like guided autopilot. So, it's like, you still have to hold the wheel. If you remove your hands from the wheel, they give you, like, a warning. (warning beep) - .. take control on the vehicle, just like that.
So I guess Tesla doesn't want to take responsibility for any kind of incidents that could happen. This is completely on autopilot. He's not touching the steering wheel. It detects the red light, and then goes in the right lane. You see on the screen, it shows the other cars that are next to us right there. Okay, watch the steering wheel move by itself.
And then accelerate to a safe speed on the highway with zero input. This was crazy. The car's parking by itself without anyone else. Alright, bro. Thank you so much. And that was my first ever Uber experience on a Tesla.
So the mic I lost yesterday has arrived. God bless Amazon same-day-delivery. So I'm going to show you guys my first experience of using a MacBook. - To use British English as the main language, press the return key.
- To use English as the main language They speak English with an Indian accent. So, I got a lot of packages here behind me, you can see. And I need to unpack them and replace a bunch of things.
Here we go. So this is the newest Osprey Sojourn, which is going to be my new (main) backpack. My old backpack is still functional. That's the one I made a video about..
six years ago, more than six years ago. So I'm surprised it's still functional after so many years of travel. But the belts and the straps are about to give away, so I just got a new one. (laughs) Sleeping masks. Alright what's this? Oh, this is my Kindle. So it's just a bunch of like TSA locks that I need.. (and) memory card readers.
And a lot of Old Spice deodorant. Because it's.. I sweat a lot and it gets stinky. And it's hard to find this ___ for some reason in a lot of other countries.
It's 7:06 a.m. and I'm about to head to the airport and I haven't slept all night because I accidentally deleted some very important footage while I was trying to, like, transfer files into my MacBook. But then I figured out a way to recover it. So, I am panicking less. And this right here is my big backpack and my new small backpack is inside it.
So I forgot to film myself unpacking this one, but I also got a new day-bag because the other one was breaking down, which was now inside and packed into the bigger backpack that I just got. Remember at the start of the video, I said, I can only take this other bag, the old one and nothing else. It's because that's the only thing I'm carrying (as a carry-on) and the other two are going in checked luggage.
Now I'm going to go to the airport. Okay, so it’s like 10:28 a.m. and I'm waiting at the gate at JFK to board the flight to Saudi Arabia, which should be like 12 hours.
This part is getting rough without the sleep. It's been like a solid 24 hours without any sleep. After crossing the Pacific Ocean, now it was time to cross the Atlantic Ocean. You know, I tried to read and follow the maps about what was going on, but honestly, I was I was sleeping for like ten hours straight when I got on that flight. Okay, so there was a lot that happened in Saudi Arabia.. So, basically, I have a 12-hour layover in Saudi Arabia.
So I'm making a full video about my first day in Saudi Arabia since this is my first time in this country in Jeddah. And that's an exciting vlog already from everything I've done. So check that out if you want to see what happened in Saudi Arabia. So I've been traveling for like 86 hours now. And at this point, I'm just so tired and it's so hot here. It's like 36°C. That’s close to a 100°F.
I've literally just been sitting on this chair under the gate to Mecca for the last.. 30 minutes. Alright, I've crossed immigration again.
Now I'm going to go to my gate and board the flight. I’ll fall asleep like, the moment I get in. This is like way past my bedtime, whatever my bedtime is at this point. I was just finishing this book that I've been reading for the last couple of months Around The World In 80 Days. About to board the last flight for this trip. Oh, I dropped my boarding pass.
Dropped my boarding pass. As expected for any flight that goes in and out of Bangladesh, this flight was as busy and hectic as it gets. Finally, got back to Dhaka Airport within a hundred hours. Okay. It's been 99 hours and we've come full circle back to Dhaka.
And crossed immigration for the last time for this trip. See, at this point you can see on my face how tired I am. Okay, so I've completed the journey. I'm back at my parents’ place, and I didn't do much yesterday or in the last 24 hours because I was honestly just so tired.
That process was more brutal than I thought it was going to be. Out of the four nights in the 100 hours or 99 hours. I slept on a bed only once, and out of those 99 hours of traveling, I was on a plane, like sitting like this for 45 hours and I was eating plane food, which is like disgusting, the whole time. And I gained 8 pounds. I think that's almost four kilos in four days, which is crazy. So that was very unhealthy, but we got it done.
So let's talk about how much I actually saved at the end of the day. The MacBook itself cost me $4,550. The flights cost me $1250.
And most of that was the flight across the Pacific to New York. Then the train back, Delaware to New York, cost me $72. The Uber from Manhattan to Brooklyn cost me like $70. And let's just throw in the Saudi e-Visa in there, you know, because I explored Saudi while I was there. This plus, like, you know, all the plane meals and everything, and I didn't have to pay for accommodation, obviously, because I was staying with friends and family. All of this combined cost me $5,970.
if I wanted to buy the exact same MacBook, and I needed something very specific. I needed a MacBook.. with a Max (processor) chip, with these specs of CPU and GPU cores.
And I needed an 8 TB SSD, the minimum.. literally the minimum that I could get in two weeks would have cost me, like more than $7,000, like $7,100, if I got it here from Bangladesh. All of that combined cost me less than $6,000. So I saved more than $1,000 actually, if you think about it.
And, honestly, I could have saved a lot more. Like, before I bought my ticket to the US.. someone who lives in the US that I know.. he found out that I was looking to get a laptop from the US.
He literally said.. if I just got it delivered to his place, he would just bring it for me. So I could have gotten it for, like, less than $5,000 or like, $5,000. He wouldn't have charged me for the delivery. But, you know, once I started thinking about this plan, I really wanted to do it. I really wanted to make this video because I thought this would be such a cool concept.
I didn't realize how brutal it was going to be. and I wanted to see Devan. I wanted to see my best friend that I hadn't seen for five years, literally. I wanted to see my uncle and aunt. I wanted to see Saudi Arabia, which turned out to be a hell of an underrated country.
Wow. That was easily my favorite.. Gulf country that I've been to, out of just the one day that I saw there. Like so much soul and culture as opposed to the UAE and Qatar. So all in all, I saved $1,000, went around the world in less than 100 hours, and made this video that I'm really proud of.
So that's it for this video. If you like it, do “like” it. If you want to watch more videos like this.. do let me know. I'm going to try to do it, if it's not as brutal as this one was. Because this one was.. (dying-noise)
rough. Not good for my health. And if you want real time travel updates, feel free to follow me on Instagram @nadironthego I'll catch you guys in the next video from..
Indonesia.
2024-09-13 16:14
