How I Recovered My Lost Backpack on FlixBus: A Real Experience & Lost and Found Tips As an Esperantist in my 50s who is currently studying AI, I travel abroad for more than a month each year to attend international events and explore new places. Looking back at last year's journey from Brno, Czech Republic, to Vienna, Austria, I still remember one particularly stressful experience: I left my backpack on a FlixBus—and got it back about a month later. 💡 I Left My Backpack on the Overhead Shelf After attending an Esperanto congress in Brno, I took a FlixBus to Vienna. I stored my main luggage under the bus, but placed my backpack—containing my glasses, Esperanto booklets, and other personal items—on the shelf above my seat. It was only after arriving at my hotel in Vienna that I realized what I had done. My backpack was still on the bus. To make matters worse, the drop-off point near Vienna Central Station was not the final stop, so there was no Lost & Found office there whe...

Before my trip to Germany, I thought AI would mostly help with planning. Instead, it became useful in ways I hadn't expected—before the trip and while I was actually there. I used Google Docs and Sheets to keep five travelers organized, built a travel expense app for our group, and turned to AI when I couldn't understand products, communicate easily, or figure out what to do when our train journey went wrong. By the end of the trip, I had learned something simple: The most useful technology wasn't always the one I planned to use. It was the one that helped with the problem in front of me. 📄 Before the trip: keeping five travelers on the same page Traveling alone is one thing. Organizing a 10-day trip for five people is another. Flights, accommodation, destinations, expenses—there was a lot of information that everyone needed to see. Google Docs became our shared travel notebook, while Google Sheets helped us keep track of the budget and expenses. 🔗 I used Google...

 Traveling alone is one thing. Traveling through Germany for 10 days with five people is another. Before our trip, I was thinking about the obvious things—flights, accommodation, places to visit, and transportation. But there was another problem underneath all of them: How do five people keep track of the same information without constantly asking each other questions? My answer turned out to be surprisingly simple. Not a special travel app. Google Docs and Google Sheets. 📄 One Google Doc became our shared travel notebook Normally, travel information ends up everywhere. A hotel confirmation is in someone's email. A restaurant is saved on another person's phone. Someone posts a map in the group chat, and two days later nobody can find it. For our Germany trip, I tried something different. I put the important information—flights, accommodation, destinations, and other travel notes—into one Google Doc and shared it with the other four travelers. One document became the place all ...

 I had been learning Esperanto for more than ten years before I started studying AI. At first, they were two separate interests. Then I began combining them. I used AI to build an Esperanto vocabulary game, improve it through repeated prompting and testing, create an Esperanto children's story, and even design banners for an Esperanto congress. Along the way, Esperanto became something unexpected: my personal AI laboratory. 🎮 From learning Esperanto to building with it My first big experiment was simple: could I turn my Esperanto vocabulary into a working web game even though I wasn't an experienced programmer? With Gemini Canvas, I did. 🔗 I built my first Esperanto word game with AI and discovered that an idea could become a working web app without starting from traditional coding. But improving the game was harder than creating the first version. Prompts could fix one feature and break another. I learned to make smaller changes, test them carefully, and save working versio...

I thought designing a banner with AI would be the hard part. It wasn't. The hard part was getting AI to spell Esperanto correctly. I recently helped create horizontal and vertical banners for the 58th Korean Esperanto Congress. I had last year's sample files and the required sizes, so I opened ChatGPT and started experimenting. It quickly gave me several designs I liked. I could try different layouts, adjust the colors, move elements around, and compare new versions without having to design everything from scratch. For someone who isn't a professional designer, that part felt surprisingly helpful. 🔗 I had already experimented with AI-generated graphics while creating a banner for my blog , but this time the design had to become a real banner for an actual event. Then I looked more closely at the text. That was where the real problem began. The design looked good. The Esperanto didn't. Esperanto uses letters such as ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ . Those small marks above the let...