Quixoticguide
Hi, I’m Maarten Van Den Driessche, a curious human, aviation enthusiast, vexillophile, world traveler, and food lover with over 14,000 days of life experience.

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You Don’t Need a Plan to Travel
There is a strange obsession in modern travel. Spreadsheets.Pinned maps.“48 Hours In…” itineraries.Color-coded Google Docs titled Masterplan – Version 7 Final FINAL. And yet, some of the most transformative journeys begin with a sentence so simple it feels irresponsible: “I’ll just go.” This is not anti-preparation. It is anti-overcontrol. Because sometimes, the most Quixotic way…
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Hachikō — The Dog Who Taught a City How to Wait
Tokyo moves fast — trains every few minutes, crowds flowing like tides, screens flashing with news from a planet that never pauses.And yet, right outside Shibuya Station, Japan’s busiest crossing, stands a monument to waiting. Not efficiency.Not technology.Not progress. Waiting. The bronze dog at the Hachikō exit is one of the most quietly powerful places…
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The Singapore Girl — Memory Worn as a Uniform
QuixoticGuide Addendum No airline symbol has survived the decades quite like this one: Singapore Airlines created a figure that is neither mascot nor stereotype, but ritual — the Singapore Girl. She is not famous because she smiles.She is famous because she repeats. A Brand Built on ContinuitySince the 1970s the sarong kebaya has barely changed.In…
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The Acceleration of the Century
When progress stopped being generational and became personal For most of human history, innovation moved slower than memory. A farmer born in 1200 would die in a world recognizable to his grandparents. Roads were the same roads. Ships were the same ships. War, trade, and distance obeyed identical physics for centuries. Change existed — but…
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The Country That Runs on Timetables
100 Years of NMBS — Belgium’s Quiet Machine of Movement There is a peculiar Belgian habit:we measure distance not in kilometers, but in minutes. “Gent is 36 minutes.”“Antwerp is one delay away.”“Brussels is… complicated.” For a century now, that mental geography has been powered by one institution: the NMBS / SNCB — the National Railway…
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One Day in Singapore — a perfectly engineered 24-hour adventure
Singapore works beautifully for a short visit: compact, hyper-efficient, safe at nighOne Day in Singapore — The City That Works There are cities you visit, and cities you understand only after slowing down. Singapore punishes ambition.Not because there is nothing to do — but because everything functions.Efficiency removes the drama tourists unconsciously search for. So…
Where curiosity leads
Travel isn’t about collecting countries, but about understanding them.
These are places that shaped how I see the world — not just destinations, but contexts, encounters, and stories waiting to unfold
Travel Beyond Tourism
- Discover Places
- Understand Cultures
- Travel Better
- Meet the World
- Learn the Context


My Travel guides
- Not instructions, but orientation.
- These guides explain how places work — so you don’t just visit, you arrive.
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” –
Ibn Battuta
Maghrebi traveller