The Soap Bubble Artist
Aleksander Gojszyk (36) is a journalist from Belarus.
At 19, he was arrested and thrown in jail for fifteen days for peacefully protesting the 2006 presidential election results. “Another rigged election of Lukashenko,” he told me.
Expelled from University and ordered to join the army, Alex fled to Poland to continue his education. Two grad degrees and six years later, he returned to Belarus where he worked as a journalist for the largest independent media portal in the country, fighting misinformation and state-spewed propaganda.
“In 2014 Russia attacked Ukraine for the first time and occupied Crimea. There were economic sanctions against Russia, like there are now. Belarus depends on Russia economically, so we felt that. I felt that. Our publication was forced to cut the budget.”
Fed up with the ongoing corruption and economic distress, Alex left his ‘normal job’ and began to travel the world. For the next four years, to fund his life on the road, he split his time between vagabonding and working construction jobs in Poland.
He started in Central Asia, crossed China, India, and then Nepal before hitchhiking across Siberia.
In 2019, Alex secured a Polish passport. His new citizenship was like an “access pass from the second to the first world.”
Taking advantage of his EU membership, Alex immigrated to Switzerland where, as a means of income, he took up street performance as a soap bubble artist. Over a couple of years he honed the craft: using rods dipped in soap to sculpt ephemeral creations in the sky. His ‘air painting’ drew reliable tips from tourists and delighted children.
Knowing he could leverage his Swiss earnings for up to 10x the spending power in more affordable nations, he set his sights on Latin America.
For the last thirteen months, Alex has hitchhiked, couch-surfed, and volunteered his way through Central and South America.
His adventures, as you would imagine, range wide. In Mexico, he met and fell in love with a woman from Ukraine; was mugged by the police in Venezuela; bought a motor-scooter in Guatemala that’s carried him all the way to the Bolivian desert — to the Salt Flats in Uyuni — where we met on a three-day tour.
Alex has another six months planned in South America. He’ll go to Chile and Argentina, hike in Patagonia, and see the waterfalls at Iguazu. Then he’s off to Brazil, where he’ll sell his scooter to fund a flight to New Zealand. From there he’ll take another year to see Australia and South East Asia. Then, depending on the state of “Putin’s War”, he’ll consider a return home.
Alex has visited 72 countries to date.
He’s kept up the writing too, sharing his expanding perspective for the people of Belarus who care to follow his journey. To cover the basics along the way, he performs soap bubble art. Most of the time, though, he’ll do it for free as a volunteer visiting schools and orphanages’. “It is very important to me,” he says of his craft, “I can charge my battery and share energy with the kids.”
“There’s a very small percentage of people who have traveled, or would care to travel, as much as you have” I suggested during an after dinner chat on our last night together in the desert. “What’s one thing you’ve discovered that others might not expect?”
Alex considered the question.
“I think it’s the people,” he replied, dragging his Marlboro beneath a moonlit-sky in the middle of nowhere. “That the world is full of good people.”
You can follow Alex’s journey around the world here.
A citizen of the world!
A great piece Nick.