Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

That's just your opinion

There’s some naysayers out there who say spending thousands of dollars on plane tickets to Guangzhou, only to not explore anywhere else in China, is a waste of money and time. These people’s vision of traveling is to do as much as possible and visit as many places as possible. PTO is a precious commodity, is it not? You can lounge around and eat right at home. No need to spend so extravagantly.

Good news is, I live for me. Forcing myself to travel differently just because of the opinions of others would be peak inauthenticity. It’s like wanting a child soon as your friend group start popping out babies. Memetic tendencies that served us well ancestrally - you don’t want to be the caveman that sticks out - are no longer necessary. We can and should live how we want to, unheeding the conscious and subconscious influence of others.

I travel because I want to spend time living in places that I like. I could spend two weeks in Seoul and do nothing but hang out, walk around, and eat. The touristy stuff isn’t a must-do. The goal isn’t to check as many boxes on the landmarks list. If it were, I’d have gone to Europe many years ago, instead of visiting China every single year since 2014.

Waste of a plane ticket? Absolutely not. That’s like saying renting a place - versus buying a home - is throwing money away. It’s all transactions that we simply don’t agree on the value in return. You maximizers out there surely cringe at doing relatively nothing in a foreign city for two weeks. I on the other hand reckon that’s a lovely time. Besides, anything is better than working, right?

Buy nothing movement

I’m the type to travel light. I take what I need for everyday stuff and leave everything else behind. Visiting gifts for family? How about I give you money instead. That way I don’t have to explain to the Chinese customs personnel why there’s a dozen bottles of fish oil in my carrier. I’m not a reseller! My father’s side of the family is simply, large.

I also don’t do any shopping when I travel. That way I don’t have to lug things all the way back to the States. In this connected world of ours, what is it that we can’t buy in our home countries anyways? Remember when matcha flavored Kit Kat was something you can only buy in Japan? Not anymore. Cheers to globalization. We can buy almost anything on AliExpress.

In addition to the hassle of extra luggage - if I were the travel shopping sort of person, there’s also the extra stress of going through customs. Not that I would be smuggling in (or out) anything illegal. But it’s just so much mentally freer to not have to declare anything. What I brought into your country is exactly what I am carrying out. What I brought out of my country is exactly what I am bringing back. Easy.

This is why it is stressful to travel with my Asian mom. She likes to buy all sorts of things when we travel, and in vain I try to tame it down as best as I can. She doesn’t need to heed potential hassles of going through customs because if there’s any questions, I’m the one left holding the proverbial bag. You see, these are tea leaves, not plants… Crossing international borders is of zero consequence for my mom because she has zero skin in the game.

I’m at the age where I want life to be least stressful as possible. Purposefully adding stress by buying things on overseas trips is naturally out of the question.

Too damn long

I was surprised at the amount of Chinese elders that were on my flight from San Francisco to Guangzhou. 14 and half hours is absolutely no joke to spend in a pressurized metal tube. Those of us in the peasant class are resigned to our fate of misery. The human body is not designed to sit that long whilst getting slowly dehumidified.

If our elders can endure that lengthy flight without complaint, then there’s nothing for my near 40 year old body to say. Then again, our elders are accustomed to enduring through tough times. Either suffering through the Cultural Revolution in China, or scratching out a decent living after immigrating to the States. A long intercontinental flight might as well be a cocoon of comfort in comparison to the hardships that came before.

Meanwhile, we can’t even stay still for a single minute without any sort of stimulation. Taking a dump without a using a smartphone at the same time might as well be a form of torture.

The magnetic call of home must be that powerful for octogenarians to willingly take a long-haul flight. The elder sat next to us was on her way back to her hometown to meet up with family. There’s another two hour bus ride waiting for her after landing in Guangzhou. A journey of an entire day when you factor in the waiting and transfers. I’ve great respect for that sort of dedication, especially when I cannot imagine doing the same myself when I am at that age. I am certainly endeavoring to be as fit as possible for as long as possible…

But maybe by that time, aviation would have figured out a way to make supersonic flight economically feasible. Even getting it below the 10 hour mark would make trans-Pacific flights far more bearable.

Subsidized lifestyle

Word on the street is the Chase Sapphire Reserve card - the preeminent travel rewards credit card - is increasing its annual fee. What started at an already hefty $450 per year is now a whopping $795 per annum. COVID-era inflation comes for everything eventually.

Of course, Chase has all sorts of new card benefits to potentially offset the price jump. But it’s all predicated on one thing: cardholder spending. This is a classic case of spending money to save money, which only works if that money is what you would have spent regardless. If you wouldn’t have in the first place, then you really shouldn’t have.

I did sign up for the Sapphire Reserve when it was first introduced many moons ago. The signup bonus was super generous: 100,000 points on a $4,000 initial spend (worth a thousand dollars in cash value.) Coupled with the $300 travel credit per year, the true annual fee was only $150 at the time. As an annually traveler, it was not difficult to for me to “break even”, so to speak.

That 100,000 bonus point allowed me to fly first class to Korea in 2017. Truly living the champagne life on a beer budget. But that was during a time when lots of capital was going toward subsidizing a rich person’s lifestyle for the mundane middle class earner. Surely you remember: UBER rides used to be cheap, thanks to the company continuously burning through VC cash to hide the real cost.

Did we honestly think we can afford to have our burritos hand delivered from the taqueria for only a few bucks? DoorDash fees used to be not so exorbitant, too.

Well, those sweet subsidized days are over. The premium travel reward credit cards are now only for those who can comfortably spend the high amount necessary to reap the rewards. Good news for me, I cancelled my Sapphire Reserve soon as COVID prevented any sorts of traveling.

The amazing Amazon

I don’t see how anyone can boycott Amazon. When you absolutely need that one thing quickly and you cannot be bothered to go anywhere to get it, Amazon always comes through in the clutch. Prime free next-day shipping is an amazing feet of logistical engineering. Labor exploitation be damned if I can replace a broken water bottle in less than 24 hours, for the cheapest price, with just a few taps on the phone.

Good luck getting that convenience genie back into the bottle. I have to wonder those who claim to boycott Amazon on Reddit: do they really do it? Often times, people’s actions do not back up their words. Those who rail against higher education have gone to college themselves, and will send (or have sent) their children to college. Those who advocate for leniency towards the homeless invariably do not have mobile homes parked in their neighborhoods. Women who claims partner income doesn’t matter have never dated someone who made less.

Talk is easy and superficial when you don’t have skin in the game.

I returned from Korea late April. The trip marked a two week hiatus from weightlifting. I then got sick the week after - as one does. So in earnest I did not pick back up the weights until the start of May.

It then took an entire month for me to get back to where I was - in terms of strength numbers - before I went on vacation. I guess that’s about normal? (I lift three times a week.) That’s the thing about traveling when you are chasing the gains on a barbell: you have to accept the regression. You work so hard to gradually reach a certain weight for a certain amount of reps. Then, like the Itsy Bitsy Spider, you go back down and have to do it all over again.

I’m not saying don’t go on vacation. But if there’s a target weight goal you’re chasing, it’s going to get prolonged.

The grand return

Hey, good news: they let me back into this country! I guess that bus fare evasion ticket from over a decade ago isn’t enough to have me deported to a foreign country. (Tongue in cheek obviously, but for the record I am a full citizen of these United States.) It’s always lovely to hear the immigration officer say “Welcome home.”

It’s indeed great to be home. Over the course of two weeks in China and South Korea, I somehow managed to lose 10 pounds. You’d think with the overwhelming amounts of delicious foods over there (cheaper, too) that I’d return home with more flubber. I was fully ready to work off the extra poundage until I stepped on the scale and found out I’m actually lighter. I guess cardio is a very effective weight-loss lever: 25,000 steps every single day is enough to overwhelm all that I ate whilst on vacation.

Good to know that next time I can eat even more.

What isn’t so pleasant after my return is the intense jet lag. For the week afterwards I was struggling to stay awake past 10:00 PM, even though my scheduled bed time is 11:30 PM. Multiple days of sleeping over 9 hours wasn’t enough to break the spell. It probably didn’t help that soon after I came back to America, I contracted a nasty cold. A double whammy.

Happy to report I am now mostly recovered.

Whenever I go on these multi-week excursions outside of the country, I carry with me the gratitude of being able to take paid time off. To be able to go on vacation without worrying about the job, and knowing that any slack left behind will be taken up by my colleagues. That’s worth everything. In a time of great uncertainty and change, I try not to take for granted the fortunate position I find myself in vis a vis employment.

Many more happy returns.

The Healy travel luck

I have what my friends jokingly refers to as the “Healy travel luck.” It seems that when I go on vacation, things go very smoothly for me. And I’m not the type to obsessively plan things out into a rigid schedule. Serendipity has been kind to me, it must be said. Weather seems to cooperate where ever I go. The restaurants I encounter are all fine and delicious. A local immediately appears whenever I get stuck in a quandary when I’m in foreign countries.

In 2025 I wanted to make the annual trip home to Guangzhou, China during the QingMing Festival. It’s a yearly event where Chinese people visit their family burial sites to pay respects. I’ve never done it for the family on my father’s side (all residing in China), so the excitement was considerable.

But there’s only one problem: early April in Guangzhou can be rainy. And it’s the sort of tropical rain that you’re hopeless to defend with an umbrella. Never mind performing the rites: the rain is so heavy that you’d never get out of the car. My attention was glued to the weather forecast in the weeks leading up to the trip, with the unfortunate prediction that it was going to rain on the day of the visit to the graves.

Enter the Healy travel luck. It did rain that day, but it started in the afternoon. By that time, we were completely finished with the ceremonies in the morning. Funny enough, the sky opened up like crazy soon as we got back into our vehicles for the trip back to the hotel. It cannot get any more fortuitous than that.

Of course, I’ve completely jinxed myself just by typing out the previous paragraphs. Farewell, good fortune!