🇸🇬🇮🇩 Asia Trip 2019 🇹🇼🇰🇷

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Roar, by Treat. I will buy a 🍺, no matter how challenging logistically, for anyone who can state why I chose this song for this post. 🎵

I just took a trip to Asia where I visited 4 countries. It's been a while since I've done anything like this, and I had a great time!

I'll start with high-level feelings/observations, then go over the What in the photos at the bottom of each section. You can skip to any of the legs with the links below:

• Singapore
• Bali
• Taiwan
• Korea

Singapore 🇸🇬

📅 2019-03-18 → 2019-03-21
Pablo, Karen, and Saurya

The Big Reason for this trip, in my mind, was to visit my bestie Saurya. We lived together in college and it's one of the most lasting and fulfilling friendships I've ever had. While Karen and I made a bigger trip of it, we started here because I missed my boy.

Control structures (like governments) are either top-down, mandating the shape and growth of their subjects (e.g. government comes up with a tree policy, then plants or uproots trees to fit it) or they're bottom-up (government observes the trees already in-place, and comes up with a tree policy based to suit that). It's a bit like how Google used to map the Internet as an emergent phenomena, but now the Internet shapes itself to please Google.

In this way, my main reaction to Singapore was observing it as one of the most top-down states I've ever experienced. I saw exactly one dog and zero panhandlers. Every public utility had clean bathrooms. Exactly one person (a barista) had any traditionally countercultural markings (colored hair and gauged ear piercings). It's cleanliness made it look like a movie set for "modern city in the 21st century," rather than what I know those cities to actually look like. For almost everything I asked "why is it like this?", I could produce an answer along "the government wanted it that way (probably to be friendly to Western and Eastern businesses)".

(this could all be confirmation bias: besides its reputation, when our plane landed they prime your reactions by reminding you that carrying illicit drugs carries a mandatory death sentence)

All told, for a certain type of person: it works! If you have money and are okay spending it, it looks like a fine place to be. I just feel funny when things seem too orderly or clean.

Pros:

• Hawker centers are amazing and I want to be near them all the time.

• The bird park is spectacular, in the truest meaning of "spectacle." Karen happens to love birds more than most but we had an amazing afternoon there.

• I enjoyed using Go-Jek to get around. They're 2nd to Grab, making them "the Lyft of SEA." It's also founded by a Brown alum, which, considering Uber's new CEO is also a Brown alum, makes us excellent at congesting cities.

It hurt my brain a bit to do too many price calculations: things were either more expensive than I felt great paying (cocktails, fancy food, some attractions, one of the hotels we stayed at) but others far less (non-fancy food, the other hotel we stayed at, transporation costs).

Bali (Indonesia — Kuta and Ubud) 🇮🇩

📅 2019-03-21 → 2019-03-24
Pablo and Karen

Bali came next. While it's world-famous, we went in large part at the suggestion of a friend of ours. A few life events were timed to hit Karen and I around this time (notice that we're buying a house and Karen is changing jobs?); our friend suggested "just take a break from working for 6 months and live as expats in Bali." We didn't end up doing that, but we did visit on this trip. Saurya didn't come with us, so this leg was Karen + Pablo.

Bali reminded me a lot of Guatemala: infrastructure on a comparable level, a healthy tourist economy, the dollar going pretty far, delicious climate, and exceptionally friendly people. The food was obviously amazing, I feel this is in part because its ingredients seem fresher; when you eat fruit in Guatemala it often feels sweeter, and the flesh meatier. I'm no expert, and again, this could be confirmation bias, but I had a similar experience here.

We spent our first night in Kuta, which is famous for its nightlife. Trouble is, we were still jetlagged, and couldn't stay awake past 10:00PM. It was a lovely day and a half, but I can't say we had the experience people suggested. We went to Ubud next, where we'd spend the majority of our trip.

I had a lot of fun, but candidly, Bali was my least favorite leg in the trip. Virtually all the Balinese people we saw or interacted with were in the service of tourists like us. Many of the people we saw, total (40%? 50%?), were tourists like us. This led to a dynamic where I didn't feel like we were visitors observing communities of others living their lives, it felt more like there was a buffet going on, and it was unclear if they had offered us a buffet of simulacrum attractions/entertainment for us to sample, or if we were a dish in a buffet of tourists for them to pluck at.

Everyone was friendly! But, every interaction was transactional! I felt a bit like a money piñata, with most interactions trying to work me. To be clear: I had a great time. And I absolutely don't judge countries for maximizing revenue from tourists (get that bread!). I just don't feel like it gets me what I want when I travel. I expect we'll go back some day, and I suspect we'll do a bit more research to avoid the tourist loop we hit this time.

Taiwan (Taipei) 🇹🇼

📅 2019-03-25 → 2019-03-28
Pablo and Saurya

Karen went back to the States at this point, only taking a week off. Saurya's spent a lot of his 4 years in Singapore traveling through Asia, but never Taiwan, so we visited together. So this was Saurya + Pablo.

I loved Taiwan. It's hard to separate the city itself with having 4 days of quality time with a best friend you haven't seen for years, especially considering how well our travel styles meshed (e.g. I love to walk, we walked 16 miles on our first day). This nourished me in a way I deeply, deeply needed.

Taipei seemed like a "just right"-sized city: one thing I loved about SF was how walkable it was, and Taipei was large enough to have a lot of everything without being a metropolis that makes you feel insignificant. The weather was my favorite of any of the cities I visited, literally everything I ate there was delicious and criminally affordable. I ate more dumplings in those four days than I've eaten in the last 5 years and I'M NOT DONE.

Our days often involved going to walking trail cultural attractions, and our nights (thanks to a lack of open container laws) often looked like:

• Get a giant beer from 7-Eleven for < USD $2.
• Look at the next great-looking thing from this list (dumplings or noodles or shaved ice or night markets or…)
• "That looks like it might be about a 40 minute walk?"
• Bare out our souls to each other over beer while walking, the city buzzing around us.
• Many interruptions for yummy things we see along the way.

After Bali, the main change I observed was that Saurya and I were maybe half the foreigners I saw for the entire trip. This gave exploration a very different vibe: it felt more like we were in a living, breathing place independent from our experiences, rather than having our foreigner experiences centered.

Korea (Seoul) 🇰🇷

📅 2019-03-28 → 2019-03-31
… Pablo … alone …

Korea blew me away. My biggest obstacle was that I didn't pack for cold. I walked around in the hoodie I packed and slowly froze while exploring the city.

(Karen, upon hearing this: "could you have bought a light coat, or heavier sweater while you were there?" Dear reader, I never thought to do this. I can't believe I'm allowed to drive)

Seoul is massive: I don't think the States has an equivalent city where we just sprawled and sprawled while maintaining a coherent whole (it may just be my bias for East Coast cities? Karen suggested LA, which seems correct. Seoul has over twice as many people though). The city it reminded me most of was Guatemala City, where we just kept expanding, and from the top of nearby volcanos you see several "city centers" for each of its districts, rather than a single big skyline.

Getting around reminded me most of my time in San Francisco: the bus + subway system is robust, and the T-Card system (one payment card for all transport, including taxis, readily available) made me pretty jealous. Broadly speaking, I group cities into "comfortable to own a car, shitty to be a pedestrian" vs. "comfortable to be a pedestrian, shitty to own a private car" and Seoul seemed to strike the best middle ground I've seen, where roads were wide and plentiful, while sidewalks and buses also had excellent space, attention, and resources.

(my druthers would be for private car ownership to be mad uncomfortable, but we can't always get what we want)

Like Taiwan, I felt less like a guided tourist, and more "fish in someone else's pond." Being here made me more motivated than I've felt in over a decade to learn a new language. I'll come back, knowing a lot more Korean.

The most surprising thing about this trip was my internal state traveling alone. Something that comes up a lot in therapy (and my conversations with Saurya!) is how I need to improve at recognizing or grounding my wants and needs. I'm often so eager to accomodate those around me, I avoid having to address myself. This is likely related to my household and upbringing: my brother and sister are also extremely conciliatory, and neither of us has taken a "bend the world to our will" style in our adult lives. It makes us pleasant to be around and good community members, but at its worst, it's a bit like Buster Bluth's "a Milford Man is neither seen nor heard."

This type of behavior is a crutch disguised as altruism: "Since it's for other people, I'm actually very generous!," conveniently freeing you of having to exercise any agency, or assume responsibility for outcomes. It's failure-minimizing instead of success-maximizing. It's a more pernicious "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Pablo: "I can't lose if I don't play!"

So when traveling alone, without much planning, or a set agenda, I had to pay attention to… me. It sounds silly, but this was frequently terrifying! It's like if you hedged your personal and professional happiness on how heavy a weight you could lift with your weakest muscle. You'd really prefer to use your beefy quads or something.

(this manifests in other areas of my life: I've rarely been single, and when I have been, I've been uncomfortable. My relationships often suffer from me not articulating my needs, then getting miserable when they're not met. It's not a great pattern.)

What all this feels like is alternatively anxiety-producing ("am I doing the right thing? what do I even want? do I just think I want these things? I'll be a failure if I don't DO THE RIGHT THING ALL THE TIME") and the most creative and inspired I get (excitement to learn Korean, inspiration to learn all those things I love again, delight at working according to my own schedule/needs).

So this leg of the trip was a success. Because I made it so 😎