At the Low Cost Carrier Terminal

My trip is starting out with a 10-hour vacation inside the LCCT in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. After what for no good reason at all has felt like a mildly emotionally tumultuous few weeks, this feels like a sort of cleanse to start my new adventure.

I had an onion paratha. Two bottles of soy milk. Read a book and subsequently was inspired to have a long, thoughtful conversation with myself about death.

Originally I was a bit anxious about the prospect of spending a night alone at the airport...and not even the nice one. This is where the poor people go, as my Malaysian friend reminded me many times during the past two days since I first booked these tickets. And "it's where...you know (in a whisper)...like a lot of people immigrate in from."

While I still have five hours to go (still ample time for abduction!), I'm actually really enjoying the experience. The solitude amongst a crowd of strangers. There's a kind of quiet sadness to the veiled women hunched over in uncomfortable slumber over their luggage and the consistent whirling by of janitorial carts, manned by attendants veiled not with burkas but with a sort of desperate, sleepy fog. Maybe it's my exhaustion or the fact that I just spent hours starting and finishing a book in the gift shop about learning to live through learning to die, but I think there's something kind of beautiful about this experience.

I look around and see people from all over the world, and...

...oh! we just got kicked out because they need to conduct pest control in the airport for the next three hours. I did, however, just landed myself a cozy spot between three Indonesians, who gave me an apple and took my photo, as well as a white guy, who looks a few moves away from finishing his rubik's cube.

Anyway, it's pretty amazing having all these very different people out here...heading to very different places...in very different life moments, but we're all huddled together outside this airport in Kuala Lumpur for this one night for the same reason -- just waiting for the next life moment on the other side of this next plane ride.

And, of course, because we're all too cheap to get a hotel for the night.

Travel Notes: Eating and Walking Hong Kong

Sooo...I meant to write something about this trip months ago, but now here I am...having just returned from another trip (to Japan) and now already planning the next one.

Luckily, this was an extremely memorable yet ridiculously simple weekend in one of Asia's food capitals (I still stand by the fact that Taipei wins as number ONE though), which can basically be summed up as just eating followed by walking...followed by more eating and then more walking. With little time for digestion as there was actually often simultaneous eating AND walking.

Some highlights:

My dear friend Mike's birthday meal/our first meal in Hong Kong/duck fat! Mmm.

Late night walk to the Star Ferry for a view of the very dazzling, very 80s HK skyline.

Pork bun treat!

Followed by more walking around in search of pork buns.

Followed by eating more pork buns.

Walking around The Peak. Pretty!

Walking around Repulse Bay. More pretty!

Lunch at the American Restaurant, which was named to attract American sailors when it opened right after WWII. So, I figured it only made sense to bring my American sailor, right?

Walking around Hong Kong Park. Turtles and birds!

Massive HK$860 meal at Yung Kee.

Stroll through the markets.

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Another walk, another park. Flamingoes at Kowloon.

A proper farewell to our eating/walking tour of Hong Kong. Dim sum at Maxim's.

Tourist Eyes

I’ve been fortunate enough to have nearly a dozen people stay at my place over the past months – playing hostess in a land that is still rather unfamiliar to me.

However, I’ve been in Taipei just long enough to have it sort of feel like home and to start getting antsy to move on to the next place. Struggling to decide how much longer I want this place to be my home. As I’ve settled in, my eyes have grown a little duller and less curious, so I love the idea of seeing this place with fresh eyes again. In a new light.

There’s nothing like seeing the world as a tourist.

You look at everything a little closer. You taste everything a little more intensely.

In general, you just pay more attention. There’s something very zen about this that I like.

I hate the way we often say the word “tourist” with such disdain (but I guess I’m biased having named this site after it). I met a guy in Florence who made a huge fuss about only traveling like a local (I get that part; that makes sense) but refused to do any of the “touristy” things…like go to museums and cathedrals.

Seriously? How can you say you’ve experienced a place like Florence without stepping into one museum or cathedral?

I say embrace the tourist experience – whether you’re traveling or not. Order everything off the menu just to try it once. Take super long walks. Stare thoughtfully at things like tall buildings, mountains and interesting looking people. Absorb all you see with the same intention and awe you would devote to a work of art at the Louvre or the view from the top of the Empire State Building.

My latest travel companion made a comment on our plane ride to Hong Kong that has helped me smile every time I’ve looked up at the past week of overcast, drizzly Taipei sky.

We were flying in a sunny patch above a thick layer of those fluffy, rich clouds that always make me hungry for an English trifle when he noted how funny it is that it’s actually always this sunny out…everyday….everywhere. Sometimes we just forget because there are clouds in our way.

What a very simple, beautiful idea – and coming from the most cynical guy I know. I doubt this yuppie-banker-type would have made such a crunchy-yoga-instructor-kind-of-observation while sitting in a windowless office cube.

But getting out and traveling does weird things to people.

So, like every visitor I’ve had, he’s helped me see my life in Taipei in a new light…even despite the clouds.

Happy Taiwanese Music

Maybe I've already been here too long, but I think this is the best thing ever.

A Thought (and Many Words) on Expectation and Travel

So I recently returned from a trip to the Philippines. With every new plane I board, I find myself flying further and further away from the girl who left Boston back in September. My dear friend Julie and I bought our round-trip tickets from Taipei to Manila a month ago, but we had planned absolutely nothing else in between these destinations.

We arrived in the middle of the night Feb. 16. Slept at the airport. And walked into a beautiful Filipino 7 a.m. sunshine with only the weight of our little backpacks and the bright, shiny feeling of freedom and optimism that comes with being in a foreign country with no plans. We literally did not know our next step until we planted one foot in front of the other.

I thought that with such little expectation, there would be no room for disappointment. However, poor planning (or nonexistent in our case) is not the same as being void of expectation. You can't escape expectations.

I had this postcard image in my head of a palm tree-lined beach along a clear blue ocean that we had seen when we arrived in Manila (and promptly booked our next flight to said beach shortly thereafter).

My mind never ventured to what lay beyond the sand in the photograph, and I found myself extremely bummed the first days beach bumming through Boracay. It was such a mecca for mediocre food, beach-side tattoos and hair-braiding, drunk men using the ocean as a giant public urinal, and rows full of stalls peddling Boracay-labeled trinkets -- not the off-the-beaten path adventure I had hoped for. 

I'm reading Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel, and I love how he describes his personal experience with this phenomena during a trip to Barbados:

"Nothing was as I had imagined it, which is surprising only if one considers what I had imagined. In the preceding weeks, my thoughts of the island had circled exclusively around three immobile mental images, assembled during the reading of a brochure and an airline timetable...If pressed, I would naturally have recognized that the island had to include other elements, but I had not needed them in order to build an impression of it."

But for me everything changed when we accidentally wandered into a cemetery in the mountains. There were stone coffins/tombstones seemingly haphazardly stacked atop one another. We realized that one of the young women buried in front of us was born just a few months after me. She died at 16.

Suddenly I felt so ungrateful and selfish for coming to this girl's home (it really looked just like the paradise pictures had advertised) and not appreciating it for everything that it was and might have been for her had she lived long enough to see me face to face that day.

I thought about all the experiences I would have missed if I hadn't made it past 16 -- how small my world was then and how little hope I had for my future around that time.

In just the 10 days we spent in the Philippines, there really was so much to experience and so many new things to see:

• became a certified scuba diver
• danced alongside posh Brazilian models in Manila
• got attacked by a family of jellyfish in Moalboal
• sang love songs over the intercom system to a plane full of Cebu Pacific passengers
• ate chicken fetuses
• swam under waterfalls in Kawasan
• hiked in dark caves alongside baby bats and alien spiders
• ate a cheese popsicle
• met tarsiers in Loboc
• slept in the jungle and showered with big lizards
• pet the tiniest goat I have ever seen and admired Chocolate Hills in Bohol
• ...while all along the way getting to know this amazing new friend who lived an ocean away from me only months before.

Boton quotes J.K. Huysman's 1884 novel A Rebours (while discussing the protagonist's ambivalence toward traveling to faraway destinations): "the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience." But what would the point of travel be if everything always came as expected? Isn't that the whole idea of an adventure?

Thanks to Julie, Boton, Huysman, that 16-year-old girl, and many other friends made along the way, I had an amazingly unexpected voyage to the Philippines and am loving the vulgar reality of actual experience.