I’m a notorious packrat. Case in point, I’ve been racking up frequent flier miles since I was 16 years old, since then I’ve managed to hoard over 140,000 miles. The weird thing was that there wasn’t a specific trip or anything that I was saving for–I was just doing it for ONE DAY when I would really need them for something.
Well, that day finally arrived, and thank my lucky stars that the airline didn’t decide to just go bankrupt or make flights cost 5x more than before.
We booked our tickets to Spain today (I still have miles left too!)
So in 7 months we’ll definitely be traveling again!
Tags: airlines, frequent flier, spain, yay
5 types of tourist in NYC. Funny because it's true. (Jon Keegan)
So in my research about traveling in Barcelona, I came across a somewhat funny article called Barcelona Clothes and Dress Code: Tips on How to Blend in With the Locals. The primary reason for this article is to keep tourists safe from scam-artists and pickpockets, but I would argue that those people would be targets anyways no matter how you dressed them up simply because they obviously lack something vital as a traveler: common sense.
People spend all this money buying money-belts and fancy traveling gear when you could simply just dress and act like a local, as much as possible. Obviously this isn’t possible everywhere in the world, but it’s certainly possible in a worldly cosmopolitan city like Barcelona that’s full of foreign expats. For example, I live in New York City — a city that tourist guides will tell you is dangerous. Don’t do this, don’t talk to these people, don’t stop here, etc. Yet somehow millions of people live in this city without ever getting pickpocketed their entire life, yet a tourist manages to in the few days they’re here. Amazing odds, really. 
Like most of these tourist women do in their hometowns, I carry a purse every day, and like they probably are back home, I’m very careful with it. Yet somehow these visiting ladies come here wearing a fannypack because they’re suddenly a tourist. If you wouldn’t be caught dead in something at home, why would you wear it in a cosmopolitan world city suddenly because you’re a visitor?
Being a tourist is a state of mind! We’ve found that if you don’t act like one then most people won’t treat you like one, especially not thieves — cause really, why bother with the person who MIGHT be a savvy local expat when you could harass the tour-package couple with their map hanging out of their back pocket?
Tags: fashion, sigh tourists, Travel Advice
After months of deliberation we finally narrowed down what we wanted to do on the honeymoon.
Something exotic. Something with diving possibilities. The beach.
We added the stipulation “no Asia,” since we’d lived three years of our life there and already been to various countries multiple times (as much as we love Asia, there’s many other areas of the world to explore.) We also wanted nowhere we could feasibly go “just for fun.” While the Caribbean is tempting, we rationalized that we could go there anytime we wanted as long as we had the funds. A honeymoon is one of the few times we’ll have for awhile where it’s socially acceptable to take a couple weeks off of work after only working for less than a year during a recession.
So basically that meant the only choice was Africa or South America, and we decided to go with Africa. We’ve further narrowed down the choices to Tanzania and Mauritius, with Mauritius being the strong contender. We’re going to stop by a travel agent tonight to see our options. Yay! I have travel in my future!
Update: Annnnnd…. we decided to go in the complete opposite direction and go with one of our original choices, Spain + Morocco. Oh well, at least we’re decided!
I haven’t been writing here because it’s been a year since I’ve left the country (the U.S). At the risk of sounding like a poor little rich girl, this one year is the longest I’ve stayed in one country in the past 10 years or so. Thinking about it, this may the longest stretch without any sort of recreational travel in my entire life.
Seeing as how practically everything I do in life is a means to allow me to travel more, this is extremely depressing. However, the economy hasn’t been great, Hugh had to get his residency issues in order, and furthermore, we’re saving money for our wedding.
Which means, of course, that I’ll have something travel related to blog about… namely, our honeymoon! We’re still trying to decide on a destination, but somewhere we’d never dreamt of going is pretty high on that list. 
I’ll try and keep this more updated than I have.
Tags: General
Buoyancy isn't something we'd worked on yet...
Something I’ve always wanted to do is learn how to scuba dive. Imagine my delight when I found out that not only does my cousin dive, but she was willing to take us out somewhere to go on an intro dive.
We drove out to Anilao in Batangas to a small resort. When I arrived, I looked out to the grey ocean and felt a bit anxious. It was a gloomy day and the water looked choppy and cold. Did I mention I am actually afraid of the ocean, and more importantly, putting my head under the water? It all stems from when I almost drowned trying to surf in Hawaii….but I digress… =P
I was a bit nervous during the briefing, I knew it was just an introductory course and that everything would be okay…but you know, the fear was there. So we get geared up, we get on the boat, and I’m told I need to fall backwards into the water (oh good lord, I thought!) Managing all the courage I could muster, I let the weight of the air tanks pull me backwards and…
Well, I entered a whole new world. If the sea looked grey and bleak from the surface, it was completely different below. I saw so many fish, and bright coral, and weird looking plants. You know when you go to an aquarium and you see all the neon colored anemone, and coral that look like brains, and weird stripey fish? Yeah, somehow I just thought all that stuff was fake and created for aquariums. But then I got to see it for real, and it was just amazing. All my fear washed away.
Hugh eating fresh uni out of the sea
After our intro dive, we went to shore with a bag of uni (sea urchin) which we had plucked from the rocks near the shore (apparently it is not illegal to get them in the Philippines.) I’m not a fan of uni personally, and I think I’m even less of a fan after watching the resort chef hack them open. It’s amazing how little meat is actually inside of those suckers! Anyways, Hugh and my cousin were both extremely pleased by the quality of the uni which they ate with calamansi juice.
We had so much fun we promptly decided to sign up for our certification. It took a week and with it came a whole new set of stress and tears (on my part) but when I actually accomplished the task I couldn’t do for days (clearing a mask underwater) I felt a very happy sense of accomplishment. Oh, and I also got stung by a firecoral down there so I guess now I have battle scars =P
It’s wonderful to have conquered a fear AND crossed something off my Life To-Do List!
Tags: adventure, diving, epicurianism, General, Philippines, sea, travel
Living in Japan, I often heard people ask me, “how can we Japanese learn English?” or “How come the Koreans/Chinese/Filipinos/Singaporeans speak English better than us?” It was kind of an odd question that I couldn’t really answer before, but coming back to the Philippines the answer seems so obvious: you learn English by using it.
Few people know that the Philippines has more English speakers than the United Kingdom. Many people know that Filipinos speak English, many people know that they speak Filipino/Tagalog as well in the Philippines–but what a lot of people don’t know is the extent that English is spoken. In Japan, as well as many other countries in Asia, English is used to puncuate or emphasize something like… “Aki no Trendy Style!” (Trendy styles for Fall) In the Philippines, they’d just flat out say “Trendy styles for the fall,”. I remember Japanese people being amazed when I told them that Filipino TV was 90% in English. To the Japanese, English is a language for Caucasian Westerners–nevermind the fact Singaporeans, Hong Kongers, Indians and Filipinos all speak English.
I remember on a trip to the Philippines one of my friends was stunned that street children could speak better English than the high school students she taught in Japan. How does that happen, we wondered? Well, it’s easy. They just use it. TV shows are often in English, not subtitled or dubbed. If they’re not fully in English, a good part of it will be. Especially if the show is about something technical like medicine or law. Hugh often understood the gist of what was going on around him simply due to liberal use of English.
Other examples? During a Filipino wedding, all the prayers and songs were in English, the priest’s sermon was also in English. During the reception, all speeches were in English despite the fact that out of the 500 guests only 5 people in the room didn’t understand Tagalog. You would never see this stuff in Japan–not that this is the way it should be. Language is important for cultural identity, and the loss of language is something which I consider very sad. I found out that several of my cousins CANNOT speak Tagalog despite being born and raised in the Philippines. I find that very odd.
Yet, the question of how should Japanese people learn English continues to bother me. The only real way to make sure people learn it is to make it a requirement, more so than just something kids have to do to pass a test to graduate high school.
Tags: cultural differences, General, Japan, language, Philippines, travel
Chick on a stick...not actually very tasty.
While in the Philippines, my cousins and uncles have been trying endlessly to gross out Hugh with “exotic” Filipino food. I think this is a pretty common practice around the world, where rather than be embarassed about some local delicacies, most people consider Americans (and its usually Americans who are so grossed out by foreign delicacies) to just have boring diets. And honestly–with our health, who are we to be grossed out by what people eat? I’ve come to consider the giant bowls of fat they serve at restaurants back home to be pretty foul.
However, Hugh’s a pretty adventurous eater so he always ends up grossing people out in their attempts. In Japan we/he sampled such delicacies as: bees, sake with a dead snake coiled in it, raw horse meat, not to mention many of the more normal things like seaweeds and shellfish that some people would find repulsive. In Laos, we tried silkworms and water buffalo. I’ve had turtle-shell jelly in China and Taco Bell in America. It isn’t about trying to gross each other out, or be adventurous or anything. There are certain things we won’t do–I won’t eat anything killed before my eyes (like the snakes and their beating hearts in Vietnam) which are often done just to be grotesque for tourists and not because the majority of the population eats it. But we figure that if people in a culture eat this sort of food, then it’s certainly worth trying. At worst, just don’t eat it again. It PROBABLY won’t kill you. We rolled our eyes at tourists in Laos who would go on and on about how horrible it was that Laotians ate certain things (civet cats, random wildlife, birds), never realizing that certainly certain groups of people think the Western diet of beef is possibly horrible, or that Laotians are poor and hunting game in the forest isn’t about sport, but about survival.
Food is all very cultural anyways. I never grew up on fancy cheese (many Asians don’t) and as a result, I often find the cheeses that my European friends love smell and taste like vomit, or worse. I mean really, do you know WHY blue cheese has blue flecks in it? My point is–blood pudding or dog meat or whatever. Food is food.
Saddam Hussein pizza?!
In the Philippines there are delicacies such as dinaguan, a stew made of pigs’ blood, which isn’t really that strange to some cultures who eat blood puddings or marrow, but most infamous with non-Filipinos is balut, which is chicken embryo.
Somehow though, Hugh managed to finally put my family’s taunts to rest when he ate a day-old chick which are served whole on a stick and meant to be eaten as such–bones, innards, head, feet and all. My uncle who will eat balut seemed positively disgusted by the fact we ate it, though you could joke and call it overripe balut. My cousin Jean made him do it and he heroically did so, announcing “tastes yolky!” as he did so.
Tags: cultural differences, epicurianism, food, General, Laos, Philippines, travel, United States
Bad photo, but you can see Hugh jumping, someone running for their life, a car being showered by sparks, and just how close we were to third degree burns ;p
After the wedding, we went with my cousins to Baguio, a mountain-top city which serves as a summer retreat for Manilans. I was told that it was very rural and provincial, but I guess after backpacking through rural Laos I had a completely different idea of what that would be. While it was certainly quite pretty in some parts, I was a bit disappointed to see how developed and urban it was. Most of the hills were covered with houses, developments, and/or shacks and a lot of the tourist areas had tribal people standing out in front of them trying to get tourists to dress up in traditional clothing for 30 cents. After seeing how tourism and hilltribes can successfully work hand-in-hand, it was a bit disappointing to see the more exploitative and sad side of it close up and more personal.
New Years was a mix of both kind of dull and fun, but the countdown was fun. We went outside and from the hill we were on we could see fireworks exploding all around us. Actually, all week we heard fireworks randomly exploding which was really pretty jarring since no one really likes hearing explosions in the middle of the night. The highlight of New Years was definitely seeing my life move in slow motion as fireworks exploded a couple of yards away from us. =P Good old Filipino safety standards 
Tags: General, new years, Philippines, travel
Ceremony in a lovely old church
We officially arrived in the Philippines on the 26th, worn-out and suffering from food poisoning (well, me at least.) However, after a few days of rest we were able to attend my cousin’s wedding. Although I’m ethnically Filipino, I was born and raised in the United States and had only attended one Filipino wedding prior to this one (and that one was sort of a blend of traditions since it was of a Filipina-American friend.)
The church ceremony was Catholic, but with so much pomp and circumstance that I’m surprised more people in America haven’t taken some of the traditions. First there were the dozen sponsors for the bridal party, then there were all the offerings. It wasn’t just wedding rings being brought up by a young boy, but also a bible. I had to fill in for a sick cousin, my role? I was to place a cord/giant rosary over the couple to symbolize them being joined together, but that was already after a veil was placed over them. Despite the ceremony, the church was surprisingly loud and chipper–some weddings I’ve attended have almost felt like funerals since they were so quiet, solemn, and often filled with crying people. Instead there were children running around, people gossiping to themselves, the doors and windows thrown wide open to keep the church from being stifling.
Men dressed in barong tagalog--a traditional formal dress shirt made of pineapple fiber
After the church ceremony, the reception was held at the Peninsula Hotel Manila where there was live music, professional dancers to keep the party moving, and a very international buffet with prime rib and other things like that. What was most amazing was the cost: a wedding in an centuries old church, a reception in a 5 star hotel, live band, custom made dress, 5 tier cake, and 500 guests cost approximately 1/10th of what it would cost in America. My family joked, “have the wedding here, just fly everyone over and you’ve still saved money!” What’s sad about that is that it’s completely true. :/
Tags: cost of living, cultural differences, General, Philippines, travel, wedding
I love Bangkok. I know a lot of tourists dislike it, and I often heard people on the tourist trail exchanging stories and saying how much they disliked it–but I think if people would take the time to step out of Khao San (the backpacker ghetto) or Patpong (the girlie show ghetto) then they might find a really vibrant city full of entertainment options, extremely good value accomodation, high quality food from all over the world, and excellent shopping.
For Christmas Eve, I met up with a Thai friend of mine who I met in Japan. She took us down to a local street food market full of delicious food that of course, isn’t listed in any guidebooks. We sat on the street and they ordered a massive feast of food, that of course is actually authentically flavored since its made for Thais. I think pretty much every meal in a foreign country is vastly improved by having a local do the ordering.
As strange as some people may find it, we were excited to be in Bangkok and to be wandering the streets and shopping and just enjoying city life. Our next stop is the Philippines for a month, but seeing as we will be with family I think this may be the end of our “backpacking” trip. In fact, Hugh and I splurged on a suitcase and are far too excited to be filling it with stuff. Amazingly, after 5 months we bought very, very few things on the road so its kind of hard to break that habit. Not that I want to. A little less materialism never hurt anyone.
Anyways, the dinner was pretty untraditional as far as Christmas Eve goes, but I was still really happy to be in a big bright city with good food and good company.
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