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Life

For 4th of July weekend, Adeena and I took a trip to Nashville. It was motivated by 2 reasons – Nashville hot chicken and visiting Tennessee as my 46th state. These probably aren’t the most common reasons to visit; I’d imagine country music and honky-tonks to be more popular answers, but truthfully it was not something we were in the demographic of.

Nashville, like Savannah or Charleston, is a very popular bachelorette party destination. There are similarly many historic plantations that glorify the life of a 19th century southern plantation-owner. They also try to walk a fine line on racial topics by highlighting the appalling experience of slavery too.

It was pretty hot and humid in Nashville, so we really minimized the amount of time spent outdoors. Paired with a lot of eating, I remember being constantly quite full throughout our time there. I visited the Johnny Cash museum without really knowing who Johnny Cash was beforehand (sorry), and briefly walked around a full-scale replica of the Parthenon. It’s quite curious how it came to be: the city was known as “Athens of the South”, so they built a Parthenon replica in 1897 to commemorate the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. We also visited the Belle Meade plantation house, but Adeena didn’t really want to pay for a ‘colonialism tour’, so we just walked the grounds outside. Towards the end of our 3 days there, we ran out of things to do that we even made a trip to the Hermitage Hotel to visit the men’s bathroom, an art deco public restroom that won “Restroom of the Year” in 2008.

Life

On the way back to Seattle from Mexico City, we intentionally chose an itinerary with a 6 hour layover in LA to go to Koreatown. In hindsight, it was a bit of an extra move: the KBBQ was solid but not worth the $100 of uber’s to and from LAX.

We stayed the night in Seattle, and then drove up to Lummi Island the next morning. Lummi Island is one of the lesser known islands in the Puget Sound; you can ask a Seattlelite and chances are they won’t have heard of it either. It’s a pretty small and sparse island with really nothing notable to see, and it’s also quite far north - near the Canadian border – making it not as accessible as some of the other islands. But at the same time this serene mundanity is its main draw: the idyllic and unspoiled setting really epitomizes what the region has to offer. It is perhaps for this reason that there is a bucket-list bed and breakfast on Lummi Island – the Willows Inn.

The Willows Inn was ranked as the best restaurant in North America according to some list, serving a tasting menu focused on hyper-local ingredients. The story goes that a young chef who had worked at Noma returned home to Washington and responded to a craigslist job posting at the inn. He fell in love with the island’s purity of ingredients – foraged berries and flowers, freshly caught shrimp from local fishermen, tiny local farms, you get the idea – and tries to encapsulate this in a 12+ course dinner. However, the Willows Inn is also infamous for another reason: a NY Times exposé published last year revealed its toxic workplace filled with just the worst parts of ‘kitchen culture’. We didn’t realize this when we booked it though.

Life

Like April, May was a prolific month of travel for me – in total, I was probably in New York for less than a week. After a few short trips in the first half of the month, I left the city around mid-May and ultimately ended up in Seattle by Memorial Day, where I would call home for the summer.

I started the month with a long-weekend trip to Savannah and Charleston. Both cities were impressively charming and historical, thanks to excellent preservation efforts that have kept their look(s) and feel(s) in the 18th century.

The streets of Savannah, Georgia

Life

On the first day of April, I flew to Dallas to meet an old High School friend who was soon heading to China for work. Working in China since COVID requires a lot of determination - it is no longer the same ‘foreigner-welcome’ place that I had left back in 2016. In order to enter China, he needed a special approval letter that took 10 months to receive, then had to stay put at the place of departure (Dallas) for 7 days while taking a series of tests that cost upwards of 4 digits. The consequent quarantine that was required after landing was the worst part; with the recent outbreak I think it was only some time in May that my friend finally reached Guangzhou.

I recently heard someone describe Dallas as just a big version of Modesto (guess where they’re from), and I can see where they’re coming from. It’s a true American city that has been designed for the automobile; points of attraction are scattered around its endless urban sprawl that rivals LA, with public transit being an afterthought. Nonetheless, we had a productive weekend walking around the downtown area that included the Art Museum, the niche MADI art museum (think colorful and abstract geometric art), and plenty of food including creative tacos at Velvet Tacos and (of course) Texan BBQ. I tried a Sloppy Joe sandwich for the first time, which is tasty but really doesn’t make sense in the form of a sandwich because of how leaky it gets. We also went to the opening weekend of Carbone in Dallas, which I found to be slightly lesser than my first time in NYC; I can’t tell if it’s because it was my 2nd time, or because the original location is better.

My next stop was New Orleans, which I stayed for a bit more than a week. I wanted to take advantage of work still being remote, and reasoned that since New Orleans is mostly about food, a longer stay where I worked during the day and dined out at night would be best. I consulted the different lists & guides for food in New Orleans then made reservations every night, trying the best of what Cajun & Creole food had to offer. If you’re wondering – Creole food typically uses tomatoes and originates from New Orleans, while Cajun food is more country style.

Life

Getting COVID was unpleasant, but overall it was actually a better experience than the flus I used to catch once a year. My symptoms were pretty mild: my body temperature went up, but not technically yet at a fever level, for about a day and a half. After that came the sore throat and blocked nose for a handful of days, which was annoying but bearable without the fever or lethargy looming over. By the end of the week things were back to normal.

I also felt an odd sense of relief. The way I see it, it’s only a matter of time before everyone gets Omicron, so the guaranteed immunity (at least for a few months) is a settling fact especially when making larger plans like for traveling. I’ve also noticed that I feel less anxious about things we’ve been primed to avoid over the last 2 years, like large crowds or people not wearing masks.

Two weeks after I first tested positive, I took a quick weekend trip to Cincinnati, which sits on the border between Ohio and Kentucky. Cincinnati is a strange city - it was once the sixth most populous city in the US during the 19th century and was grandly named the “Paris of America”, but it isn’t exactly a city full of rich history. I remember walking down the old Millionaire’s Row to disappointedly find out that it was half empty without much preservation. At the same time, Cincinnati feels like a somewhat global city - it is home to the headquarters of large corporations like Kroger and P&G, and has an unexpectedly large and modern airport. There was also a sign by the river displaying its many sister cities, one of which is Kharkiv.

Life

I spent most of January at home recharging, wary of the Omicron wave. Despite this, NYC continued to operate like pre-Omicron; during the peak in early January, I went into the city to meet a friend and was stunned to find everything business as usual. In a week or two, Omicron left NYC in the same exponential manner as it came.

During January, I became enamored with the idea of buying an apartment in NYC. My main motivation was along the lines of why pay rent when you can pay for your own place instead?. I developed a brief yet intense pastime of browsing StreetEasy for potential apartments, sort of like you how you would browse aimlessly in online shopping. I visited a handful of apartments in Brooklyn and also quite a few in the only tall building in my neighborhood (if you’re wondering it has 18 floors but only 2 elevators, which makes waiting for an elevator notably slow). However, I soon realized that this was a bad idea - buying a unit would tie me down to the city, owning instead of renting would comes with its baggages, I’d have to pay an arm and a leg for a mortgage, and on top of that the taxes + fees alone were already basically half my rent. I gave up the search soon after, wondering why I even wasted so much time considering this idea.

Some of the largest Corinthian columns in the world at The National Building Museum

Life

Looking back at December, it was the calm before the Omicron storm. I felt a sense of deja vu as the variant started showing up around the world, and consequently a helpless admission of ‘here we go again’. Knowing that our newly regained sense of normalcy was about to be restricted again was an uncertain feeling. But at least there was a silver lining this time - news soon came out that while Omicron was far more infectious had fewer severe symptoms.

I took a weekend trip to Kansas City, motivated to tick off 2 states that I had not yet been to – Kansas and Missouri. Only upon arrival did I learn that there are two Kansas Cities, one in each state, and the bigger one is (counterintuitively) in Missouri. I was pleasantly surprised by KC; I didn’t expect to feel a need to return, but my short weekend there turned out to be very insufficient. There were many interesting and niche museums from the Toy Museum to the TWA museum that I didn’t get a chance to visit, partly because they were closed on Sundays (that was a big theme). I highly recommend the Arabia Steamboat museum, a unique display of the treasures – from fine china to preserved pickles – from the Arabia steamboat that sank in 1856. It’s also a museum that details one family’s ambitious efforts taking on such a large excavation – in fact, there are plans for a few more digs over the next few years.

The Kansas City Public Library

Life

I spent most of October in NYC, beginning to form a routine to my new life as I settled into my apartment and as work became more rhythmic. I started going to the office a couple times per week to ‘switch things up’, found a long street block not far from home good for running, and explored the hole-in-wall cash-only places around for food.

At the end of October, we had a week long new-hire consulting training in Chicago. I leveraged this opportunity to visit Oklahoma City the weekend before, adding Oklahoma to my list. I didn’t really have a plan of what to do until I got there, and it turns out there really isn’t much to do. Oklahoma City is the kind of place where if you tell someone you’re here for tourism, they look at you pleasantly surprised. I ticked off the top three attractions according to TripAdvisor: visiting the National Cowboy Museum, walking around the rather underwhelming Bricktown (the downtown entertainment district), and learning about the Oklahoma City Bombing in painstaking detail at the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

I also saw No Time to Die while I was in OKC, which was 2 entire dollars cheaper than had I seen it in New York. In addition, for just 7 dollars, I went to see a Thunders game that wasn’t ever really competitive. The most hype the crowd got was when a fan made a shot from half court and won 20,000 dollars. However, my highlight in OKC was completely unplanned for: I was passing through the city’s ‘rich’ neighborhood while walking from lunch to the memorial, and stumbled upon the annual Heritage Hills Historical Homes Tour. For a weekend every year, a bunch of rich people open up their houses for us commoners to admire, and charge 20$ for the experience – a weird way to flex I suppose. Nonetheless, it was an experiential version of flipping through a picture-perfect interior design magazine; the amount of detail put in to balance creativity, history, and livability was inspiring. I felt I got a slice of what (high socioeconomic status) life in Oklahoma was like.

Life

I had about a week to get settled in to NYC before I started work. During that week, I spent most of my time finding an apartment.

With a friend who also just moved to NYC, we booked a month-long Airbnb first to slowly carry out the apartment hunt. However, the poor state of our Airbnb forced me to speed up the process: our place was small and old, the only sink in the unit happened to be constantly leaking, and the last straw was the sighting of a cockroach. I still have memories using a dirty rag to clean up the flooded kitchen after waking up because the leak had overfilled the bucket overnight. In hindsight, the pictures of the place on Airbnb weren't incorrect, just deceptive; they were strategically taken and our minds filled in the gaps beyond the pictures with something better than it actually was.

My biggest takeaway from this experience was the conclusion to live in a newer building, where repairs would be addressed quickly. I didn't want to pay rent for cockroaches.

Life

The last stop of my 2-month excursion in Europe was Paris. It was my first time in the world's most iconic tourist destination. Predictably, I checked off the classic tourist activities: going up the Eiffel tower for unobstructed views of the city, lining up for half an hour to take a subpar photo of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, learning about impressionism at the Musée d'Orsay, and traveling all the way out to see the Palace of Versailles. I walked a lot around the city, eating too many pastries and at a handful of Michelin-starred restaurants that weren't all too memorable. Paris was much more posh and felt less friendly than other places I had been in Europe. The societal class separation was more evident, and I was constantly reminded that I was a tourist and outsider. In the future, I'd consider coming back, but it wouldn't be purely for tourism. In fact, I had completed all the must-see's; when I had an unexpected extra day in Paris after oversleeping and missing my flight back home, I wasn't sure what exactly to do.

Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in suburban Paris

During my time in Paris, I took an overnight detour to Brussels. I really liked the Atomium, a bizarre futuristic building inspired by its namesake, built for the 1958 World Expo. Since Brussels is the unofficial capital of the EU, the Parliamentarium was an engaging exhibit about the history of the EU, accessible in all 24 languages of its member states. Manneken Pis was a small and fairly unimpressive bronze statue of a boy peeing on an ordinary street corner, and to be honest I wasn't sure what I was expecting. Being in Belgium, I sampled many pralinés (pronounced with 3 syllables in French) at chocalatiers across the city for the best gifts to bring back home.

Life

After Italy, I had originally planned on going to Portugal and Spain, but the rapidly spreading Delta variant made me reconsider. On the second last day before flying out, I forfeited my existing plans for Porto to instead go to Berlin.

Tempelhof Airport's main check-in hall

Berlin is a very livable city; the place I'd settle in if I were based in Europe. It's green, modern, the cost of living is low (relative to Italy and the US), and also quite international. A city with a somewhat tricky history, Berlin has done an impressive job repurposing its historical sites into modern facilities while paying homage to the past. For example, the Berlin Wall Memorial along Bernauer Strasse features original poles marking where the wall once stood, complete with touching information placards telling personal stories of families affected by the wall. It also doubles as a strip of urban greenspace, a popular jogging track for residents and frolicking spot for dogs. Spreepark, a East Berlin theme park whose owner was caught for smuggling cocaine, is being developed into a public park and currently offers 'urban exploration' tours into the abandoned site. I also took a tour of the perfectly preserved Tempelhof airport, the main site of the Berlin airlift, which hasn't been in operation since 2008. The airport runway has been converted into a large urban green space, often used for electronic music festivals.

Life

I officially became homeless on 5/31, when my lease in Berkeley ended. After the apartment was completely emptied, I flew to Seattle to stay with Adeena and friends.

One weekend we went to Vance Creek bridge, an abandoned railway arch bridge about 100 meters tall that you've probably seen before on social media. We hiked for about an hour to get to the other end of the bridge, then crossed the bridge to go back. It was an exhilirating experience – my heart rate was heightened and my palms were sweating profusely – but really it wasn't that dangerous unless you were near the edge. The wooden slats you could see through all the way to the bottom of the valley mostly weren't large enough to fall through, and the boards were generally stable. In fact, I didn't feel any sense of fear until I dropped my lens cap and it fell through. Something switched on in my mind that second; perhaps I began to realize the possibility of a potential fall, and I wanted to get off.

Vance Creek Bridge

I've decided to start journaling periodically as I begin the next chapter of life. My goal is to encapsulate the experiences, thoughts, and memories of a particular period in life; some day I'll look back and read this, and perhaps the nostalgia will flow. It also doubles as a way to update you what I've been up to :)

Life

On paper it seems that graduating from college is perhaps the biggest transition in life; from being a student to a member of the labor force, or from being a net negative to a net positive in income. But it didn't feel like it. Maybe it was because the presence of 'school' had already been diminished to something remote and consequently inconsequential over the last year, or that these things just take a while to kick in. Regardless, I remember not feeling much accomplishment when I walked to receive a 'certificate of participation' for the in-person commencement; it was just another procedure.

We had a DSUS teamwide picnic the afternoon after I walked. I (finally) met many people I had been working with over the last year on a screen. Something sort of funny is the dissonance in height: since it's on Zoom you wouldn't know how tall someone is and sort of just fill in the gap yourself, but this may be quite off.