2022 July
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A week and a half ago, my parents and I took an out of town trip to Naga City in Bicol. We were last there in 2019, before the pandemic. Our trip was to attend a cousin's wedding; they'd been engaged since 2020 I think; I remember my dad and uncle were already joking about it back in 2019. The date kept being pushed back because of the pandemic of course. At the time that we went, covid cases were on a slight uptick, but the risk for travel seemed low, especially given all three of us were vaxxed and
2019 November
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Something I haven't done in a while: travel with my parents to Bicol to pay respects to our ancestors during the undas long weekend. In fact, the last time I made this trip was back in 2004, 15 years ago! (I technically also visited Bicol about 11ish years ago, but that was via a flight to Legaspi, Albay, and not to my dad's hometown.) My Dad's hometown is in Daet, Camarines Norte, and that's also where my grandparents are buried. But instead of heading there directly, we went first to Naga City in Camarines Sur, where we had relatives and
2019 July
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People travel for different reasons. My parents travel mostly for shopping purposes. Which meant when I flew back home with them during the recent trip, we came back with an additional 3 fully-packed pieces of luggage full of shoes and clothes and such. As someone who doesn't really indulge in shopping, I can't relate to this, and in fact it runs anathema to my philosophy of always packing as little as necessary when travelling. Then there are people I know (mostly younger people) who seem to be travelling every weekend or every other weekend and they're always at the beach
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I had written about travel anxiety before, but I'm revisiting the topic because the recent US trip reminded me how much of a problem it is for me. The US trip was a new experience because I would be abroad for 40 days with multiple travel legs, it involved 4 international flights (back and forth) plus three domestic flights within the US, and on one leg and several flights I would be travelling alone. I had travelled abroad before for a longer period (3 months for London in 2015), but for those 3 months I was based in the same
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After the Seattle part of the trip, I reunited with family for the final leg of the trip where we all be hanging around the San Francisco bay area. We were based in my uncle's place in Vacaville, which one of my friends kindly described as "in the sticks", i.e. basically far away from everything. Like Houston, we had to rely on the kindness of relatives who were willing and available to drive us around. This was the laziest part of the trip by far: not much walking, most of it either just driving to places and taking pictures; or
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Seattle was the riskiest part of my trip, relatively speaking, because it was my solo leg - I didn't have any friends or relatives in the city I could turn to in case of an emergency. I had also read online that while Seattle was very much a walkable city, there was a nontrivial homeless population, and some areas may be a bit sketchy after dark. As a friend of mine said though, "sketchy" in the US is probably a lot safer than "sketchy" in Metro Manila. I still worried a little bit, but given where I from, it didn't
2019 June
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Not much to say about Anaheim, it felt like the town was all about Disneyland and not much else. But then again we did spend our three days there just going to Disneyland, so what can you do? In LA we stayed in the Koreatown district, so everything felt weirdly Asian. Not Asian like living in Asia, but like Chinatown in any other city I guess? The city felt a bit dirty, I'm told the metro elevators smelled bad, and there was grafitti everywhere and a high incidence of homeless people. One time we took an elevator to get to
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I'm not a big fan of theme parks. I think for the most part they are overpriced and not worth the time, effort or money. And I'd probably never go to one by myself or without one of my nieces/nephews. I understand the impetus of bringing kids to a theme park of course, they really enjoy it. Prior to this trip, I've only ever been to a theme park once, and that was in Unversal Studios Singapore with my brothers back in 2015. This time we went to Disneyland in Anaheim and Universal Studios Hollywood. The kids with us were -
My US trip started on the first of the month. I've been meaning to write more regularly about it, but one thing I had forgotten was how exhausting it would be to be a tourist, walking everywhere all of the time. Here's how many steps my Fitbit recorded during that first week: I finished this week with a bit more than 105k steps, which I'm pretty sure is a lifetime record (though I dont have the data anymore from the Europe trip in 2015 - I suspect that it's comparable in scale.) Compunding the tiredness was that I wasn't getting
2019 April
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Family's been planning a US trip this year, and while I wasn't originally planning to join them, they convinced me to go. I was like, why not? My schedule is flexible, I've never been there, and going to the US meant adding a whole new continent to my experiences. Getting a US Visa was a good idea anyway, in case I ever decided to travel there for some other reason (i.e. I miraculously get a slot in a MTG Mythic Championship or something), and it was a good chance to spend some time with family for a while. It might
2018 June
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I had an out of country trip last weekend to Kuala Lumpur to play Magic, but I was a bit tempted to not write about it all. The reason being that inevitably after one of these MTG-related trips the first thing people ask me is "Nanalo ka ba?" (Did you win?) and this time, the answer was sadly no. (Let's get the spoilers out of the way early shall we.) However, I realized that not all stories have to have happy endings. Sometimes the journey itself is the story. Besides, it was my first trip ever to Malaysia, and as
2017 December
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I took a 5-day trip to Singapore last weekend, mostly to play in the Grand Prix, but the opportunity to get away from the country for a while was appreciated. These are some notes and anecdotes from the trip. (Not about the GP itself, that's a separate post on its own.) By my count this would be my 5th visit to Singapore. That means Singapore now ties Hong Kong for my most visited foreign destination. My last HK visit was back in 2009, there was no overlap. Normally when flying out I prefer to check luggage so that I'm not
2017 June
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So last April my friends and I took a second trip to Japan. This time we mostly stayed around Tokyo, while taking a few days off in-between to visit Fuji, Hakone and Nikko. I like Tokyo, so I'll talk about Tokyo for now. I've only been here twice, but I could imagine myself living here for an extended period of time. It solves my top three problems with Metro Manila: overly hot weather, poor transportation options, and poor internet. Both visits I found the temperatures to be within the generally agreeable range of around 5-25 degrees celsius. The low end
2017 May
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(Click photos to view full-size)
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Tokyo - Fuji - Hakone (Little Prince Museum) - Tokyo (Ghibli Museum) - Nikko (Edo Wonderland) - Tokyo (Tokyo Tower One Piece / Final Fantasy exhibits) - NAIA3
(Click photos to view full-size)
2017 March
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A couple of years ago, two friends and I were being tourists in Barcelona. With its wide, spacious streets and strangely uniform city blocks, we walked around a lot. During one of our tourist days, we decided to eat some paella on the way back to our AirBNB. Who comes to Barcelona and doesn't eat paella right? We ended up walking for quite a while. Every time we came upon a new restaurant that served paella we would consider the price and the restaurant and would think, hey maybe we can find somewhere better or cheaper further along the way.
2015 November
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As I write this I am at the airport, trying to kill time. As per usual, I am more than an hour early before the check-in time for my flight. It's a thing I do, no matter where I'm travelling, that I put in lots of buffer time so I will more often than not arrive way too early and need to wait. It's not just for flights either -- I have a tendency to arrive early for any sort of time sensitive appointment. (Except work of course, where I often take what I call "tactical lates", but that's a
