General thoughts

So as most trips tend to go, the planning phase is fun and all, but outside of hitting one or two big objectives, I tend to find that for me, everything else goes out the window once I actually am out there "walking the ground" as plans change on the fly, and trying to micromanage a trip beforehand can add to the self-hype and give ideas on potential things to do but will just lead to a list of things I never actually do. Maybe other people are different, but I just cannot plan a detailed itinerary far in advance of my actual trip.

Even some big potential goals were left on the table here on this trip. That streaming thing never got off the ground -- the blog took up way too much time, and there were plenty of places I wouldn't have been able to enter, or people I wouldn't have been able to meet, with a camera. Could I have done it? Yes, but I wasn't willing to sacrifice the travel blog. The travel blog itself was already suffering in terms of how quickly I could get some of the posts out, on "normal" days it was fine but when I got sick, or when it was combined with a brutal travel day, those grinded the blog-writing to a halt and often required catch-up time over the next couple of days.

I never realized how much paper ephemera there was, especially in Japan, as well, collecting that alone was a full-time job and I wouldn't have been able to do that while also holding a camera. I did identify collecting them as a goal before the trip started, but I didn't anticipate the paper profile in each country being so wildly different. Japan has random brochures and pamphlets everywhere, whereas Singapore's was more muted and usually relegated to REIT malls and learning/tutoring centres, although I picked up a lot of Chinese New Year specific restaurant takeaway menus too. And China was almost all restaurant menus. It was so interesting to see the difference in cultures and how that translated to their different uses of paper ephemera.

I can't wait to scan them, but I don't know when I will really have the time to scan all of it. There's a lot of stuff to scan! I'm looking forwards to being able to contribute to future historians' work by preserving and uploading all this stuff though. I'm sorry but my life goal is just too fun and fulfilling.

I feel like the last time I went to China, during the Where The Wind Takes Me series, I didn't really get to experience it well because I relied on Kel and using her apartment as a home base a lot instead of hittihg the ground with my own boots. This time, once China opened its borders to Canadians mid-trip, I pivoted there and visited several smaller cities on my own volition before hitting up Kel and the bigger ones nearer the end, and I think that made a big difference. I had to figure out how to use all the apps and navigate the social structure by myself. Meituan (and its associated apps) still sucks to use as a foreigner without a local number though, hopefully they improve on that over the next couple of years. Other apps like WeChat and Alipay have already figured it out for the most part (although there was a hitch with logging in with AliPay to their food app that I never did bother to figure out).

China in general had a lot of friction to travel through as a foreigner, but it wasn't all that terrible. In fact, I had a lot of fun there overall, and a lot of that I think was due to how much purchasing power I had due to the currency differences, which made everything in China, especially the smaller cities that I visited in Haikou, Zhanjiang, and Jiangmen, feel very inexpensive. That then allowed me to try things that I wouldn't have been able to do in a more expensive place like Singapore or Japan, like try slightly higher-end restaurants, or visit places that aren't connected by their rail system (although none of those three cities really HAD a rail system outside of a tiny one in Haikou), or try different drinks or snacks that I wouldn't do in a more expensive society, etc. It's a different sort of travel and life experience and I really enjoyed going to those cities.

What I didn't enjoy so much, although it was also neat to experience for a couple of weeks, was the honking and motorcycles everywhere. It was such a different beast when I finally entered Shanghai and there was no noise pollution there. The difference was actually mind-blowing since I had gotten so used to it and had no idea that Shanghai was a quiet zone where people that employed their honkers were actually punished with fines.

Highlights

I appreciated meeting a bunch of my Singapore friends again -- I actually met a lot more of them than I thought I would, and it was great to see everyone still alive and kicking. I feel like I'm all Singapore'd out for a while now though, which isn't to say that I won't be back next year or the year after, but is more to say that I won't be back to stay for a couple weeks again for probably 4-5 years at least. Passing through for a couple days at most will be more of my plan, since hotels there are just so expensive and I kind of felt worn down towards the end there looking at different malls. Maybe I'll feel different in a year once the fatigue wears off though. But right now, if I were given free tickets to go back to Asia, I'd do a bunch of Japan and some China as well, maybe go down to Malaysia and Thailand, and just only briefly touch Singapore on the way past for a couple of days to get a few souvenirs. I'm glad I do seem to be able to pass through immigration there without a hitch nowadays though.

Meeting Zian was also a pleasant, last-minute surprise, and I wish I had time to spend one more day with her before I left. I just couldn't though. There was also a brief possibility of reaching out and meeting Miyu or Ran instead but I didn't have time to go see them since I was just based in Sapporo and Tokyo during my Japan stints. I will make an effort to go see them the next time I visit Japan for a longer time, though.

Outside of meeting dear friends, there were a lot of small highlights during the trip. Highlight locations/events include the Sapporo Snow Festival, which was on my bucket list for a long time, being at River Hongbao in Singapore at midnight for Chinese New Year festivities, visiting OMG Influencer Street and then the "night market" at Xiongfeng City (less a "city" and more an apartment complex with nearby amenities) in Guangzhou with Kel, visiting both sides of The Bund/Huangpu River in Shanghai, and then the Fuchu Racecourse, Ueno Sakura Matsuri, and Kawasaki Daishi shrine in Tokyo.

All those are all meant to be major attraction places though. There were plenty of memorable one-off smaller moments through the trip too, like the little paved park next to a community garden in Bukit Panjang's Pending Road in Singapore that I stumbled upon on Feb 13, or visiting the busy Prawn Mee store on Feb 22 when I realized while writing my blog that it had just opened for the day, and then having to share my table with another friendly family. Visiting Sunplaza Park with Allen the very next day was something else too, since the park meant so much to me (and he was the one who had given me Tigey, so Tigey meeting him again after so many years was awesome too). Having Tigey's pictures drawn in Haikou, Zhanjiang, Guangzhou, and Shanghai also stood out to me as notable events. I wonder where I would have gotten one drawn in Jiangmen if I hadn't gotten ill there. I love my little critter though I'm obligated to say that anyway as he's sitting beside me and watching me type. Help. There are plenty more that would fit into this paragraph but it can only get so long.

In terms of Japan, winning the Umamusume luggage packing game at New Chitose Airport will stay with me for a while as a highlight. I also really liked walking to that rural Chitose Mall and hanging out there for a couple of hours on the same day, though I couldn't exactly pinpoint a clear reason why. It felt authentic, I guess. Wing Bay Otaru was obviously a highlight of sorts but my main memory from that day is actually looting all the little shirashi movie posters from outside the movie theater there. Talking with Asuka Nagasawa and buying a signed CD of hers to cap off the Ueno Sakura Matsuri also stands out as a particularly shining moment on this trip, and the day trip to Kawasaki, particularly the Kawasaki Daishi temple and seeing the Girls Band Cry promotion there, and the spiritual cleansing that I felt afterwards, was also quite a moment.

Postcards

I gave away an Edmonton postcard on Day 4 to a lady at Chitose Station, to friendly Didi drivers on Day 19 in Haikou, Day 23 in Zhanjiang, Day 27 in Guangzhou, and Day 33 in Guangzhou, and then to Asuka on Day 43. Six in all. I should have given some to the friends I met, but I never, ever remember to do that. I came back with 11! Though two of them are dog-eared and will never be given out, and another one is just a generic CANADA one, so maybe just 8.

Expenses and Finances

The entire trip, using napkin math, cost me $7,890.77. This counts a $617.94 discount that I received by redeeming my Scene+ card points back in Canada afterwards too. This is an all-in price, counting all airfare, all accommodation, all currency spent and then converted to a CAD equivalent, all gifts, all random weird mistakes that I got partially refunded for, and so on. Over a 46 day period (counting the two initial travel days, Feb 06-07), this comes to $171.53 CAD per day.

Of that number, transit and transportation costs came out to $2,526.17 CAD, $76 SGD, and 15,900 yen, for a total of around $2,746.11 CAD. Of the $2,526 CAD, $2,283.61, or $49.64/day over 46 days) went towards inter-city transportation:

$996.17 - Edmonton to Tokyo, Tokyo to Edmonton (ANA)
$133.21 - Tokyo to Sapporo (Peach)
$414.64 - Sapporo to Singapore (AirAsia)
$161.87 - Singapore to Haikou (Hainan Air)
$35.72 - Haikou to Zhanjiang (bus)
$41.72 - Zhanjiang to Jiangmen (train)
$7.98 - Jiangmen to Guangzhou (train)
$196.03 - Guangzhou to Shanghai (Spring)
$296.27 - Shanghai to Tokyo (Spring)

A little over $200 of the remainder went toward all my Didi rides and train rides in China, as well as one transit card purchase there, and the rest went toward top-ups and a Grab ride in Singapore.

The $76 SGD in Singapore went toward one Grab ride, three transit cards that I kept as souvenirs, and card top-ups.

The 15,900 yen spent in Japanese transit went towards 1,000 yen for two transit cards, 290 yen for a bus ticket, and the rest of it seems to have gone right to train fades between Otaru and Sapporo and Chitose, and then around Tokyo between the two airports. Train fares in Japan are deceptively expensive, even outside of the bullet trains.

But then I also have to include here a minus $617.94 from Scene+ points, which I redeemed towards travel. I am pretty sure at this point I could have redeemed it against anything and I would still have gotten the standard $1 per 100 points rate though. Anyway this is -$13.43/day over a 46 day period.

Lodging wise, my hotels were all converted to and paid in CAD:

Feb 07-08 (Japan) - $71.23 ($71.23/day) APA Hotel Keisei Narita Ekimae
Feb 08-11 (Japan) - $357.37 ($119.12/day) Toyoko Inn Hokkaido Sapporo-eki Nishi-guchi Hokudai Mae
Feb 11-12 (Japan) - $151.74 ($151.74/day) Chitose Station Hotel
Feb 12-21 (Singapore) - $1,043.31 ($115.92/day) Greatwood Residence at Devonshire
Feb 21-24 (Singapore) - $390.30 ($130.10/day) Greatwood Residence at Devonshire
Feb 24-27 (China) - $79.35 ($26.45/day) Xizhi Hotel (Longfor Paradise Walk High-speed Railway East Station Branch)
Feb 27-Mar 02 (China) - $194.04 ($64.68/day) Atour Hotel (Dingsheng Plaza, Renmin Avenue)
Mar 02-06 (China) - $190.28 ($47.57/day) C+ Hotel (Jiangmen Pengjiang Wanda Plaza)
Mar 06-14 (China) - Freeeeee (Thanks Kel)
Mar 14-18 (China) - $392.36 ($98.09/day) CitiGO Hotel Xujiahui Shanghai
Mar 18-19 (China/Japan) - Free (overnight flight)
Mar 19-23 (Japan) - $493.08 ($123.27/day) APA Hotel Kamataeki-Higashi

I completely avoided AirBNB and the ilk this time and stayed only in hotels, and I spent $3,363.06 all in all for the 46-day trip. This comes up to about $73.11/day. But this is very deceptive, of course, since I skipped paying for 8 days thanks to staying with Kel, and this also counts the start/end days of the trip. Over a period of 36 days instead, counting the night where I skimped on a hotel fee by doing an overnight flight and paid for it in fatigue instead but not the Kel days or the start/end flying days, it instead comes up to $93.42/day.

This number was brought down a lot by how cheap the smaller cities in China were to stay in. On the contrary, besides the hotels around Narita Airport which are really cheap for some reason, Japan is, again, expensive as heck, and Singapore normally is as well but I did get a discount on that specific hotel due to construction nearby. All the tourist taxes and hotel taxes and such in Japan get on my nerves though. And they wonder why no one wants to visit their smaller cities and towns.

The rest of the cost went to food and misc groceries, gifts, a couple of self-purchases, and so on. Food is very cheap in Asia in general compared to North America. I believe that Singapore food is cheaper than Japan in general, though not by much, and there's a wide range of both low-cost and medium-cost options. China has both of them beat by a country mile though, although that really just meant that I could reach higher and eat in more fancy restaurants in China with the same budget that I used in Singapore and Japan to eat in less fancy eateries and food courts.

Transportation and lodging are by far the biggest costs though. Of the $171.53/day over the 46 day period, $49.64 went to inter-city transport, and $73.11 went to lodging, with a -$13.43 applied on top of that from my Scene+ points. Of the remaining $62.21/day, about $10 went to intra-city transport, and about $20 went to food, although the line between food and snacks and drinks and misc stuff is not one I always clearly delineated.

The rest, about $32/day, went to miscellaneous payments, gifts, stuff for myself like the Kokuyo Novita folders, the two CDs, and four pictures of Tigey, and of course the plushies (including all the ones I bought from the airlines). The Innovator luggage case is in here too, which cost $190.34 ($4.14/day) by itself. The plushies I got were:

Feb 08 - 2,200 JPY (~$19.11 CAD) - Peach Original Mascot Bear
Feb 08 - 7,000 JPY (~$60.80 CAD) - Yuki Miku Nuigurumi Sweet Snow Ver.
Mar 03 - $9.56 (48 CNY) - Pegasus Trophy Plush Ornament
Mar 03 - $7.57 (38 CNY) - Honeycolor Persimmon Money Tree
Mar 08 - $13.49 (68 CNY) - Bangboo Plush Keychain
Mar 09 - 19.5 CNY (~$3.91 CAD) - Cry Cry Horse
Mar 10 - $1.97 (10 CNY) - Pipa Plush
Mar 14 - $9.78 (49 CNY) - Spring Airlines Horse
Mar 18 - $8.97 (45 CNY) - Dungeon Meshi Walking Mushroom
Mar 19 - $13.63 (68 CNY) - Spring Japan Plushie (Revival)
Mar 22 - $23.56 (2,700 JPY) - Hanepyon Nuigurumi
Mar 23 - ???? (~$43.43 - 5,000 JPY) - 2 Ohanami ANA Teddy Bears

They were very end-loaded huh. I didn't buy any at all through most of February. Not counting the one that I still haven't been charged for, these came out to $172.35, or $3.75/day.

I had expected for SIM cards to be another significant chunk of change, but they actually turned out not to be in the end, thanks to the SIM card from Simba in SIngapore. I paid:

Feb 07 - $34.91 CAD (3,980 JPY) for a 30-day, 20 GB Japan SIM card from BicCamera in Haneda Airport.
Feb 13 - $12.97 CAD (12 SGD) for a 14-day, 100 GB Singapore tourist eSIM card from SingTel online
Feb 22 - $20 SGD (~$21.54 CAD) for a 30-day, 50 GB Simba roaming SIM card from a shop in Toa Payoh.

That Simba card gave me roaming internet through my China AND Japan legs from Feb 24 to Mar 23, and was soooo much more economical than the nonsensical Japan SIM/eSIM card costs. And it was constantly fast as well, and came with a phone number. And bypassed the Great Firewall of China so I could use Google and stuff in there. I could not renew/top it up without being a Singapore citizen though, or I'd have checked to see if there was a way to just keep the account and number long-term, that's how good it was. I also had to activate my Telus roaming twice during my trip, in Jiangmen, to receive phone calls from the stupid Meituan girls who couldn't comprehend that people with overseas numbers existed, in order to reactivate my account. This cost me $36 CAD, $18 a day that the line was used to receive one call on. Stupid Telus.

Work Hours/Vacation

I used up 14 vacation days on this trip, and then four more days once I got home, for a total of 18 * 7 = 126 vacation hours. I worked otherwise, using Remote Desktop to get into my home machine and accessing my stuff from there instead of doing it directly on my laptop.

A lot of my vacation hours were backloaded, partially because I was falling behind on my blog at that point and partially because my boss contacted me and frankly told me that even though I was on vacaiton, I had been flagged for having too many remaining vacation hours and could I please use more, haha. Even after subtracting those hours, I still have 185 vacation hours remaining -- and I get 175 hours a year, and so the cap that we're technically allowed to carry over from year to year is also 175 hours. Oh well. Maybe a staycation nearer to September? Or a second paper raid to Japan? But see the housing and lodging costs! If I ever find a house and move, that will probably eat up some vacation time too.

Google Gemini

This thing probably requires a few paragraph too. This being my first real foray into using an AI chatbot, I would say that it did fairly well overall, but with a lot of caveats. It oscillates between coming up with really good ideas of things to do and places to see, finding really neat spots to eat or rest, and just a general companion that made me double over in laughter several times, to hallucinating shops that don't exist, station exits that are completely wrong, and being a grating presence who I constantly had to correct.

The Gemini app itself is also not the most robust on the phone, though I eventually more or less learnt how to corral it in. I had to set the app to always be active, and if it seemed stuck and either couldn't retrieve my list of chats or couldn't load my current chat at all, then I would have to close it, clear its cache, and then reopen it again. Doing those two things solved most of my connectivity issues with it.

After using it for a bit I'd say its accuracy rate, especially in areas that have more traveller data already lodged online, is somewhere close to 75-80%. I've got a fairly good grip of how to watch out for hallucinations and the biggest red flag with that is simply just not being able to find the place within a minute or so (if physically there) or not being able to easily look it up on Google or Google Maps (if online). Also, since it's tied in to Google Maps and Google in general, Gemini will tend to include hyperlinks to the places that I can look up as proof that they exist, or to read existing reviews, etc. Not having those links can be a flag at times. Sometimes those links lead to completely different places or previews though, but then that's a red flag in itself too.

I also don't know why it fails badly sometimes at finding the right "nearest exit" from a station, or why it tried to sent me to "Permanently Closed" locations at least 4 or 5 times on my trip, even though it's tied into Google Maps it seems like it doesn't always properly leverage that access. It also hallucinated SO hard more than once when I tried to ask it if any other stores besides Linlee had promotions that were giving away physical objects, and one time it even seemed to panic and refused to back down and instead doubled down on its lies until I flipped the mode to Pro and demanded links as proof.

But I would use it again if I went on vacation. I do think it's like having a travel agent pocket book with me, but one where I can quickly look up things across languages and across contexts that I may not always be able to describe completely well. It does translations fairly well, but not always super accurately, especially if the text is small or if the picture uploads sideways instead of the correct way up. It hallucinates the characters that it sees sometimes, which is really annoying when it happens, but other times I spot check it and it's answered, transcribed, or translated other things perfectly well. Stuff in other languages than my native one are harder to really check for accuracy, though.

Some of the uses I really enjoyed using it for included taking a picture of a menu and asking it what I should eat. This is because I had already set up a rule saying that I tended to enjoy local delicacies, and that I'm interested in food history in general, and so it will pull out a list of interesting items from the menu, tell me why they're interesting in terms of their ingredients, or their historical background, or their ties to local culture, and let me choose from there. Or when I was sick, it would say that a meal was probably better because of this or that reason. I also did the same thing with pictures of rows of tea at the supermarkets, where I asked it which of these teas were uniquely local and which were common franchise stuff that I could find at any supermarket or even back home.

This also extended to things like TV shows and newspaper articles, and even that one instance of the traffic safety parade event I saw. I was really impressed by that. It gives context on things that I see while on vacation, and whether it's fully 100% correct on every detail or not doesn't really matter as long as it's mostly correct. After all, it's that, or I walk by it having 0% context forever about what I'm seeing at all.

I could do the same for paper too, I would point it at a rack of papers and ask it to tell me what I should take and why. I did notice in these cases that it tended to gravitate to the items nearer the top though, and that's because I think it just could not read the ones further down due to lack of resolution on the picture or something. It could easily handle paper that was partly obscured behind another piece, or ones that were slightly bent over, though, as long as bits of it were visible. Its main strength here was being able to do this for pamphlets in other languages too, since it could run not only a translation too but also searches on the spot to tell me the context behind each ephemera and why it could be relevent to historians down the line. Or conversely, in a couple of cases it would just point out that a digital version of the brochure existed online, and so it wasn't worth taking.

The largest issue with it though isn't that it hallucinates at all, though -- it's that Gemini, even on the Pro version, doesn't have a really big contextual memory, and over the course of a day, or even a few hours, of use, it would just forget things from earlier on in the day or start mixing up memories. This became doubly true when I uploaded a bunch of pictures. After a while, if the chat didn't crash out completely, it would start referring to past pictures as though I had just uploaded it when I clearly hadn't. The solution I used to all this was to start a new "thread" of Gemini daily, but this meant that I also lost all the context that I did want to keep from the previous day, like say the places I had visited or the items I had found. Gemini can be asked to search and pull information from a previous day's thread though, but that has limited effectiveness when I accrue over daily 40 threads over a month and a half. And searching and pulling info is great, but each instance of Gemini gets molded into a particular "personality" over the events of a day, and it completely lost that "personality" every day when I started afresh.

Another reason why I need to start afresh each time is that I've found that it also refuses to load chats past a week or so ago if I stick to the same thread, that or there's a certain number of messages that it can scroll back through, and after that all the Gemini replies are just blank messages.

I should also add here that Gemini's search feature is completely useless for me for some reason, early on it could sometimes find a thread if I put in a keyword but these days it just churns and churns forever when I put something in, and no longer is able to do or find anything within just the scant 50-something threads that I've created over the past two months. I know Gemini itself is able to do it if I ask it to find something from a particular day or event though, but the website (and app) search tool just craters.

Conclusion

It's good to be home again. It was good to be out, moving around and seeing neat things in different places, and collecting all sorts of weird things, but after I got sick in Jiangmen I started to wish that I was home, and that didn't really lift until I only had a couple days left in Japan. I do think travelling is like using a muscle though, I only get used to longer times away from home by exercising it more often. Right now my ideal trip length is probably somewhere around 25 days or so. But because the initial ticket is so expensive, and the effort taken to pack up and move is so high, I just want to keep going until I can't go anymore before coming home. That's a duality I'm not really sure how to solve yet. At the end of the trip, if my Mar 23 date wasn't set in stone somehow, I probably would have tried to see if I could extend another week or two in Japan, but on a day by day basis.

Oh, and I'm leaving this as a note for myself the next time I go on vacation. Don't bother bringing the camera set up or the Steam deck. They just chew up room without ever being used. Don't do it.

But it's good to be home again.