Pre-trip Notes and Stuff (Written Apr 19-20)

I had a lot of trouble settling on a name for this blog series, but in the end this one kept coming to mind, so I ended up picking it as it needs to be easily remembered by me on top of being fancy and slightly pretentious (which is, by the way, just the way I like my blog series titles). I’ve said in other blog entries in the past that I am a creature of the wind, and air/wind is the alchemical/fantasy element that I am most attuned to, out of the classic air/earth/water/fire quadrinity. I love the feeling of wind blowing in my hair and face, eating at my clothes, pushing me onwards or challenging me to walk against it. I love seeing the world rush by as the wind swirls up and moves people and things from place to place. And I love setting off somewhere without a goal and finding some piece of beauty after the wind and my footsteps guide me there. The wind represents an invisible but ever-present force in the world that helps people make decisions without forcing them to do so, a guiding hand that forges fates and perhaps friendships. At least for the purposes of my idyllic dreams and my blog.

More broadly, part of wanderlust is not knowing where one is headed next, and that’s sort of the theme of my trip — I booked my first outgoing ticket, for Apr 21, on Apr 03 2024, but I didn’t book my first lodging until Apr 16 2024, and even though by today on Apr 19 I’ve finished booking the entirety of my Japan itinerary, I haven’t booked anything past that, even my flight out of Japan to China.

Part of this was due to a desire to leave my trip open-ended, sort of like I did on my USA trip, and part of this was a bit of uncertainty over certain parts of my trip, like whether I would be able to enter Singapore, which I will only find out at the border once I arrive there, or China, which I needed a visa for and only finally got in my hands on Friday, April 19.

But the other part of this was budget as well. As I have a bit over 70k (Canadian dollars) locked up in investments in preparation for the house, and 6k parked in my Scotiabank account to make that account and my travel credit card free of annual fees, I only had about $4,000 of fluid funds on top of that (plus lines of credit, which I have no intention of using), and after I withdrew and exchanged some money to bring along with me, this number is down to about $3,000. About $1,250 from last month is sitting on the card and coming off this month, about a week from today. I get paid from my work about $2,000 or so every two weeks, the first time around the 7th-10th and the second around the 25th-26th, but I also have to pay the $1,300 rent on my current apartment on the 1st, a parental tithe of $500 on the 25th, and various minor utilities totalling about $200 here and there.

I think I’ll have about $2,500 at the start of next month after rent, with a bit over $4,000 coming in over the course of the month, but then there are various subtractions from utilities and stuff, and then the credit card bill on top of that. The credit card bill next month will contain a bit under $1,000 from the move, and then the plane tickets, the lodging bookings, the food I eat that I can charge against the card instead of pay with cold, hard cash… it’s going to be pretty high, and I’m not exactly sure quite how high.

I need the credit month to roll over first, which I think is in about a week, before I can proceed with trip booking, so that anything else I pay for after that will come off on May’s credit card payment instead of April’s. I pay off my entire credit card each month, and have never had any problem with being behind on credit card payments, but this month is the perfect storm of cash locked away in various investments, the cost of the move, and the upfront cost of paying for the trip. At this current moment, I’m staring at a bank account balance of $2,976.23 and a credit card balance of $2,939.57, and while I mathematically know that everything’s okay and that this is probably the tightest and ugliest point the budget will be, since only part of the credit card balance gets paid off this month and I’ll get another three paycheck deposits before the rest of this month’s balance is due, it’s still an uneasy feeling and something that I’ll be watching closely to see if I need to activate some of my reserves, especially since I know that while on a trip, I still have base expenses of $2,000 a month for the home apartment, utilities, and parental trips, and lodging alone while on the trip is going to probably easily chew through $2,000 per month. I’m not starting from a value of zero though, and some of that is already paid off (and I have a bunch of paper money on top of that) so it should be fine.

(To clarify for any passersby who might be worried about my financial situation — what happens if I run out of money in my main RBC account that I use for my spending cash? My first recourse will be to convert about $400 in US Dollars that I have in another account into Canadian Dollars and use that to bridge any gap. This was extra cash that I had from my USA trip back in late 2021 that I never converted back to CAD since I would be losing a bit of money each time I convert currencies. My second recourse after that would be to dip into the $6,000 CAD I have in my Scotiabank account that is there purely to prevent me from having a $30 fee per month for my credit card there. I’ll eat that $30/month until I return home if needed though. So basically yes, I’m slightly stressing out over money and keeping watch like a hawk over my finances just to essentially try to avoid spending this $30 a month.)

So anyway, that was a long-winded way of saying that I can’t book too many things right now because I am trying to push some of my remaining bigger ticket items to the next credit card month as well. Therefore right now I have the Japan part of my itinerary complete, but everything after that is a black hole. I currently have some plans as to where I want to go and what I want to do, which is China for a week, Hong Kong for a week, Taiwan for a week, Malaysia for two weeks, then Singapore for a month, but the exact durations in each place are not set in stone. I could stay in Japan for an extra week or two if I want to. Or I could go to Thailand or South Korea instead somewhere in there. Or add Macau. Or cut out Taiwan or half of the Malaysia trip. Or only stay two weeks in Singapore. I could loop back to Japan at the end too because the cheapest flights back to Canada tend to be from Japan. Or I could go to Australia to meet Zian. It’s rather open-ended and fiexible, and I will have to plan everything as I go along. This is both exciting, and a bit nerve-wracking. And I think in some places, possibly all places, I might have to declare on the visitor card what my outgoing flight will be as I am coming in. I’m not certain. Oh well. I’ll figure that out.

Some goals I have are to learn how to get around new areas and countries, and try out their public transportation systems, so that I will be much more familiar with the places and be able to plan out better itineraries the next time I come by. I will also eat a lot of weird food, if I can manage to, and walk around a lot. Those are normal vacationy goals. I also have little traditions I do every trip — I will look for plushies, I will look for nice opportunities to give away my postcards, I will try to meet as many friends as possible, I will try to collect photographs of other people taking photographs (don’t ask), and at some point on my trip I will find at least one nice place to sit down and eat ice cream. I have reached out to a number of friends to see if I can schedule a meeting with them, although Ran is in Nagoya now instead of Tokyo so I don’t think I can meet up with her, and KT is back in Singapore now instead of in Hong Kong so I might meet her in the former but not the latter anymore. Huihan is in Australia but will be back in Singapore in June too, if I am not mistaken, so I will probably meet her there at some point. Zian is stuck in Australia and I doubt I’ll be going there. I’ll be meeting Quintopia in Tokyo, Miyu in Osaka, Kel in Guangzhou, and hopefully a bunch of old Singapore friends in Singapore.

Also, a collection that I’ve started hoarding over the past couple of trips involves finding event and festival and convention and other weird local CDs that might be difficult to find, and hopefully I can indulge in some of this as well. I also plan to look for and collect ephemera that I can bring home and scan, things like flyers and papers and cards, I love that sort of thing as a little microcosm of another country in a certain period of time. And I eventually WILL scan and upload all my stuff from all my past trips onto my blog. I also would like to pick up some cheap, cute, comfortable clothing to wear around the house.

Something I’ve largely slacked off on on my past two trips to Japan is to break out the video camera and use that to chronicle things, and this time I am considering doing more of this by actually hooking it up to Twitch and casually streaming some walking around for some friends in Discord and whoever else might stumble by. We will see if this becomes a thing though, since I’ve done basically no set up for it.

I will be working remotely at my job as I go, largely in the late nights or early mornings, and taking days off when I need to (for example during travel or during hectic days/nights), although my times in Asia will not coincide with regular North American working hours very well. It is a huge perk of my job that I can work remotely and thus can travel as I work though, with my supervisor’s blessing and everything, so I’m going to use that benefit as much as I can. It’s very liberating to be able to travel with no firm deadlines and still get paid while doing so. And after my past two trips (not counting the Ritsumeikan study abroad one) I know that I can balance that with blog-writing as well. I would like to spend at least two months abroad, anything less than that and I will consider it a failure. On the other side of things, four months is probably the absolute top length that I want to spend out on the road, and I don’t think I will reach anywhere close to this number. I will likely get homesick long before this, and I don’t think my supervisor will actually let me stay out that long even though he’s said that 3 months is perfectly fine.

For the Japan leg of my trip specifically, the JR Pass has priced itself out of usability since the prices rose last year, so even though I plan to visit Osaka and Kyoto for three days, I’m just using a regular Shinkansen ticket for that. It’s really stupid what they did to the JR Pass prices, since that makes it more expensive for people to access the smaller towns and cities in Japan, and so even more of the tourism that they get will be concentrated in the Tokyo and Kyoto areas and everyone else further afield will suffer.

Also, even though I switched my SIM card to an eSIM so that I can put a regular travel SIM in my phone, the Internet for my Japan leg will be coming from a portable wireless router instead, since apparently those are better for streaming if I end up deciding to do that. I haven’t decided what to do for Internet for everywhere else after Japan though. That’s another thing which I will just wing for now and see what happens. The one I used is from iVideo, and if that works well I can use a similar thing for China, HK, and Taiwan.