A Blog About Things We Do

Things We’ve Done

  • A big birthday on the Peak of the Balkans Trail

    A big birthday on the Peak of the Balkans Trail

    I’m not sure if you’re anything like me, but my belief is a birthday is the perfect opportunity to ask for something you might not normally ask for. For me, I can’t think of a time that has meant a tangible “thing” per se, but more often has meant that I feel a little extra inspired to ask Kev to do something with me that he might normally need a little more convincing of but because it was something I asked for on my special day, he feels more reluctant to outright pass on. While he’s almost always game for anything I throw at him, I can rattle off a number of birthday “adventures” in the recent past that he might not have immediately jumped up-and-down about at first, but ended up loving in the end. **I also have to note that even if parts of the adventure become “type 2″ fun event at some point, that is 98% almost always still the case šŸ˜‚** Needless to say, this birthday was no different!

    All of this to say, we just spent the past ten days hiking just over 200 km on the Peaks of the Balkans trail, winding through the remote mountains of northern Albania, western Kosovo, and southeastern Montenegro. Though we’ve obviously done our fair share of backpacking and camping, this was our first hut-to-hut trekā€”carrying everything (other than food!) we needed on our backs, crossing borders on foot, and sleeping in the homes of folks who once lived in these isolated mountain communities.

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  • Christmas and New Years in Australia

    Christmas and New Years in Australia

    I must admit (because Lindsay keeps reminding me) that I wasn’t super excited about traveling to Australia over the holidays. I don’t really know why I wasn’t excited, it’s possible it just felt like a hassle, or that we’d been moving around a lot (we’d done lots of trips in November around Tokyo). There was a lot of planning and transportation and such that went into the trip and it just felt like a lot. In the end, the trip was amazing and I have very warm / fuzzy feelings every time I think about it.

    The trip had roughly four phases:

    1. Cairns and a live-aboard, diving the great barrier reef for three days
    2. Sydney
    3. Driving and camping from Sydney down to Melbourne over Xmas
    4. Melbourne
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  • Somedays I Did Not Make the Most out of Living in Tokyo (and getting a year older)

    Somedays I Did Not Make the Most out of Living in Tokyo (and getting a year older)

    One day I woke up in what, to me, is one of the greatest and most exciting cities in the world. I walked Lindsay to the train station and saw her off on a week long vacation to Thailand. At that point from around 7:15AM onwards I had complete freedom to do almost anything I could imagine in Tokyo. Practically speaking I had no constraints on my time or money, plus I was healthy and energetic.

    But, I chose to spend the day sitting in the same room I sit every day, working on an electronics hobby project and trying to figure out how to make two little LEDs blink. I worked at this until lunch time, at which point I did not go out and explore some new neighborhood in Tokyo nor did I eat ramen or sushi at a delicious lately restaurant. I ate the same thing I eat (most) every day, a bowl of oatmeal with homemade yogurt. Then I worked on the blinking lights the rest of the day until the evening, at which point I went out to Matsuya, a chain beef and rice bowl place a 10 minute walk away, had the cheese beef rice bowl.

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  • Walking Across Tokyo Metro South to North and West to East

    Walking Across Tokyo Metro South to North and West to East

    I completed a Tokyo bucket list item that I feel was a mild accomplishment and wanted to post a few details about it.

    When we were moving to Tokyo, before we left Michigan, I thought it could be cool to walk across the entire breath and width of Tokyo’s Metropolitan area as a way to get a feel for what Tokyo was in terms of size. “What do the edges of the Tokyo metro area feel like?” I thought. It just felt like a nice thing to do.

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  • Bali, Indonesia (and some great airport food in Kuala Lumpur)

    Bali, Indonesia (and some great airport food in Kuala Lumpur)

    I’ve read a lot about Bali on reddit in the “digital nomad” community the past few years. Especially since COVID and the explosion of work from home one of the prevailing themes of discussion is the country has been overrun with wannabe influencers and scammy startups. The cynic in me assumed that this was going to be the case, but that turned out to only be part of my experience.

    It turns out a lot of popular destinations do indeed feel overrun with people specifically there to take selfies, but the island is so incredibly beautiful that it largely made up for that.

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  • A real vacation in Cebu, Philippines, (briefly) visiting mainland China, and what’s the point of it all?

    A real vacation in Cebu, Philippines, (briefly) visiting mainland China, and what’s the point of it all?

    I occasionally wonder what sort of value traveling has to me at this point in my life. I’m not sure the best way to word this because it’s not really a concrete thought and it’s not even a serious question, but essentially when I look at the limited resources in my life (primarily: money and time) I wonder if one day in the future I’ll look back and say, “you know, I really should have skipped some of the trips and spent more time <investing in friendships / developing hobbies / doing an intensive language course / watching TV / etc>.” When I’m old and decrepit will the memories I make bring me warm feelings and a smile, a feeling of contentment with a life (reasonably) well lived?

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  • Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau… except not Shanghai

    Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau… except not Shanghai

    Tickets back home to Michigan over Xmas were too expensive this year which meant Lindsay and I had to figure out what to do to maximize our time together over the holiday break.

    To be honest I would have probably stayed in Japan and spent our modest budget visiting a new region or city or something, but Lindsay really wanted to go somewhere totally new and tickets were reasonably cheap to Shanghai, China – unfortunately the tourist visa was something like $185 USD and took a long time to processā€¦ BUT you can get a transit visa for 144 hours as long as you are flying through China somewhere else. In other words, you canā€™t book a trip Tokyo -> China -> Tokyo and qualify for a transit visa but you CAN book a trip Tokyo -> China -> Hong Kong -> Tokyo. So this is what we booked.

    Unfortunately the flight to China was out of Narita which is not the most convenient place to fly out of. Itā€™s a solid hour and a half from our house (sorry Corie who is flying into Narita to visit in a few days!). Double unfortunately our flight to China was a red eye. Triple unfortunately, after we got on the flight around 11:30, literally minutes before we took off three people came to our seat and told us that our flight from Shanghai -> HK was cancelledā€¦ so the flight is ready to go and we had to decide if we were going to stay on the flight and very likely not be able to stay in China OR get off the flight. We had to make a decision right then with everybody on the plane watching and the cabin lights dimmed for takeoff. Anyway, we got off the flight because I was a bit concerned weā€™d end up being forced to buy a super expensive last minute flight once we arrived in China to HK.

    Anyway we got off the flight but we were stuck on the other side of immigration – immigration was closed. So we couldnā€™t just walk back into Japan, we had to sit for probably 30 minutes while the airport staff got some office staff to come out and figure out what to do with us. Eventually we got let back into Japan and made out way back home, a good 2 hours later (having spent a solid USD$100 on the last night bus). We were felling pretty bummed about our plans being completely ruined, not to mention the fact we had to eat a bunch of reservations (hotels, flights, etc), but in the end the next day with fresh eyes we booked a cheap flight to Hong Kong so we could at least use our return flight HK -> Tokyo.

    Here we are trapped in immigration after it was closed. Nobody at any of the lanes, everybody went home. We sat like this for a good 30 minutes.

    Hong Kong

    Anyway, that thrilling story out of the way, Hong Kong. What an absolutely amazing city.

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  • Tokyogurt: Part One – New Beginnings

    Tokyogurt: Part One – New Beginnings

    This is, obviously, a bit of a different topic than my normal travel related updates, but I wanted to write in this blog a bit more often. My primary motivation is simply that I think I should write more than I do in general – too much consumption, not enough generation.

    Most of my early yogurt making memories come from my Mom. She used (maybe still uses?) quart jars filled with milk and put under a towel with a heating pad (the type you use for a sore back) underneath the jars. From what I remember this always worked really well. I actually wonder now why we didn’t do this all the time, I feel like it was a “few times a year” thing.

    I actually can’t remember the first time I made yogurt myself. It was probably either in college in my first apartment living with Nick and Kevin, or it might have been in Wisconsin Rapids in my first real solo-apartment. Or maybe even in Lindsay and my first apartment in Grand Rapids post-college. Honestly I don’t remember. What I do remember for sure though is maybe 6 or 7 years ago living in Chicago I got slightly more serious about making yogurt and testing out different techniques. I tried different starter cultures, different incubation methods (e.g. sous vide vs crock pot), scalded vs unscaled, different milks. Strained vs unstrained. Etc. Unfortunately I remember very little about these techniques besides I remember that there was somewhat of a fine line between straining yogurt to the point of greek yogurt vs spreadable paste.

    Here is a random video I found from Chicago in which I am showing how thick this yogurt is. It’s not important.

    (VERY slightly interesting aside it turns out I have a fork from this same set of silverware here in Japan:

    which sort of hit me a second ago because it’s a very unexpected through-line between my life 8ish years ago and my life here in Japan. I should probably throw these forks away before they develop some sort of meaning to me or are a physical representation of my 30s or something.)

    OK, back to yogurt.

    I like yogurt, and I like making things. I don’t have much space at home here in Japan but I do have space to make yogurt. I think the main reason I’ve decided to experiment with yogurt making here is because in general I really like the milk in Japan. Hokkaido is known for their milk and dairy in general and there are a surprising number of options for milk and yogurt at most grocery stores.

    Kotatsu

    I decided to start the yogurt journey here by attempting to ferment the yogurt under our cheap 惋惈ćƒŖ kotatsu.

    I used the entire liter of milk and about a quarter of the yogurt container (which is quite a lot), and I fermented for around 12 hours (a long time)

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  • The first 4ish months living in Tokyo: A shorter post, probably, or at least fewer photos

    The first 4ish months living in Tokyo: A shorter post, probably, or at least fewer photos

    We have officially been in Tokyo for four and a half months now. I wanted to record a bit about how the move went and how things are going on in this still relatively early stage of our life here – last time we moved to Japan I didn’t actually post anything until we were fairly close to leaving and I think it’s possible I missed some of the details from early on.

    When we landed in Japan this time around I felt quite a bit different than last. I’ve developed a sort of constant (perceived) life-GPS or “grounded-ness” that made it impossible for me to feel that my life had totally changed when we stepped out of the airport. I still feel like me, just in Japan. That might not make sense but in the not-so-distant past I remember arriving to a new place and having an out-of-body feeling that took a LONG time to go away. This was disorienting but on the plus side, very exciting and in ways intoxicating. That said I felt (and still feel four+ months on) very very happy, you might say “joyful” when we got out of the airport.

    Our flight was uneventful. We brought quite a bit of luggage with us, arguably more than we needed, but a lot of the stuff we packed was books and clothing for Lindsay’s job. We also brought some particularly heavy stuff, e.g. silverware because I hate spoons/forks that bend easily. When I think about it now I’m honestly not sure how we had so much stuff.

    One of the first photos I have out of the airport
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    All of our bags. Roughly 300 pounds worth of luggage.

    Edit from later me: Iā€™m finishing this post in the main Hong Kong library, we just flew back out of Haneda to HK yesterday and it was strange coming back through the airport the other direction, especially after spending so much time in Tokyo over the last months. Somehow the airport felt ā€œsmallā€, despite being a major international airport.

    We decided to be lazy and take an Uber to our temporary AirBnB. It was relatively cheap (maybe USD$40ish?) but taking the train would have been a huge pain with our luggage (almost always we’d deal with the pain to save 30 bucks or whatever, but it was just too much to carry on a packed train).

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  • We’re (probably not) moving to Tokyo (edit: ok, actually we are)

    We’re (probably not) moving to Tokyo (edit: ok, actually we are)

    Warning: This will be more of a high school emo style blog post without a lot of photos, so set your expectations accordingly!

    Note: if you’re reading this, either we’ve decided to move to Tokyo, or it’s been weeks or months since this discussion came up and we’ve decided not to and the thought has been well put to bed. I’m writing this for myself, to process my thoughts / feelings and document them for the next time this type of life changing issue comes up.

    Two weeks ago Lindsay got a “cold call” from a quality international school in Tokyo, Japan asking her to interview for a middle school position that starts in August of this year (roughly three months time). They had found her resume in a hiring pool from a job she had applied to a long time ago and reached out randomly and without prompting. This was totally out of the blue, and unexpected, and pretty “world rocking” to be honest. To be clear, we had absolutely zero plans on moving to Japan, or even visiting Japan this year, BUT… Tokyo! One of the worlds great cities! Japan! Curry! Onsen! Sento! Beautiful mountains and streams and Hokkaido in the fall! Easy access to Korea and Vietnam! Etc.

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