we don’t backpack

yes, there are a few out there, a few whose opinions and rationale for voting the way they are voting i respect. i wanted to point this out since i feel like many think that i am pro anything liberal and anti anything conservative. not true.

two of the people whose opinions and decisions i respect the most in the world are my parents, who are both conservatives. but - unlike so many conservatives that i’ve talked to - they are not unwilling to admit the current republican party is deeply flawed and has gotten this nation into situations we need nothing more than to get out of. we just disagree on how to go about doing this :-).

they have told me things like:

*they wish there was a better representative of small government on the Republican side.

*Sarah Palin isn’t the best VP candidate, but many candidates have grown into the office and went on to be great Presidents.

my dad even linked to an article where the author had enough foresight (and hindsight) to admit that the current republical party is in a world of hurt. (even though it was a list of reasons why not to vote for obama, yes, i’ll even put the link to the original article: http://boortz.com/nuze/undecided.html)

the author says:

*One thing for sure … the Republicans deserve exactly what is happening to them in this election.

*The Republicans don’t deserve power in Washington just as you don’t deserve a boil in the center of your forehead

*I operate on the principle that governments have the power to tax so that governments can collect the money needed to pursue and pay for the legitimate functions of that government.

of course, the author says a lot of other things that i DON’T agree with – and he doesn’t back up much of his information with sources or facts, which everyone probably knows by now is a must for me! but i’m willing to admit that many of his points are well-reasoned and at least purposefully thought-out, as opposed to simply regurgitating uneducated opinions and right-ist propaganda. which is more than i can say for most of the republican-leaning articles i’ve had passed on to me. then again, the bar has been set pretty low.

another thing i appreciate deeply about my parents is that they value – and taught me to value – rational thought, even if it leads us to two different conclusions. the more i’ve debated with people (mostly on the right) during this election, the more i’ve bemoaned the death of rational thought. and not just that. i’ve been shocked at the vitriol with which you’re attacked if you DO believe in researching your own information, evaluating positions, and coming to a personal, rational conclusion.

not only is rational thought for the most part apparently dead, you will likely be verbally pistol-whipped by obscene amounts of people if they suspect you’ve engaged in something remotely resembling “ration” or “thought.”  i cannot tell you the number of times i have been met with feelings or statements of, “bad christian,” “bad person,” “no values,” “biased,” etc because i was NOT towing the line of the religious right and i had opted to draw my own conclusions.

although i grew up in a relatively conservative home, i feel i came away with a bit of a different perspective than many in similar situations, as i was encouraged to broaden my horizons, think for myself, learn about (and visit!) different cultures, keep an open mind and treat people fairly.

and though my parents and i may be on different pages politically, i have something i’ve come to value even more over the last few months: their support in spite of our differences. they respect my opinions – and i respect theirs – because we each know we came to our conclusions based not on someone telling us what we should do, but based on a quest after the truth, and rational thought.

thanks mom and dad

I came across this post on 50 ways to save money, cut back in every day life and save $1000 a year. $1000 isn’t much and sometimes the trade-offs aren’t worth it (make my own laundry detergent? no thanks) but it’s good to keep in mind some “basic” ways we ratchet up our spending without even noticing.

a few months ago, ryan and i decided to live on my income and use his income for mortgage debt pay-down, savings, and investments like current and future real estate properties, our start-up companies, and a few other things. since then, we’ve been looking for ways to reasonably cut back. i say “reasonably” because sure, i could make my own detergent, wash clothes by hand, grow my own vegetables, and cook everyday but we also want to strike a balance between cutting back, enjoying life, and making the most of our time. for example, if ryan or i could charge X for an hour of client work and it takes us an hour to cook dinner and we only save $5 in the process, technically we’ve actually lost money. obviously, this is somewhat of a fallacy, since we won’t be working 24/7 (although it feels like that sometimes …) but the principle stands, and this is often our deciding factor between what money-saving practices are worth it (using the landromat instead of the fluff and fold - a decision that did NOT make me happy!) and which ones are not (clipping coupons - gag).

so back to the list. many of the items on the list we’re already doing - which is good, but i’ll admit i was hoping for a few genius tips i hadn’t thought of. we way cut back on takeout and “going out.” we don’t have a car. we live in a small apartment. we don’t have much - if any - credit card debt b/c we never use the thing (i’ve never even HAD a personal credit card). we eat very little meat. we don’t have a TV or any game consoles and therefore no cable and no temptation to buy games or DVDs.

there are a few things on the list that, of course, i just won’t do to save a buck. i won’t give up my gym membership - i can’t get the same benefits from just going for a walk or a jog a few times a week. plus our membership is like $15/month. obviously we have puppies which are a big drain, but having pet health insurance has helped a GREAT deal. i won’t turn down a night out with friends - but i can only order one drink, or just get by with a salad to save a few bucks.

and here’s a big one: i won’t move. in terms of where we are and what we get, our apartment is a relatively “good deal” though still obscenely expensive compared to middle america, or even somewhere else in california. but i just won’t give up city life - nor do i ever plan it. at some point i’d love to live in new york and/or hong kong but those are also some of the world’s most expensive cities and so we’ve made our decision as to where and why we’re spending the most money.

so out of the list of 50 there weren’t really that many new tips i could implement. are we already maxed out on our “reasonable” cut-backs? is it possible to be “maxed-out” in this area? is saving that extra $1000/year really worth it when looking at the sacrifices you may have to make to get there? i guess these are questions everyone has to answer for themselves - and be happy with the outcome no matter what it might be!

I always forget the exact number of times I moved. when the number has been in the double digits since you were, like 15, it’s hard to remember. but i counted it up and the grand total so far is 13. that’s not counting little, cross-town moves. if you add those in, the total jumps to 17. sure, moving is a hassle, but for me, the major hassle - packing and the actual act of MOVING it all - has always been taken care of by the military. i’ve moved cross town, cross country and out of the country and i think my biggest concern has always been getting unpacked quickly so i’d have time to settle in before we moved again in a year, or 18 months, or maybe two years.

we moved out to san francisco two years ago by ourselves - that was my first “self-moving” experience and i don’t remember much, except that we rented this HUGE moving truck. it would’ve been way too big anyway, but then i ended up having to sell all our furniture b/c a). ryan rented us a studio in SF, and b). that studio was 300 square feet and partially furnished. we had like 10 boxes in a ginormous moving van.

so how much can one fit into 300 square feet? not THAT much, but a lot more than you’d think. i like the idea of  “traveling light,” but now that i’m starting to pack it all up, it’s not as “light” as I thought!

so i’ve been out scrounging for used boxes (i can’t justify - financially or ecologically - BUYING moving boxes that i will likely only throw out), and digging through our recycling bins for old newspaper and unwanted mailers to wrap my dishes in.

ryan was making fun of me for my complete lack of a method - and it’s true, i really don’t know what i’m doing. i may be the worst serial-mover EVER.

ok, that statement isn’t ENTIRELY true. there are certain types of risk that make me super-un-easy. and i’m not saying i jump in with both feel without doing the research. but i’ve come to realize i’m far more OK with risk than most people. a lot of this has to do with ryan, who also loves risk - he tends to feel that if you’re not risking something, you’re playing it too safe. and of course, there’s the old cliche, the greater the risk the greater the reward.

a lot of it has to do with my friends - many of whom are entrepreneurs - their examples, support, and encouragement. then there’s the factor of where we live. San Francisco and Silicon Valley are areas built on risk. you can’t sit in a coffee shop without hearing several conversations about start-ups, funding, elevator pitches, etc. We live in the “entrepreneurship bubble” and i have to remember that this area is HIGHLY concentrated with unlikely stories of people who have risked it all to hit superstardom, or at least risked a lot to succeed. of course some have lost it all - but if nothing else they risked it for something they believed in.

and … a lot of my risk-loving - especially the components that existed prior to ryan and San Francisco - comes from my military upbringing. it contributes to my feeling that “if you’re not moving on, you’re not challenging yourself.” growing up, “moving on” usually meant literally MOVING, but as i’ve grown up it’s coming to mean other things.

Another reason I’m a fan of risk is that big dreams usually come with some degree of risk. and i was brought up to believe that i can - and SHOULD! - actually achieve my dreams. it’s taken me a while to mold these dreams but as i have, this seeming cliche has become more important to me.

we bought our first investment property at 21 (and the two to follow) with the dream that these will help us on our road to financial independence. i.e. not HAVING to work if we don’t want to.

we moved to the city - to fulfill our dream of living somewhere awesome  - with no jobs, no apartment and no furniture.

when i didn’t want to be a slave to an employer any more, i quit my job to work for myself.

i founded an eco-friendly pet product company to get a start on my dream of working with animals and doing everything i can to make their life - and our planet’s life - better.

there are many more in this list, but these show varying degrees of risk. and when i look at some of them “on paper” they look downright stupid. and i’ll admit we haven’t always made the best-advised decisions, but i think as we’ve matured we’ve gotten better at taking calculated risks as opposed to blind risks.

for me, i think it comes down to, “what’s it going to take to make my dreams a reality?” or, “what do i need to do to change the world in a way only i can.” I’m not talking about risking it all for delusions of grandeur, but we each have a passion, purpose and dream that is uniquely ours. and finding the road to fulfilling that purpose will, likely, not be risk-free.

I’ve decided to resurrect this blog to be one of my “personal” blogs - I just don’t have enough time or creativity to set up an entire, new site.

Anyway, as most of you know, Ryan and I started “dating” when we were 18. I put “dating” in quotes, well, b/c we were 18 - and shortly after our first date, Ryan headed off to the Navy, and I headed off to college. What followed until we got married was anything but dating, and more like obsessive email and letter writing, interspersed with a few random visits here and there. beside the fact that we were 18, this was not a great way to start a relationship - and definitely not easy! - i could write volumes on that topic, but  i digress.

this past weekend, ryan and i celebrated the 7th “anti-versary” of our first date. anyone who knows us knows we’re a little … well, “unconventional” is a nice way to put it. some people would probably say we have a weird relationship and that’s pretty accurate too. this is especially true when it comes to the “traditional” pillars of a relationship. we HATE valentine’s day and we don’t really celebrate our anniversary, opting instead to observe our “anti-versary.”

it’s a lot less complicated than it sounds: our first date was on a Friday the 13th. so each year when Friday the 13th rolls around, we celebrate in some way, some more glam than others. This year - since we’re trying to move, and in SF you have to have like 10 grand in the bank to do that - we went to a neighborhood bar, then watched the (really crappy) movie (”someone like you”) that we went to on our first date.

We also talked about our 18-year-old selves.  all-in-all, i think my 18-year-old self would be proud of me. I always hear about these people who, when they were young,  had these grandiose dreams and then life happened and they didn’t get to do what they wanted to. i’m really fortunate to not have had this problem yet! Sure, i think if i’d told my 18-year-old self EXACTLY what I was doing - namely that I was self-employed and starting another company! - i probably would have been a bit surprised. entrepreneurship kind of snuck up on me, it wasn’t necessarily something i set out to do years ago! but i think overall my former self would be happy with the decisions I’ve made so far.

you never know how life is going to turn out, but i feel like a lot of people sell out their younger, more ambitious selves for the status quo. i don’t think i’ve done this so far and - while i AM still young - i feel like the decisions i’m making now will help ensure that my future is anything but status quo. i think 18-year-old me would be satisfied with that :-).

i felt like i should post something to wrap everything up and let everyone know we’re home. traveling was fun, and i’m so glad we had the opportunity, but i’m happy to be home. I honestly don’t know how those backpackers do it - for months at a time, with no real itinerary. having grown up military, i’ve always considered myself a bit of a modern-day nomad, but more of a longer-term nomad i guess. more like 1-3 years in one place as opposed to 1-3 weeks or months!

we’re still digging ourselves out from under the luggage, souvenirs, and mail we accumulated over the last 2 1/2 months and are enjoying our regular haunts like our neighborhood coffee shop, deli and grocery store.

i haven’t really decided what i’m going to do with the site from here … one thing i learned from this trip is that i don’t plan to do something like it again any time soon!  when we first took off i thought if everything went well - considering our employment situation - we might continue doing these types of trips. but when we travel from now on, i think we’ll take longer chunks of time to see one or two areas - instead of six countries in one month! It was a great way to see everything - and obviously i’m psyched we did it - but it’s not something i necessarily want to repeat

and speaking of our employment situation, i think i’ll be looking for full-time employment now that we’re back. a lot of my clients stopped working with me around christmas time for various monetary issues and i honestly don’t love what i’m doing as a consultant/freelancer enough to try and build my client base back up again.

so anyway, i’m thinking i might just use the blog to update friends and family on our (incredibly exciting non-travel, day-to-day) life. so keep checking back and i’ll keep writing.

<3

alexis

Hong Kong: “prissy alexis” kicked in (although, she may always be “kicked in”) when we arrived at our shockingly gross project of a hostel. of course, we moved hostels, but this was probably just a smart maneuver on ryan’s part - every where we went after that looked like a palace!

Hong Kong island was like a little taste of “home” - hilly, foggy, condensed, yet with an awesome downtown and a great “big city” feel. of all the places we went, this is the one i like the best, and where i’d eventually like to live. it was so international and urban.

Beijing: ahhh … china. i think it was a perfect storm (literally and figuratively) that made us hate you. hate may be too strong. ok, strongly dislike. it was freezing, kind of ghetto, no one spoke english, it was communist and - oh yah - we got stuck on a train for three days.

i’m not ruling out going back at a later date and giving it another shot because i know that a lot of the reasons why i was less-than-impressed wasn’t really beijing’s fault.

one thing that WAS my favorite - the snacks. at home, i’ll venture into chinatown for their great drinks and pastries, so i was more than happy to chow down on sesame balls, boba, rice cakes, mochi and bean paste while in their native country.

thailand: i drank my weight in thai iced tea, then sweated it all back out. i got a wicked sunburn that is slowly (and somewhat disgustingly) turning into a wickedly awesome tan. (and probably also skin cancer).

we bypassed all the side-of-the-road foostalls  - some of which looked awful (basins of dirty, soapy water where dogs drank and pigeons landed, used to “wash” dishes) and some of which looked great (fresh fruit and drinks in coconuts!) - in favor of staying healthy and not contracting some crazy disease.

malaysia: taxis and shopping were cheap but i didn’t feel like there was a lot to see. it would be a fun place to live, but as a tourist there wasn’t anything phenomenal that stood out in my mind.

singapore: oh, singapore, you shouldn’t have been at the end of our trip! we’d run out of time, the will to tour, and money. Again, not a place that stood out as having awesome sights to see, but the lifestyle there was probably the best out of all the SE Asian cities we went to. everything was clean, well-organized, people were friendly, and everyone spoke english. it’s like the america of asia.

unfortunately, the prices are closer to those in tokyo and that made even having a drink with dinner difficult - especially after coming from super-cheap thailand and malaysia!

overall - i’ve loved my asian experience! from “living” in tokyo with my parents for six weeks to traveling around this last month, but i’ll be glad to get back home. i can’t say that the “extended travdling” bug has bitten - honestly, i don’t know how these backpackers do it, for months on end, moving all the time, with no real itinerary. And when we get back, i’ll probably be looking for a “real job” again - one that pays more steadily and yes, one that forces me to commit to staying somewhere for an extended period of time.

looking at it from my perspective now, i’d say that the next time we travel somewhere extensively, it’ll probably be when we move abroad - like, maybe to hong kong!

Day 1

(singapore is really known for its shopping - a lot of people throughout the rest of asia come there just for that. orchard street is one of the biggest shopping districts with everything from high to low-end, boutiques to chains)

(eating dinner outside - it was a little bit cooler in singapore, so we could actually stand to be outside at night!)

DAY 2

on our second day in singapore, we got passes to a hop-on-hop-off bus, since we figured that was the best way to see the city in a short amount of time:

(i know most pictures are of me, but i’m not super vain - ryan just never wants me to take his pic when i offer!)

(the mosque in the little india district)

(little india)

Our second - and last - night in Singapore we only had S$18 left and we didn’t want to have to get more cash out since we were leaving early the next morning. fortunately, we found a food court in a mall near our hotel, which actually had really good asian food options - at least i thought so:

(i had vegetables and noodles in broth - which is one of my faves - along with milk tea boba, another big favorite!)

(ryan on the other hand, thought he was getting sesame chicken, but it was really coffee pork ribs. this is how he felt about it)

(since ryan’s first meal wasn’t fulfilling, we went across the street to a streethawkers food bazaar. it seemed REALLY risky - hence the freaked out “i-might-spend-all-day-tomorrow-on-the-toilet” expression. fortunately, he was fine.)

KL Day 1

(the view of kuala lumpur from what i call the KL Space Needle)

(the patronus towers which - until recently - were the tallest towers in the world)

(double chin in front of the KL tower - AKA the KL Space Needle)

(gong xi fa cai! that’s “happy new year” in chinese. this was a big new years’ display inside Time Square - which is really just a huge mall with a hotel at either end!

we walked to Time Square from the Tower and accidentally went in the wrong shopping building and got totally lost and turned around. we asked someone which direction TS was, and she actually walked us through the building we were in, down three floors, and outside, the told us the direction we needed to go. wow. i should start being nicer to tourists in SF!)

(taking the monorail from Time Square)

(view from the monorail)

KL DAY 2

(at the royal selangor pewter factory. RS was started more than 100 years ago by a chinese immigrant to KL. this was one of the original pieces, now one of their signature teapot designs)

(making a handle)

(at the caves- BEFORE i walked up almost 300 steps!)

(climbing up the steps)

(inside the caves)

(this is what i meant about it not being a REAL holy site - yes, that’s a ginormous pile of garbage with monkeys playing in it)

(the monkeys were WAY too close for comfort for me!)

(on our way out of KL, waiting for the train, o’dark:30 does not make alexis a happy girl)

i know i have a lot of catch-up blogging and picture-updating to do, but we’re in the airport getting ready to head back to tokyo.  i can’t believe it’s been a month already and yet i can’t believe we fit all we did into a month!

looking back, sitting on that train out of beijing, for example, seems like a long time ago. but at the same time coming into HK for the first time (our first stop) feels so recent. it’s an odd feeling!

i was thinking about it last night and we took six flights, three trains, and stayed in 11 hotels. no wonder i feel travel weary!