Monthly Archives: December 2018

Asia, Transportation, Traveling

One Ticket to the Other Side of the World

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It seems like if I got all of you to read me ramble about this trip, I should at least have a post about the trip to get here. I believe in being transparent about the negative aspects of good things, but they are usually necessities. So here’s the trip: Cleveland to Dallas to Seoul to Chiang Mai. Thirty hours of my life sitting in a seat in the sky.

I left the day after Christmas, which means Christmas Eve and Christmas were spent doing the final cleaning out of my apartment and trying to see everyone humanly possible. Anyone who knows me knows I am an extremely gifted procrastinator, so I finished cleaning out my apartment and handed in my keys at 9p.m. on Christmas. My flight left Cleveland at 6:30a.m. on December 26th. I left my car at my Dad’s house and they didn’t print my Seoul or Chiang Mai tickets and said I had to get them from the airport, so I wanted to go early to ensure that I got them with no issues. This meant that I had to go to the airport around 4:30a.m., so my Dad and I stayed up until I had to go to the airport. Around 2a.m., I decided I needed at least an hour of sleep. So I told my Dad I would be up in an hour and crawled into bed. His dog, Jinx, was nice enough to come cuddle with me (Sorry Dad, I know he isn’t allowed on the bed) and I fell asleep pretty quick. I got to the airport and found out they meant I had to get them from the airport I was headed to Seoul from, so no luck until Dallas. Two hours of sitting around with Ryan later, and we both headed off. He went to JFK and I headed to Dallas.

An uneventful three hour flight with only one hour of sleep later and I was in Dallas. As soon as I arrived, I headed to my gate and told the KoreanAir desk clerk that I needed my further tickets. She said I would need proof of onward travel to get my tickets, so I called Ryan to make sure we did the same thing. He had his laptop so I had him look up cheap flights. There were plenty of tickets with 24 hour total refunds but if I needed to show proof when I landed, it would be outside of that 24 hour window. Those were a bit more expensive if we didn’t get to refund them, so we decided on the cheapest we could find. I bought the $48 ticket Ryan found me and got my next two tickets. In standard Ryan fashion, he called me ten minutes later to let me know that he had found tickets for 26 dollars and gotten them for himself. I walked around for about an hour and then sat around for the last hour before my life, making sure everything I owned was charged and my limbs had a good stretch. Dallas to Seoul, 14 hour flight, the longest of my life so far.

The inflight animation of the fourteen hour Dallas to Seoul flight.

The flight itself was daunting and a weird experience in and of itself. Each row was split into three sets of three seats. I got the middle seat in the middle set, standard luck. I slept for the first hour, watched a movie, wrote some letters, watched another movie, regretted not putting games on my phone and then got some more sleep. The screen in front of me had a counter as to how much longer of a flight we had, a cruel joke disguised as a helpful feature. After all of these things, I was certain that I was at least halfway through my flight. No dice, 8 hours remaining. Everyone knows I am a huge movie junkie, 14 hours of movies is nothing for me, but trapped in a single seat is a different story. Luckily, they just kept feeding me, so hunger wasn’t an issue. I made sure to keep adequately hydrated, but they were really pushing the beer and wine. As fun as being drunk sounded, being hungover while trapped in a single seat sounds like a special kind of hell. Another movie down, I was running out of the interesting ones provided on the plane. 4 hours left, and I was starting to wonder if they would just let me jump out and swim the rest of the way. Thanks to the beauty of Netflix, I had downloaded some crime thriller series and began watching the episodes. Four episodes later and I was down to an hour and each episode was 45 minutes. One more episode and I am home free. Finished the episode and find out that timer is to when the plane will start it’s descent. Plane finally lands with an hour until my next flight. Unfortunately, we don’t get off the plane until forty minutes until my next flight. Added bonus, the Seoul Korea airport is gigantic and I am about a fifteen minute walk from the customs area. I make it through security, ten minutes until flight. I get a little excited to grab some food that isn’t from a plane and maybe lay on the ground or something. Mistake, the gate is about a ten minute walk. Ryan is messaging to ask if I got lost.

I hop on the plane and grab my aisle seat next to Ryan. Feels like four hours, but it’s been twenty two hours since we parted ways in Cleveland. We trade stories of our flights and Ryan tells me how cool the Seoul airport was, even sadder now. This is only a six hour flight and then we will be landing at 10:30p.m. Chiang Mai time. We decided we should refrain from sleeping so that we can dodge jetlag. I take a quick count, I slept for one hour after doing things nonstop all day on Christmas and got a total of three hours of sleep on my other two flights. The odds are low, but my body has done better for worse reasons. We play some games, we chat, we eat. I attempt to watch the final episode of my show and I can feel my brain refusing any sort of comprehension. Ryan grabs the provided blanket and rolls over to sleep. I agree that I could be more comfortable and wake up two hours later. Thirty minutes and we are in Chiang Mai, perfect. We land and remember we don’t read or speak Thai.

The inflight animation of the six hour final flight.

Airports are usually pretty self explanatory no matter what country you are in. Lines in airports are usually not as self explanatory. We get to an area filled with people with a bunch of signs that all vaguely seem to say the same thing. We need our arrival visa, we find the “Visa on Arrival” line. Before we hop in, I see United States is not listed. I do a quick Google (Thanks Sprint for the 2G everywhere) and find out that Americans have a visa exemption for arrival. We hop in to the longest line that seems to be about half Americans. We wait around for about thirty minutes hoping we are in the correct line and luckily, we are. We get to the front, I had in my arrival form and the clerk tells me I have to get back into line. Doesn’t sound like my plan for the day, so I quickly jot down the address to our hostel and we get our visas. Nothing to declare so we are on our way out the door. We exchange some cash for surprisingly close to the market exchange rate and dodge the taxis offering rides. We make it outside and realize there are none outside harassing people for rides, not something I have seen in other countries. We end up flagging one down and showing him the address. He quotes us two hundred baht, about seven dollars, pretty much American pricing, but at this point, we are about to pass out in the street so we agree that splitting seven dollars won’t kill us. Hop in the taxi and get to experience some authentic Thai driving and we make it to the hostel.
We settle our room debt (Seventy dollars total for two of us for seven days, score) and head to our room. It’s now about midnight Chiang Mai time. We open the door and the couple in our room are listening to something at full volume. Both take some long needed showers and get some much needed sleep. Thirty hours total and it only feels like six. I respond to all the texts and snaps I missed and realize that it’s about noon back at home. Time travel at its finest.

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How the Whole Asia Thing Started

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I’ve been asked a number of times “Why Asia?”, “Why quit your job?”, “How did you do it?”, amongst other variations of the same line of questioning. So here it is.

I had made the decision to leave Rockwell Automation and Cleveland, Ohio in January of 2018, when I had reached three years of employment with Rockwell. The plan was to check out some cities in the summer time and decide where to go and apply for a new job in October and be moving by the end of January. I checked out a bunch of cities and had decided on Austin, Texas. The day I had decided to start applying to jobs in Austin, I ran into an old coworker who offered me a position on a new team that ran an agile environment. As if someone in the company had heard I was planning on leaving, a manager I had worked with in the past offered me a DevOps position.

I went to check out the Agile team and after meeting the team and hearing what they were working on, I was sold. It was a utility role writing code, tests and working on DevOps. A whole product being rolled out by three members. I met the team on a Tuesday and was accepting the position by Friday.

The team ended up being the dream job. Great coworkers, plenty of cool opportunities and a never ending list of different challenges to work on. The downside was it required me to stay in Cleveland and traveling was restricted to a few times a year. This brought back up the leaving Cleveland idea.

I started looking at Austin again but it seemed like I had skipped over Austin last time and maybe something bigger was in order. This is when I began to look at other countries. I have made plenty of friends in Australia and loved my time in Germany. Next, I started looking at Software Engineer positions in those places, but nothing was really peaking my interest job wise. Then it occurred to me that I had my ideal job in the Software industry, but maybe there was something else I want to do more.

I started by looking into other fields I am interested in: fitness or game development. Again, it just felt like I was finding another thing to drag myself to. So I began to look at master’s degrees. I had looked at business master’s because it is something I was unlikely to learn on my own time. A mentor had suggested a one year business master’s in another country so that I could learn another language as well as attain the master’s. He had also suggested aiming for the ones in the top twenty. I had decided to try for INSEAD, IE or Bocconi. After some dedicated research and starting to study for my GMAT, I realized that this was a heavy investment for yet another thing I might not end up liking. So what did I really want to do that I could afford to live doing and appeased interests I already knew I had?

Thailand and Vietnam have always been at the top of my travel list, but the flight time has always been the stopping factor with me doing short trips while having a full time job. I’ve always been interested in Buddhism and martial arts. Asian culture has always fallen in line with my interests. I knew that area of the world was much less expensive than America and had plenty of experience planning budget trips in other parts of the world.

The original plan was to spend a month in Southeast Asia and then decide what I wanted to do with my life. After looking at flights and hostel prices, I realized I could stay there for quite a while until I really figured out what I wanted to do. I realized that my lease and other obligations all came to an end in December and I could walk away with little fuss.

First, I had to tell my family. Most of my family lives in Cleveland and has lived there most of their life, so me leaving a good job to walk around Asia with a backpack probably seemed like I had lost it. Outside of the worries that something bad was going to happen or I would never find a good job again, I think they all sort of expected something like this at some point. Next was the job.

Being the neurotic planner I am, selecting a date to tell my team that I was leaving was a big deal to me. Part of me wanted to tell them that day, three months in advance. I had decided on two months in advance but some friends had suggested that although that was a good friendly move for the team members I am close with, the company had no reason to keep me for two months on a three person team. I decided on a specific date about a month before I was planning to leave.

To my surprise, the engineering lead of the team announced that he was leaving about nine weeks before I planned to leave. The team had decided that he would knowledge transfer most of his responsibilities to me. I immediately planned a meeting with my manager to inform him I was also leaving. After this meeting, I told my product owner and had a meeting planned for the following Monday to tell the rest of the team. Monday morning I got in early and had fully prepared what I was going to say. About fifteen minutes before the meeting, I got a message that it needed to be rescheduled to the next day. The following day, I sort of just blurted out to the team that I was leaving and taking a backpack to Asia. Most of my teammates have lived elsewhere so were very supportive of the move.

So that’s that. The telling people part is over and now I just need to get rid of all my stuff. There’s one answer to one of the questions I tend to get frequently regarding this trip.