Category Archives: Travel

Travel

Beaches of Ko Phangan, I will miss you

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When people think of Ko Phangan, they associate with revelry and partying. I’ve had a thoroughly different experience filled with beach, quiet, and spiritual moments. I have thoroughly explored and savored the northern beach life in Ko Phangan. So sad to go :(.

NORTHEAST KO PHANGAN

The northeast is a wild and undeveloped area, with a few waterfalls and not much more than a few low-key resorts. The scenery is absolutely gorgeous, nestled into a cove that makes it feel like an undiscovered fairytale land. This is a great area to visit if you don’t want to see many people but have all the natural beauty of being on a beach in Thailand. The swimming here is lovely, and the beaches are vast and walkable. Continue reading Beaches of Ko Phangan, I will miss you →

Travel

The people we meet…[play plant music?]

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Sometimes I wonder if we are fated to meet certain people. Doesn’t it always seem that the people you meet during a certain phase of your life reflect the theme of that period?

Yesterday, I was swiping on Tinder out of curiosity and boredom, just to see who was around. One person and I had a mutual friend in common, a fairly successful musician and artist in NYC (successful enough to have exhibited at MoMa but not a household name). We started chatting.

His profile read:

“Traveling artist, healer and entrepreneur interested in meeting and sharing stories with inspiring high-vibe humans living their dreams.

I’m here in Thailand to connect to nature and make ambient meditation music with tropical plants. Open to hosting workshops and collaborating with other healers and entrepreneurs or just have fun.

Bonus points if you can read my aura.”

Continue reading The people we meet…[play plant music?] →

Food, Travel

Srithanu eats

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After eating only Thai curries for 3 weeks, I’m happy to have some variety in hippie expat community of Srithanu on Ko Phangan, Thailand! Here’s some of what I’ve been eating (minus the loads of cashews in my bungalow). This post is for you, Lux, since you hate all the contemplation that’s been going on in my recent posts.

Health & Wellness, Life, Travel

Quiet time

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I’ve been waking up at 4:30am as usual. It’s dark, and my bungalow has the usual mix of rumpled clothing and electronics strewn about. I cough up a lung from the air conditioning, which has dried the entire inside of my body. It’s freezing. I thought 29 degrees celsius was supposed to be close to sweltering. Too lazy to look at the conversion to fahrenheit.

My current routine involves staring up at the ceiling until the dawn light starts to creep in and then running next door to Samma Karuna for 7:15am vipassana meditation. A guy robed in white sort of leads this class in a sort of pagoda-like structure right off the beach. By leads, I mean he sits there and hits two bells together three times at the end of the hour. A barely audible recording plays in the background where an oldish sounding Indian guy utters a few words every 20 minutes. It adds an air of authenticity about the whole situation, but otherwise, it feels somewhat unnecessary…except perhaps to bring you closer to the present. Continue reading Quiet time →

Travel

First day alone-alone

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Jaybird flew away yesterday to Krabi-land. Today he landed in Singapore. It’s the first time I’ve been truly alone since Bali in July. The past three weeks have been a bubble with me and Jay getting to know each other in an intense and accelerated way. Travel bubble style. It reminds me of the experience of making friends at camp.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been slowly getting off the social train. There was the intense experience in Jeju, Korea with a community of 35 other digital nomads. A subset of us ended up in Seoul for a few weeks. And then to Ko Phangan – just Jay and myself settling in to thaw, relax, and detox during rainy season.

At some point, I realized I needed to take the next step and just be alone. And so began the truly spiritual component of my stay here in magical Ko Phangan.
Continue reading First day alone-alone →

Anti-Stress, Life, Travel

Our life is the creation of our mind

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The other day, I was on Google Hangouts with one of my closest friends. He and I met in the elevator on the way to orientation at the hedge fund I worked at. In spite of the fact that we’re seemingly very different, we instantly became close friends. He’s an Indian genius programmer with a PhD who wrote his dissertation on blackbox systems (or something, whatever). I’m a scattered and uselessly overly educated Asian-American New Yorker…I don’t even know how else to describe myself.

I consider him a great philosopher, and many of our conversations over California Pizza Kitchen or dosas or comedy or hiking trips have meandered over the topic of self-development. Many of my greatest life tips have come from him. For example, to feel presence, just pay attention to your feet and how they’re pressing into the earth. Or, focus on one goal or habit at a time until it is ingrained. I know few people who read as voraciously as he does about philosophy, good living, and the spiritual aspects of life. I also kind of feel like he’s memorized the entire YouTube corpus…or maybe the internet at large.

In this particular conversation, I was staring out a some beach and he had just arrived in India. “The mind…it keeps yapping at you, no matter what,” he said. No matter how much we can gain control of our external world, the struggle to gain control of our internal world can be beyond elusive. Continue reading Our life is the creation of our mind →

Anti-Stress, Life, Travel

Sunset side of the island

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Time, place, and people have been restructuring me.

After staying for 10 days in a 5-bedroom penthouse villa on a beautiful hill overlooking the turquoise ocean and nested hamlet of Thong Na Pan Noi beach, we moved one beach over on the northwest side of the island to Thong Na Pan Yai and stayed a week at another comfortable house right on the beach. It was an extension of the Longtail Beach Resort. That was pure relaxation.
Continue reading Sunset side of the island →

Life, Travel

The supermoon, a break from the past

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Last night, the moon started to come up, big in the horizon, the biggest moon we’ve seen on earth since 1948. It coincided with a few other both solemn and spiritual events.

It was the last day of the 30-day mourning period for King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the beloved king and ruler of Thailand for 70 years. It was the end of an era. And of course, at some point, we all need to move forward with the day-to-day.

The other big occasion is the annual festival of Loy Krathang, a festival paying homage to the water goddess at the end of the main rice season and harvest season. People gather at water sources with elaborate offerings adorned with lit up candles and incense and allow these ornamented pieces to float away. There is a beautiful cutting energy around letting go of past misfortunes and letting all the anger and grudges you have held onto float away down these canals. It marks the start of a year of good luck.

Meanwhile, in Chiang Mai, the Lantern Festival
Meanwhile, in Chiang Mai, the Lantern Festival

Continue reading The supermoon, a break from the past →

Anti-Stress, Life, Travel, Work

Word-constructing meditation on stress

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I don’t know when the burnout started. I can’t pinpoint a moment. Achievement orientation seemed encoded into my being from an early age. Was I programmed for burnout?

It may have started in high school with the nights I chased a NoDoz with Green Mountain coffee at 11pm so I could cram all night for a test the next day. It could have been the years of working 100+-hour weeks. In my life, I had always felt that whatever shortcomings I had – and I felt I had many – I could overcome through sheer dedication and work ethic. I felt that if I could put in an additional 40 hours of studying to get a 99 (A) on a test vs. a 92 (A-), I felt that it was worth it to squeeze out that remaining X%. That I should push for perfection. And it worked for a while. It better than just “worked.”

During one of my interviews at an NYC-based hedge fund, I was proud when I proclaimed that I was working these kind of hours. Rick from the recruiting department seemed horrified, disbelieving, and fascinated at the same time. Continue reading Word-constructing meditation on stress →

Travel

What is real life?

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I’ve felt like a castaway for the past 11 days. From the wintry morning start in Seoul, I flew and transferred to monsooning Ko Samui before another transfer brought me to the spiritual-cum-party island of Ko Phangan in Thailand. The heart of rainy season. It seemed fitting. The world was telling me to slow down for a second, or a week…maybe forever?

sunset

I met Jay during my time at HP in Jeju in Korea. The first blurry yet distinct memory I have of him may have been at a 24-hour cafe. It was a Friday night, the first Friday of our program. I was motivated to work and had a 4-hour board meeting starting at midnight. As soon as I arrived, surprised to see so many people gathered together and working so late on a Friday evening, they dispersed, off to dinner. Jay was among the last to pack up. He was curious about the bulgogi pretzels. I felt some degree of social anxiety. When you’re two people, you sort of have to talk and engage, and I was more in the mood to fade into the background. I was still in London mode, hermetic and monastic in my approach to the world. Continue reading What is real life? →

Travel

Magic island time

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It’s quiet this morning, as it is every morning here. I woke up at 4am thinking about my 9:30am call. 3 hours of sleep. The water flow from the infinity pool hasn’t turned on yet. The birds are chirping, and out from the open air living room area of my villa, the sun’s coming up slowly.

Sunrise Ko Phangan

This has been my home for the past 10 days, looking out into this view from here, my 5-bedroom duplex villa.

ko-pha-ngan-villa-suan-sawan

The mornings and breakfast bleed into a walk to the beach and a slow meandering lunch. Sitting in silence, I’ll find myself fading into the distance thinking. Then Jay and I will tell each other stories about life, prattle on about UI design options, or just sit in silence. Yesterday, I cried in front of him. A week ago, he was still a stranger. (More on that later.) Often, he’s wrapped in a red towel on the couch as I hang off the L piece of the sectional. The conversation moves from dating to family to our self-realizations and then to the seesaw between doing something and doing nothing. Dinner. Sleep. Repeat. Continue reading Magic island time →

Travel

Reflecting back on Korea

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We arrived in silence, went through our bedtime ritual, and laid down like statues in bed. The atmosphere was tense, and I waited for dawn to arrive. I couldn’t wait to board my flight and be away from complications, cities, and bad juju.

The hours ticked to the right. 2am, 3am, 4am, and then it was time to wake up. Meanwhile, I was wide awake, readying myself to run, mentally clutching my suitcase and tracing the outline of my shoes (and the act of putting them on) with my mind. I’ve noticed that this can be a pattern, this sine wave of experience in a place and in a situation. Things build up, and I’m super happy. Then they fall apart, and I enter the trough of disillusionment. Then I quickly bolt. Lately, bolting has taken the form of a last-minute one-way ticket (not bad!). If I keep running faster, then it’s hard for things to catch up, I guess. Now, I’m in Thailand doing nothing, and my hope is that some of this processing time will be helpful for me. Maybe I can “catch up” with myself instead of continually running and experiencing new things to outpace the hammer of “reality,” if such a thing even exists.

Korea, Korea, Korea. Jeju. Seoul. Cheonan. DMZ. New friends. Family. Work possibilities. Vacation. Future home? Identity. Continue reading Reflecting back on Korea →

Travel

My DMZ visit

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One of the most common questions I’m asked when I tell people I’m Korean is, “Are you North Korean or South Korean?” No matter how many times I’m asked this question, I am surprised and caught off guard every time I’m asked. I can’t help but return a look of bewilderment before responding that I’m South Korean.

There are a number of reasons for this reaction. First of all, North Korea is so locked down that the likelihood of me being North Korean is pretty low. Secondly, if I were North Korean, I probably would not admit it. Thirdly, Koreans just don’t really think that way. We are Korean. Yes, we had a devastating war 60 years ago that divided our country in two, but as a nation, we are still one in some ways. It is getting more distant, but it is still the recent enough past that our parents remember a time when Korea was one. Continue reading My DMZ visit →

Travel, Work

Nomad List meetup, Seoul

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I almost feel like a real nomad. I went to a nomad meetup in Seoul at Woodstock Music Bar in Gangnam. I met Pieter Levels, creator of Nomad List, RemoteOK, and CoLive. I was surprised by the composition of the rest of the crew. One woman was an English teacher and friend of a friend. Another was an HP colleague. The co-founder of Hive, the biggest South Korean co-working space. A couple who spent half the year being nomadic. A game designer who was starting learn to code meetups in Seoul.

This is probably something I’ll look at as a milestone of sorts when I look back. Or maybe it was just an excuse to eat some chicken karaage. I am glad I went to this instead of the massive TechCrunch Asia event.

Nomad List Meetup