Monday 16 February 2015

Rant 1210 / Recession Incoming.

So a well-connected friend gave us a friendly warning that there's a global recession on the horizon.

Sucks that I've already booked all those trips, so the next best thing is to minimize the impact of the possibility of a weakening SGD - I'll be buying half my expected budget for the trips in the respective currencies this week.




























16 Feb 2015

It probably says something about me that I can click with a 20-year-old girl. Went out with her for the first time yesterday and wow, we can really chat. Or maybe she's just friendly. First time a girl would feed me popcorn on the first day we meet. Yeah, she's either really awesome or too good to be true.

Then we hung out at a cafe till her mum called at 2am and I sent her home before going home myself. We chatted till 4.30am when I decided I had to sleep. Work to do today!

But I'm already proven to be absent-minded at 10.20am. I just called my transporter to bring some goods to a client that were meant to be sent next month. Had to call him again to correct myself.

How will I survive the rest of the day??

Oh, and I'm already sipping coffee now; it clearly isn't enough.

Tuesday 3 February 2015

Rant 1209 / Insane Holiday Plans

So maybe I'm just very pragmatic and not completely lacking in empathy. I don't know.





















This year is going to be crazy. I have travel plans throughout the year already.

After the work trip to Seoul, I was looking at Amsterdam this week plus a really cheap ski trip in Bulgaria immediately afterwards since I would already have been in Europe. That got postponed indefinitely.

But I'm still looking at 3 days in HK and a week in Shanghai, flying from SG on the first day of CNY.

A friend just asked me to go for a ski trip in Japan immediately after I return, so I've just adjusted my flights to fly directly from SHA to Japan instead, and then to HKG where I originally had a flight to SG on the 28th of Feb. That flight has been postponed to the 9th of March.

This is kinda sucky but a necessary sacrifice if I don't want to book a new flight. The airline only has that flight after I reach HKG, and the flight from Japan to HKG is the cheapest I can find.

Another option was to take my flights as planned and then fly to Japan, which was time-consuming, didn't make sense and cost a lot because it's not a short flight between Singapore and Japan.

Third, I could have flown from Shanghai to Japan and back, and adjusted my return SHA-HK and HK-SG flights, but the SHA-HK was non-refundable, unchangeable and, again, the flight direction didn't make sense.

Fourth, I could have flown to HK as planned, then got a return flight to Japan, and postponed the HKG-SIN flight, but that was only slightly cheaper than booking a flight from Singapore to Japan.

Fifth, I could have flown from Shanghai to Japan, then back to Singapore directly, but that would have wasted two budget fares in addition to the fact that a flight from Japan to Singapore was not cheap.

In addition, most of these other options would have prevented me from reaching Japan on the same day as the rest of them since the SHA-HKG flight cannot be changed and arrives in Hong Kong only in the afternoon, too late for most cheap flights to reach the right airport in Japan before the next day.

And no, I'm not talking about Narita Airport.

After these three countries, it will be Taipei in May, where I'm looking at trying the relatively unknown bungy jump around Tainan, and paragliding if possible. And catching up with that tour guide I met last year, maybe asking her to bring me around in her home city, Tainan.

July will be Canada, and I'm considering a Contiki tour for this but there is some hesitation because I also want to spend more time in the cities where my relatives are. Maybe I'll fly between them just before the tour but that's a lot of extra money. In any case, I still have to wait for more discounts; right now I can only get a total of 15% off.

September will be Sydney but may want to adjust to August so that a friend can join me to try night skydiving there.

Dec will be a long European tour with Contiki again, going from London to Belgium to Czech to Italy to France to the Netherlands and back to London again. For this trip, I'll take it easy and not book too many things... maybe.