Tag: Travel

Don’t gussy up poor-person food and tell me it’s rich. 

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I’ve been to Indonesia. I’ve eaten nasi goreng. I liked it. That’s why I can’t eat it anywhere else. 

Nasi goreng is poor-person food. For under $5, you can get a heaping plate of eggs, rice, vegetables, meat, and spices. In the US, you can get the same (or more often, a worse version of the same) dish for $20. That doesn’t make it better! 

I’m in Dublin. Today, I ate a boxty. It’s potato dumplings plus cream sauce. It’s clearly poor-person food. I followed it up with fish & chips, also poor-person food. The first was 27euros. The second 21euros. Both were bland and uninteresting. Both would have been passable at 7euros. These were the best places in Dublin! The highest-rated for their respective dishes! Featured on best-of lists! 

I’m perfectly satisfied by 6-dumplings-for-$5.50 from a basement store with a bathroom toilet more disgusting than any at Woodstock. What I don’t like is putting a bow on that set of dumplings and selling them for $20. 

So far, Partner and I have eaten 6 meals in Ireland. We are 2/5 on passability: the late-night kebab upon arrival was delicious, as was the full Irish breakfast this morning. The beef-and-guinness stew, the fish & chips, and the boxtys are to be avoided. 

Tomorrow, we try the lamb. At least a $23 lamb shank seems appropriately priced. Let’s hope it’s also appropriately tasty.  

I <3 Ireland

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I landed in Dublin three hours ago. Three of my first five experiences: 

  1. Outside the airport, I ask a fellow whether we can tap-to-pay on the bus. He says we need euros in cash or a local transit card. We tell him we don’t have either. He initially pulls out a 5 euro note to give it to us, then realizes he can just tap us on instead, so he does. What a generous bloke! 
  2. Immediately after exiting the bus, Partner & I ask a bouncer at the local pub if they’re still serving food. He says no, but goes out of his way to suggest other options. This is not typical bouncer behavior. 
  3. A short walk later, a college-looking kid tells a homeless-looking man, “I’ll get ya tomorrow.”

I’m going to like Ireland.

Brand Loyalty & Flightiness

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Today I booked 14 flights for Partner and 4 flights for myself. She’ll end up taking 5 or 7 of them. I’ll probably take 2. I also cancelled 5 flights for Partner and 3 for myself. I have one final flight to book as soon as Partner’s Chase points transfer to her Southwest account. That’s 27 flight transactions in a single day. This isn’t how most people travel. But since Southwest allows for free cancellation and rescheduling (when one uses Southwest points for the purchase), Partner and I currently have a few thousand dollars worth of Southwest points. The flexibility is worth a significant amount of money to us; the company captures our revenue and earns the float on our points. We also have Companion Pass, meaning Partner flies for $5.60 on any flight that I take. 

We have a particular version of brand loyalty: the sort of loyalty that comes from aligned interests. If Southwest removed Companion Pass, I would drop them immediately. If they nerfed flight cancellations, they’d get less of my business (I’d fly less). That’s how I think about most versions of brand loyalty: I’m loyal to a brand because their promises are traits I want. But the moment they break those promises, I’ll leave. The best brands keep consistent values across generations. Nintendo started as a playing card company. Apple has had dozens of different product lines, some with impressive longevity (the iPhone is on its 29th generation). The successful years for Disney are the ones when they have compelling, family-friendly animation. 

I wonder if the dearth of options for previous generations, coupled with today’s novel speed of iteration, makes for less brand loyalty. Perhaps less loyalty in general. 

The world is a large, beautiful place. Explore. Fly somewhere. Use Southwest. 

Games Played

Partner, on the phone with Chase Bank: “I’d like you to… unsecure my account.”

Partner would like to clarify that she intended to say “un-scare”, which I also find amusing. (Partner’s credit card account was locked for security purposes.)

My first gurgitation

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Today, Partner and I rode the subway to Diversity Plaza in Queens for the annual NYC momo crawl. (Momos are dumplings originating in Tibet and Nepal.) 

When we arrived, the lines were long and the entry fee questionable. $15 for the passport, and then a half-hour per momo line? We walked to the end of the two-block festival. On the main stage, a woman announced the start of signups for the momo-eating competition. Immediately, I approached her. First name on the list. Partner scoffed at joining: she only recently shifted from soft foods to normal food after a medical issue. The competition was scheduled for 90minutes later, at 4:30pm. We both suspected we wouldn’t still be at the festival. Still, I signed us both up, following my sister’s sage advice: in New York City, grab the opportunity when it presents itself, and offload it later if you need. 

Partner and I ducked into a kebab restaurant that my foodie friends had recommended. We ordered a samosa and had a long talk about an important topic. When we returned to the world, it was already 4:10pm. We walked back to the mainstage. 

At 4:40pm, the announcer summoned me on stage. First to eat 6 momos wins. I arranged the momos on my plate. He counted down. Go! 

I stuffed the first momo in my mouth. Delicious flavor popped. 

Then the second. Third. 

1 minute 16 seconds later, the victor claimed his crown. I earned second place, at ~1minute 30 seconds. 

In the second heat, Partner competed in the very seat I had taken for heat #1. To spare her jaw the hard work, she ripped the momo into pieces, prompting the announcer to comment, “Very interesting strategy down here…” 

Partner received last place. I received second place. 

We both won, in that we both ate free momos. Even my sister won, since Partner brought her the two momos she didn’t finish during the contest.

My strategic update for my next gurgitation competition: 

  • Stuff my mouth with as much food as possible. Chewing is a planar force: twice the food in my mouth is chewed in less than twice the time. 

Next year, if I return, I’m winning that competition. 

Give me mo’. Give me mo’. Give me mo! 

Don’t Mess with Transit 

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How Houston missed the bus. 

A man with a hand cast approaches Partner in the Houston light rail. He points at her and points at himself as if to say “we’re both injured!” 

His opening line: “are you a believer?” 

Partner grunts, “Catholic”. 

He tells her that Jesus will take care of her. See: he prayed and his hand doesn’t hurt. 

— 

Houston is a car-based city. The light rail only navigates along a few specific stretches. Therefore the main people who use the light rail are those who don’t have cars. The selection effects mean the light rail users are mainly poor or homeless. It’s the highest proportion of people talking to themselves or yelling arguments at the empty air that I’ve ever seen. 

So what? 

So it’s a little bit of a spiral to the bottom. The New York City subway definitely has more total homeless or poor or ghost-yellers than the Houston light rail. But the proportion in Houston dwarfs that of New York. And it feels – at least to me – much less safe.  I wonder whether that causes it to only attract those without other options. So it attracts fewer riders – and fewer affluent and influential riders. And therefore the service doesn’t expand? 

Houston doesn’t necessarily need a better light rail. The buses also work well enough, if you’re okay standing in oppressive heat for fifteen minutes. But it’s a notable trait of infrastructure: if you don’t invest early enough, you’re generally better off waiting for the next paradigm. The US is a car culture. Next up: personal helipads? 

—

And a funny quote from Partner: 

“You know what’s the funniest part of BTUs? The Brits don’t use air conditioning.” 

Brooklyn Communists

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The best part of Brooklyn? It’s near New York City. 

Partner & I trained for 48 minutes each way to an event in Brooklyn. 

The event: four fifteen-minute talks plus Q&A, starting at 5pm since we had to vacate the space ahead of a different event starting at 6:30pm. 

Partner & I arrived at 4:40. One of the organizers said, “You guys are early. Could you come back in 20 minutes?”[1] 

If you’re going to have four fifteen-minute talks, plus Q&A time, you really want to start near 5pm. See, I don’t know what they teach you in Brooklyn. But here in Manhattan, 4 x 15minute = 60 minutes. And 60 minutes = an hour. 

Instead, they didn’t start until 5:20pm because, as they said, “Some people are coming from work.” 

No duh. It’s Thursday. How did you not consider this? 

So the talks got squished to 10mins each. And the Q&A got squished to one chunk of ~8 minutes. 

And only two people put their shoes in the little cabinet despite the cabinet being labeled “put your shoes in this cabinet”. And yes, they were Me & Partner. 

—

The talks were on living in communal spaces. Partner and I are interested in living with friends. We want to raise a family alongside other families, ideally in the same apartment or neighboring. 

But, for us this trait is only one of our interests. For the people at this presentation, co-living is the main part of their identity. 

One of the recommended processes for co-living: have a roommate check-in. Include open dialogue so different housemates can share their problems. 

My problem: a poorly scheduled, structured, and run event. 

[1] Partner says they said, “You guys are incredibly early.” I didn’t hear the incredibly.

Soccer Commentator Qualities

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What makes a good soccer commentator? 

  1. Know the players on the field by sight, so you can rapidly say things like “Smith passes to Jones; Jones to Marmoset, Marmoset back to Jones…” 
  2. Make predictions based on your previous soccer experience, of the ilk “If France keeps playing like this, it’s going to be a 4-0 game before the half!” and “Johnson, would you call me daft if I said France were the favorites despite being down 4-2?” 
  3. Be human. E.g. “My son texted me at the half to ask why doesn’t England always play like this?” 
  4. When you have a hunch, puil up a statistic: “Y’know, I said earlier that this might be the highest World Cup game in two decades. Turns out it’s the highest scoring game since Sri Lanka vs Pakistan in 1982”. 
  5. Make comparisons to other sports about which you’re familiar: “There’s no defense on either side: they’re playing like the NBA All-Star Game right now!” 

Things not to do: 

  • Go on and on about one topic over and over again. (“Like I said earlier, some people don’t like there being a third place match. But this third place match was excellent.”) 

Having watched the World Cup this year, it turns out the traits of being a good commentator highly correlate with one particular demographic, and anti-correlate with another. So my biggest suggestion to you, should you want to be a good soccer commentator, is: 

  • Don’t be American. 

— 

An unrelated musing: 

Why are nachos better than salad? 

  1. Nachos: the best stuff is on the top so you eat it first. 
  2. Salad: the best stuff falls to the bottom. 

When you’re hungrier, food tastes better. So sequencing the food to have the best food first (nachos) is better than having the best food last (salad). 

Also the crunch. 

[Partner says she wants Nachos to be more like salad. I think she’s insane.] 

Forever the ball rolls

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The machine in the San Jose airport will forever spark rich feelings of joy.

When I was a child, I watched for hours as the balls rolled, spun, twisted, and jumped, pinging the bells and conking on the wooden blocks. Seven balls – nine in the box, but always with two of them fallen to the bottom, having missed the jump or, more likely, the bounce-pass. For hours and hours, I would watch these balls. And never would I see a ball miss.

I remember the rhythm; the conk-CAH-cohnk of the green one that spins.

A while ago I considered the idea of buying up old dormant brands, then relaunching them for a new generation. But here’s the kicker: focus on the same people, not the same product. Instead of Hush Puppies shoes for a new generation of young folk, it’s Hush Puppies slippers for older people. The name was always the pitch: barking dogs meant aching feet, and the 1958 shoes promised to hush them. The slippers keep that promise at 75. It’s not Lunchables for a new generation of school kids; it’s Lunchables for yuppies.

We’re wrong when we say that old habits die hard. In reality, they don’t die. They simply go dormant, waiting for the trigger to reignite those same neurons.

But the same sound, the same rhythm, the same habits of mind: the same rolling ball machine still scratches that same itch.

The airport has moved the machine to a new location. They’ve rotated it so I now watch from the other side. Still, the sounds and the rhythm are the same. It’s nice, it’s comfortable, like an old warm coat passed down from a parent that still smells like them even after it’s washed. I found it in an old box in the back of a closet. How nice it is to feel the spark return to my eyes.

Hermit Crabs & Kidney Donations

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A spoken-and-transcribed guest-post courtesy of Partner, who caught upwards of seven hermit crabs today: 

Hermit Crab Homes

Hermit crabs grow, but their shells don’t, because hermit crabs don’t grow their shells but find them. When a hermit crab grows too big for a shell, it will find a bigger one. If the bigger one is too big for that hermit crab, it will just hang out near the shell, in the hope that some other hermit crab will come take that bigger shell and leave behind its shell. Because of this, you can get a whole line of hermit crabs: several smaller hermit crabs are waiting to size up their shell. As soon as a bigger hermit crab comes and takes that too-big shell, it will free up a slightly smaller shell, and then another hermit crab could take that slightly smaller shell, etc., trickling down. 

It’s like the kidney donation chain. 

The Kidney Donation Chain

If I wanted to give you my kidney, but you and I are not a match, we’d be out of luck unless there were two other people, one of whom wanted to donate and the other to receive, and we were a reciprocal match so could swap. But generally, there are so many factors required for a kidney to fit that a direct swap is improbable. And they only let something like two or three people form a loop because they want to operate all at once. They’re afraid that, if they do them sequentially, the buddy of the first person to get a kidney will renege on his donation at the end of the loop because his incentive to give is gone. 

Because of this structure, someone donating the kidney without needing a kidney for a friend or family member can change that loop from a loop into a line, which is really mathematically beneficial. And the altruistic donor is just giving away the kidney, no one’s on the hook for getting a kidney back to them, so there’s no risk of someone chickening out. If you choose to donate your kidney, you can kick off a chain that doesn’t just help the one person you are donating your kidney to, but can actually help all the people who exist in that chain, which can be a dozen people or more. 

BBC Earth video on hermit crab shell swaps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dnocPQXDQ

Info on starting a kidney donation chain, including a way to get 5 loved ones to the top of the donation line if they ever need a kidney but you already gave yours away: https://www.kidneyregistry.com/for-donors/start-a-chain/

The Coupon Book

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The goal of the game is to make money. You make more money by giving some away, then charging for what stays scarce.

I’m at the second all-inclusive resort of my life. So why do I feel nickel-and-dimed?

(My family comes together for one of these every summer now, which is a lovely experience. I’m having a great time with great people. This feeling is not a particularly negative impact on my experience; I’m simply enjoying the process of analyzing it.) 

It started at check-in, when the concierge handed me a coupon book. He flagged one asterisk: the $50-off coupon for the resort store needs a purchase of at least $100. I laughed and noted I wouldn’t wouldn’t be using that one.

A coupon book. At an all-inclusive. The whole premise of the place is that I already paid, so nothing else carries a price. A coupon is a price dressed up in a faux discount. The coupon book is a store smuggled into a building labeled “no stores allowed”. 

* * *

Once I noticed the first coupon, I couldn’t stop. $50 off a single spa treatment, which made me wonder what a spa treatment costs. I found the menu advertised in the bar and scoffed: treatments start at $229. I can get an excellent massage in the US for half that, and that’s paying US labor prices, not whatever a masseuse earns in central america. 

This is couponing the Bed Bath & Beyond way: float the sticker high, then hand back a slice, so the discount feels like a gift instead of a markup you sidestepped. It’s comparison control, the price game I keep coming back to. Anchor the number at $229 and $50 off reads as generous. Nobody mentions the seller number that should orient their side of the price: their marginal cost of providing the service. 

And the asterisk gives that number away. The same way Chipotle running a 2-for-1 tells you a burrito nets more than 50%, this resort’s $50 off of $100 in the gift shop tells me the same. They’re not discounting into a loss on purpose. If they can afford to give it back, they were charging too much to begin with.

* * *

The second move is the paid upgrade, and it bothers me more, because it breaks the frame on purpose. (At this resort, that’s the “Star Class” upgrade: your room and food become slightly nicer, and you can book Star Class-exclusive dinner tables.) The whole reason to buy an all-inclusive is to delete the transaction. No prices on the menu, no small voice doing math at dinner. If I wanted the experience of paying for something nice, I would have booked a place where I pay for something nice. The upgrade sells me back the exact friction I paid to be rid of.

* * *

So why build it this way? Why sell “everything included,” then spend the week selling more?

My best guess: once everyone holds the same all-inclusive wristband, everyone wants the same scarce things. The 7pm table at the good restaurant. The shaded poolside chairs. Put a few hundred people on identical footing and they start competing, and anywhere people compete over something scarce, there’s money in tilting the field.

So the resort sells you a basic entry ticket. Then it sells weapons to both sides: the upgrade that jumps the dinner queue, the tier that reserves your chair before dawn. What you’re buying, on top of the vacation, is a position in a contest they built.

* * *

I don’t write any of this with a clenched jaw. I came here to stop running the numbers, and on a vacation the only points worth counting are relaxation, enjoyment, and connection. I’m racking those up, surrounded by people I love. I just can’t switch off the part of me that wants to see the machine.

And the machine is simpler than it looks. If something is free, someone finds the version of it that isn’t, and sells you that. If free, then freemium. Even here? Especially here.