Living out of 2 backpacks: A 6-month retrospective

In my first month I visited four different airbnbs since I didn’t want to lock myself in before visiting. I rented a room in 합정 [Hapjeong] for almost 4 weeks. 합정 is a nice central spot, close to 홍익입구역 [Hongik University], 신촌 [Sinchon], and 이대역 [Ehwa Women’s University]. It has the green (6호선) and brown (2호선) lines which make getting around 서울 [Seoul] pretty easy. The wework I went to, 을지로3-가 [Euljiro 3-ga], is on the green line as well.

After that the host went away on a trip so I had to find a new place. I negotiated with a host to stay from March to June in 마포구 [Mapo-gu], near 마포구청역, which is the western side of Seoul above the Han river. It was a quiet neighborhood with a lot of families and children, and I enjoyed the solitude at night. It was only ~15 minutes away from 합정, so getting around via public transportation was still fine.

From what I saw airbnb was more expensive in Japan. I stayed at a hostel through hostelworld.com near Golden Kai in Shinjuku for about 5 days, then I stayed in Yokohama, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka. Golden Kai… visiting dozens of small, intimate bars was a hell of an experience. When I visit Japan again I’m definitely going to visit more bars at Golden Kai.

Note that if you’re planning to stay longer at a bar in Golden Kai, it’s definitely worth it to pay the cover charge. My uncle and I just wanted to visit as many bars as possible–we found one that was metal themed and had about 12 people in a space meant more for like 6-8. It was incredible!

I chose Yokohama due to the Shinkansen station. I had no idea it had a sizable Chinatown (and lots of tourists). Somewhat ironically, Hiroshima was serene and beautiful. I think it’s my favorite of all the places I stayed at. Fukuoka was also quite nice. It and Hiroshima are much more laid-back than Osaka or Tokyo.

One reason why I love Korea and Japan is not needing to own a car. Parking is annoying, insurance is expensive (particularly for me as an 18–25 year old male), and I can’t use my phone while driving. I find taking the bus or subway to be a zen-like experience where I can meditate or listen to a podcast. It lets me stretch my legs after sitting all day on my computer. (I almost always stand, unless I’m tired or the ride is 65+ minutes).

Compared to Korean, Japan’s railway lines are much more convoluted. Companies own different lines so your train may change colors while you’re still riding in a car. A card that works in Tokyo (like Suica) may not work in Osaka–at least it didn’t for me as of March 2019. Korean lines have a color and number. Green line (2 line) is much easier to remember and to refer to than Japan’s Ginza line, Marunouchi line, etc.

In Korea you can take any bus or subway line with a T-Money card, available at nearly every convenience store. Each station generally serves 1-2 lines and has markings on how to easily exit or transfer. However I was able to put my Suica card in my iphone’s Wallet app and tap my phone at the turnstiles in Japan. I’m not sure if T-Money cards support this yet.

Most, if not all, Korean stations have public restrooms that are cleaned regularly. A lot of places that I stayed in Korea at had older toilets and plumbing, so these restooms are gifts from God; resplendent beacons of hope.

Korea’s green line gets very crowded at 6pm due to employees and students returning home. Traveling home from 여의도 was the only time in Korea that I got shoved on the train as part of people packing in. 8am on the Marunouchi line in Japan was similar except there were people pushing quite aggressively. I always travel now with a mask on the subway in case the train becomes that crowded.

This is where the Goruck bags aren’t that great. They’re huge, especially the GR2! I would never use either as daily bags with commuting on trains or busses. I specifically packed a day bag for this reason. Of course if you drive everywhere in the US like I do in South Carolina, the GR2 works just great in your passenger seat.

A lot of subway stations in Korea are connected to underground malls. Some of them are enormous! Vendors hawk wares like food, clothes, cosmetics, power adapters, and more.

Compared to Korea’s KTX, Japan’s Shinkansen lines are insanely expensive. I don’t know how KTX is so cheap but you can get from 서울 [Seoul] → 부산 [Busan] in ~2.5 hours for ~$55. The 무궁화 line is even cheaper, although much slower at ~4 hours. Each KTX train car has room at the end to store some luggage, and overhead racks.

I don’t know if the Green cars in the Shinkansen are worth the steep price increase. The extra space was nice though. I actually found the atmosphere on the KTX to be quieter than the Shinkansen.

If you bought a JR Pass you have to stand in line at a Shinkansen hub station and request your tickets, which can be done up to ~1 month in advance. This can take over 45-60 minutes at peak times. Honestly it’s not a good experience for foreigners–the only people who are allowed to buy the pass. You cannot buy the pass inside of Japan, you must purchase it abroad now (as of September 2019).

Otherwise you can book tickets via the Shinkansen app. With KTX you can use the app or website until ~30 minutes before departure. For that or standing tickets you need to talk to a ticketing agent at the station. Standing tickets have a whopping ~85 cents (1,000원) discount.

The biggest issue I faced was loneliness. All of my college friends moved back home anyway but I did miss my family.

What I didn’t expect was missing out on… americans/westerners. Rather, I missed having people around that I shared roughly the same culture with, people that spoke English fluently (at distinguished or almost native level). I only made a couple foreigner friends at the language exchange because foreigners were always matched with korean locals.

I fixed this by going to 이태원 [Itaewon] and 용산 [Yongsan] more. These are the foreigner areas in Korea, due to the American military base nearby. These areas have lot of music events and foreign food if you get homesick. I also went to a few programming meetups through meetup.com which were comprised of almost entirely foreigners.

The other slightly annoying issue was my space, or lack of it. Not having an office in particular. At home I use two desks: one for my monitors & computer, the other for writing and any other tinkering.

Going from two 27" 1440p monitors to a macbook pro was a bit rough.

If I went back to Korea for more than 3 months I would need a space with a decent desk.

I forgot to bring a pin-enabled credit card. Whoops! I needed to withdraw cash occasionally for a few things, mainly the T-Money subway/bus transit cards cannot be refilled via card. Thankfully I received a new pin-enabled card quickly and my family was able to ship it to a Korean friend of mine.

Other than those issues I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Korea.

This shirt showed my nipples too easily. The w&p wool shirts are a bit finer in general but they work in darker colors.

I added these at the last moment before I left for the airport, hence they’re not in the spreadsheet. They took up a fair bit of space and were cotton so they were annoying to dry.

In retrospect I should have used those more. I found a more comfortable pair from jcrew while I will be taking with me on future trips.

Talk about a waste of time and money researching gear that I never used. Sigh. I’ve used it a few times since I came home, but in general cameras are firmly in the NOT WORTH IT category for me now.

It pains me to say that as I grew up using a nikon d200/d300 with my dad, but the truth is that my iphone X’s camera is plenty sufficient. The new iphone’s camera looks great, and I imagine the one after that will have even better cameras.

I haven’t had a reason to use this yet but it takes up like no space at all.

This was worthless at first because Korean outlets are recessed, so it didn’t fit. On my first day back in Korea I had to find a hardware store and bought two cheap adapters.

Then at home I daisy-chained the card adapter to the cheap adapter. Hey, it worked.

In Japan I daisy-chained it in reverse with the cheap adapter to plug in my 3-prong mac charger. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Next time I travel, I may very well take Japanese/Korean versions of the macbook pro cable to not deal with this headache. If they don’t take up too much weight/space of course.

I got tired of trying to make my way through a Korean history book. I had the mentality of "finish one book, then read another" but this doesn’t pan out so well for information-dense books.

Instead, now I read what I feel like reading. I’m in the progress of Pro Git, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and Korea’s Place in the Sun now.

I like my kindle quite a lot. One of the pains of traveling is not really being able to have books around me like I do in my office. Next time I’ll have some more interesting books to read.

I decided to get the nikes after trying them out in a store. The tech fleece is lighter than expected but takes forever to dry. (It’s not common to have a dryer in Korea). The jordan dri-fits are amazing because they’re so light, but unless I’m running in them I tend to pair them with the smartwool base layer.

F.Illuminate is a Korean brand. I found these sweatshirts in a random store in 신촌역. They’re nice and simple, no logos. They became my main staples with the sweatpants mentioned earlier.

I initially bought this to use with Duet as an external monitor, but it’s quite laggy. So I was disappointed at first but then I realized it’s pretty nice to use when I’m not programming or writing. Specifically, drawing with Procreate is fantastic. I study kanji through an Anki deck on this if I don’t use my laptop, and I can put on netflix in the background while cooking or cleaning.

However I despise taking notes on the ipad, or any other digital device I’ve tried. Only pen and paper work for me and how I process things. I really tried using GoodNotes 5, but I never want to wrestle with a tool or its UI while I’m trying to write down my thoughts. If I have to take digital notes, I would just use vim.

Stupid goodreads 5 issues I had:

Goodnotes’ saving grace is with annotating PDFs… once I save them in the right format to my phone, of course.

ProCreate is great but there’s a PEBKAC issue. I don’t find myself often sitting down to just… draw. I should fix that.

Example of what it looks like.

This watch is absolutely gorgeous. I saw it while walking around in Yodobashi Camera and was immediately transfixed.

Let me start off with saying I am not a snob about writing tools. I like rollerball pens (like these ones) just as much as I like niche fountain pens. Now, with that out of the way:

I tried out a Mustard Sailor Pro Gear Slim at Kingdom Note in Japan, and I was blown away. I love writing with this pen. It’s from Sailor’s Vegetable Collection, which seems to be no longer available on their website as of 9/19/2019.

I tried this one out at Kindome Note as well and enjoyed how it wrote. It is a bit finer than the mustard Sailor so I use it a lot for kanji practice.

I found a small fountain pen store in Korea and got these for fun. The F is too wide for kanji practice but I like the extra-fine.

Inks:

Is traveling with these a pain? Oh yes. In the future I’ll probably only use uniball rollerballs, staedtler pigment liners in 0.3mm, and my pelikan souveran rollerball.

I picked up one in Japan. I missed being able to play games like street fighter on my mac.

I would travel with this again, I think. There’s something cathartic about relaxing after a long day with some beer and a few rounds of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike.

For EDC both gorucks are far too bulky. They’re fine in the US since I drive everywhere, but have you ever been on a crowded train in Asia at rush hour?

So I use an Invisible Rolltop by OPPOSETHIS, which packs into the GR2 when I fly. I chose this for three reasons:

My programming machine. The beating heart and core of all my operations. I got a quality leather sleeve to protect it while moving around.

I like macs (2015 and prior) due to their build quality and reliability. I had a thinkpad t430 but it was insanely bulky and I got tired of "configurability". Give me a machine that works without incessant tinkering and workarounds. On my desktop at home I run Debian Stretch because I got tired of Arch’s constant annoyances. My home server runs FreeNAS–running FreeBSD without a hitch on a laptop would be ideal.

I may upgrade to a Lenovo Carbon in a year or two, but we’ll see. Maybe apple will release a non-shit macbook pro in 2020.

I cannot travel with out this. All my language notes, doodles, thoughts, tasking, and everything else go in here. Initially thought 121 pages for the softcover was too little but it took me a very long time to complete the journal.

Since then I’ve purchased two more hardcovers, grid style, and three more softcovers, dotted style, for various uses. I’m not a fan of blank or lined paper.

I saw this while traveling in Japan and thought it would be neat to have one spot for a daily log. I did this in my leuchtturm but it got buried by my notes and such. I write down small tidbits of what went on in the day. The format is such that each page has 3 years on it, so I’ll be able to see my past self’s activities and thoughts.

The problem is remembering to write in it.

I carry pretty much all of my pens in my backpack since they take up little space. I pick up fountain pens in Japan but I wouldn’t travel with them. Ink is a huge pita.

These are like magic for public transportation. In cafes and at WeWork they’re okay, they cut out a lot of stuff but don’t really stop conversations or music. I just crank up rain sounds or music. I had to buy the lightning adapter as well–I avoid losing it by always packing the qc20s in their case with it when I’m done.

The bose over-ear canceling headphones are way better for cafes and sound quality but are also much bulkier. The taotronics soundsurge bluetooth headphones are considerably cheaper yet still good in quality. Next time if I have the space, I may travel with my taotronics. Personally I despise wearing over-ear headphones in public.

This has saved my butt a few times when my phone died while traveling or when I simply forgot to charge it the night before. Heck, I even use it when I’m not traveling abroad.

For my macbook charger.

I use the lightning ones for phone calls when I’m at home, and the 3.5mm ones are a backup.

I study kanji every single day and I do it on specific grid paper with boxes sized for kanji. I keep them all since I want to see my progress, but at some point I’ll digitize them.

I printed 50 pages before I did the math. 200 boxes per page x 50 pages means it’s going to take me forever to use these up.

Acts as an external monitor or replaces the macbook if I’m not doing much beyond studying kanji or grammar.

Helps prevent those nasty neck and back problems. I don’t know if the price was worth it, but it’s been rock solid.

I DO NOT use this at cafes. I’m not that guy. I use this at WeWork/coworking spaces or at home only.

The price is definitely worth it. This mouse is freaking amazing.

Update: One of my coworking friends recommended the logitech vertical mouse. I LOVE it. It’s not as packable as the arc touch mouse but it feels amazing to use all day.

Look at how thin this keyboard is! Unfortunately, it’s too good to be true. It’s so thin it’s mushy as a result, requiring more force to register presses. After a day of typing my fingers hurt. I gave it to my uncle and he keeps it in his car for occasional use while he travels across the US.

This is a great keyboard. It’s compact but still nice to type on, and being able to pair with more than one device is very nice.

I wish I could travel with my hhkb2 pro keyboard but it just takes up too much space, and I would be worried about damaging it.