“personal”

Loved it! Far more than I expected, and almost as much as I love Japan, which is surprising because I’ve long been infatuated with Japan. Truth is I knew next to nothing about the whole country when I arrived.

Being tired from sightseeing we, my sister and I, decided to stay in Seoul the whole week and just try to get the feel of it. Well, it can feel even more urban, media drenched, faddish and dynamic than Tokyo at parts, and yet it is noticeably less wealthy and developed, and most of the city is, while new, astonishingly drab and nondescript.

First, the country’s cheap, all the more so with the exchange rate at that time (exchange rates are changing all the time these days). It’s quite more developed than Mexico yet somewhat cheaper. Compared to Japan is consistently half as cheap. (Though some girl in the hostel, returning from China, complained about how expensive everything was.)

People bump with you, like, all the time and pretty deliberately. While individually they are very friendly, out and about they can be quite rude. Coming from uber polite Japan, it’s pretty shocking. Also, people are far taller than in Japan and while girls are not so prim I think they’re generally cuter. Though plastic surgery is BIG in Korea, particularly one to make your eyes Western looking (“double eyelids” they call them) which, to be honest, does make Asian faces more Western-ly attractive.

I was worried about the food because one previous experience in San Francisco was quite atrocious. It turns out it just takes some getting used to and some introducing. At its best, say, Korean BBQ, it is absolutely delicious. Very agressive tastes, sweet, sour, salty and spicy jumbled all together. There are street stalls everywhere, very Mexico city like, and many of them sell cheap, awesome snacks.

As for technology, flat TVs are indeed everpresent and so are PC bangs (web cafes), full of surprisingly decent machines and cheap as dirt (less than a buck an hour). The mythical 100mb web was fast when you downloaded but quite unimpressive when you were browsing. Cell phones, like in Japan, are not that impressive, though the average cell phone is indeed high above America’s, the best of the Canadian/American crop, full-keyboard BlackBerries and the iPhone, seems in my opinion better than anything I’ve seen here on the streets and playing at phone showcases.

Most interesting of all was all the history and analysis I read. It was exhilarating arriving at a country and not knowing even how to say yes or no, thank you or please. Even more disconcerting was not knowing anything about the country other than that the south was a rising economic power while the north was on the Axis of Evil. So I plunged into several history and analysis books, The Koreans one of the best, and emerged a newly minted Korean buff. It was surprisingly enlightening, there’s nothing like being in the place to pique your curiosity and there’s nothing like being internally motivated for so much history and facts to start to make sense.

Photo set:

“Time flies—but I’m the pilot.”
The point is not to be admired but to be admirable.
Achieving is far more enjoyable than consuming.
Discipline rarely comes naturally but is always crucial.

I want to be the light I long to see in the world.
(Oddly, I’ve long been motivated by something very much like that thought, but only recently I discovered the cliched but beautiful phrase to give it form. I can’t think of a more inspiring phrase, demanding nothing on the world, putting the responsibility for imagination and effort squarely on oneself.)

One day in Tokyo and I already know the answer to one of the main questions that set me around the world. The answer is yes, THERE IS at least one city I like at least as much as San Francisco. I’m in love.

(Unfortunately, the prospects of being a free agent here even slimmer.)

Pictures of it all in my Flickr Japan set.

Ah, these are going to be some exciting 5 months!

David Friedman ^ELZR introduces a fascinating classification of human cooperation in The Machinery of Freedom ^ELZR. There’s
    force (imposing my end on you),
    trade (“I’ll help you achieve your end if you help me achieve mine”),
    and love (“making my end your end”).
 
The definition of love alone is, I think, a great achievement. It surely doesn’t include everything we mean by that impossibly burdened word (it doesn’t mention romance, liking or sex) but it does reveal one of love’s most important yet often implicit threads. It is abstract yet the more likely we are to call a love pure, the more likely it is about A caring about B for B’s sake alone.

An interesting exercise came to mind after reading the classification: What human activity/field corresponds to each kind of human cooperation?

The first two kinds are straightforward loosening words up a bit: Politics is the exercise of force. Economics is the exercise of trade. With love, I stumbled for the longest time. I have an answer now.

The exercise of love is… technology. A tool is the purest embodiment of love, of making someone else’s end your end. That’s why technology is so ambiguous, its ends are its users’ ends. Giving you a tool is the ultimate act of love, the more so the more control of it I give you, because by doing that I make my end your end, whatever your end may be—defending your life or stealing. Think of the geeks that cobbled up the internet, ignoring wtf the thing would be used for, coding only so that it would allow for it.

Don’t dismiss this as one geek’s techno-euphoria. There’s something deep in here. Technology is the exercise of love. “If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.” Nothing less than the meaning of our lives could be here.

My answer to life, the universe, and everything:

Randomness begets persistence
Persistence begets replication
Replication begets complexity

In what is to date the biggest purchase of my life (my obscene former desktop was a gift), I just purchased the bulk of my travel for the next year or so. Check out my itinerary and start planning on visiting or bumping with me!

27 October 2008
    Mexico City MEX to Tokyo NRT (via London) for 4 months, 22 days of Japan!
20 March 2009
    Tokyo NRT to London LHR for 4 months, 29 days of Europe!
17 August 2009
    London LHR to Toronto YYZ for a month of Canada! (ticket back to Mexico to be purchased)

All the flights are with British Airways. All for $1,852, which still amazes me—BA is a great airline, flights are incredibly main-airport and nonstop (can’t stop in the US). It’s all beautifully simple, better than I dared hope. Past week has been a Kayak and travel agency blur but it was worth it.

So, so exciting!

Been playing with travel sites all day, (Kayak FTW!) and I discovered several interesting anomalies with which I plan to tour the world for some $2k in air travel. Flight arbitrage, if you will.

You see:

• Travel within Europe is really, really cheap. As in €30 £5 London – Madrid round trip. So Europe can be thought of as one point: London, by far the cheapest hub.
• Round trips are a considerably better deal than one-ways. I understand they are the industry’s version of wholesaling but a 40% difference seems too much (a one-way can be 140% the price of either round trip leg)%.
• Travel order is everything. Mexico-Tokyo, one way is some $900. Tokyo-Mexico, one-way too, no less than $2,000! That’s right, the exact same distance can cost you over twice as much depending on where you start!

Putting it all together, my plan is to buy the following round trips: Guadalajara-Toronto, Toronto-London, London-Tokyo. I travel from Guadalajara to Toronto, then to London, then to Tokyo, where I stay 3 months. Then I return to London, where I stay some 6 months (to travel cheaply around Europe), then I return to Toronto and stay some 3 months, and only then do I return to Guadalajara.

All this for some $2k!

It’s a tad complicated and wasteful, and I need to plan far ahead, but the price’s pretty good, right?

Can you think of something else?
Know any other anomalies? Youth discounts? Passes?
Got any tips?

I haven’t bought yet but I think I will soon!

I still remember how impressive Lehman Brothers’ New York headquarters were…

The plan is to travel, to go places for a year or so, to live for some 2-3 months each time, in Tokyo, Barcelona/Madrid, London, and Toronto (in that order). Both Spain and Canada beckon with legal, short paths to free agency. The goal shall be to find out which city I like better as my fulcrum for the decade, but mostly to learn, to start projects, and to swallow the world.

I didn’t expect to like working remotely so much, as I’ve been doing this last couple of weeks, but I’ve loved the freedom, the flexibility, and the discipline it imposes. Most important of all, it allows for freedom of place and having been kicked out of the U.S. I might as well look around. So I’m looking for some sort of remote job, failing that savings and odd jobs would have to do, but having an unhinged fixed job would accelerate and catalyze everything.

There is, still, the possibility that there will be no place for me like Silicon Valley. If that’s so, then I’ll try to get a tourist visa again within a year and give de facto (ilegal) free agency another shot. I doubt, though, that they’ll grant me a visa, but there are many other, safe, if somewhat expensive means, to get inside. And once inside de facto free agency is not far fetched at all. I’m heartened by the sanctuary San Francisco itself always was for me (as opposed to the dastard federal gov’t).

But that’s just one possibility. Just having done that scenario planning comforts me and sets me free. The world beckons and Japan has always been, after America, the country I’m hungriest for. I’ve always wanted to try the sink or swim approach to learning a language! It’ll take me a month or two to get there, but just you wait Tokyo!

But why wasn’t I legally in the States? Because there are no certain legal paths to what I want: free agency. That is, to be able to live and make wealth, however and how long I want (the legal equivalent would be a permanent residence, a citizenship is that plus voting).

Sure, there are work visas, but I’m not particularly interested in being an employee. I want to make wealth myself or with others, in projects we start. And yes, a work visa can (notice the lack of certainty!), given years, be upgraded to a residence permit—I know a couple of tech guys who have done this after some 7 or more years. It takes that long because professional green cards have a shameful 5 year backlog and because why would employers give you the freedom to work for others or for yourself when they can just have you on a renewable per-year indentured servitude?

The problem’s not getting into the States to vacation work where the powers that be want you to work, the problem is being a free agent. And yes, were America the only option, paying the many-year uncertain penance wouldn’t look so bad. But the world’s a big place.