Waiting to Exhale

For an anal retentive planner who likes to live life on schedule, according to plan and always on my own terms, having no freaking clue what the next few weeks, months and years look like feels a lot like holding my breath, waiting to exhale.

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In a span of 11 days I hopped from SF to HK to Macau to HK to Bangkok to Phuket to Koh Phi Phi to Phuket to Bangkok to Singapore to Tokyo to LAX to SF. Other than 3.5 blissful, relaxing and rejuvenating days on Surin Beach in Phuket, the trip was mostly exhausting. When your body is that tired you basically feel nauseated and disoriented all the time. The final 4-5 days of my trip, I felt on the verge of vomiting the entire time. Under normal circumstances, when given the option to continue my travels (on first class air and 5-star accommodations, no less, mostly free thanks to El Hombre and friend's business trip boondoggle), I would jump at the chance. This time around I was so exhausted all I wanted was to come home as soon as possible to the luxury of my own king sized bed and laundry machine. So I cut my trip 3 days short, giving up the opportunity to spend a couple days in tropical Singapore sunbathing, exploring the city and eating chili crab, laksa and shaved ice desserts. Very un-Deb like.

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Due to some flight mishaps in Bangkok, El Hombre and I ended up in Singapore for a single night. Singapore has never really been on my list of must-sees. I'm not sure why but nothing about it seemed that appealing - if I wanted that type of food, I was more interested in Malaysia or Indonesia; if I wanted a big city in Asia, I was more interested in Tokyo or Seoul or Shanghai. However, upon my very short visit, I was really quite enamored of the tiny island city-country. It has the liveliness of Bangkok and the diversity of cuisine of Malaysia but without any of the poverty, dirt, crime, scamming of tourists and disorder found in the rest of southeast Asia. I loved the orderliness!

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Tokyo takes the concepts of space, efficiency and expense to levels I've never experienced previously. The friend I stayed with lives in a 450 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment with his girlfriend which they told me was "spacious" - rather big, really - for Tokyo. For this tiny piece of Tokyo (which to be fair, is in the expensive expat district of Roppongi), they pay $2500, which doesn't include gas, electricity or water. One of their expat banker friends lives in a 2 BR apartment that costs a whopping $10K per month. That truly boggles my mind...with that amount you could buy a $2M 5000 sq. ft. mansion in Manhattan Beach or at least a modest house in SF. In Tokyo, it gets you a 900 sq. ft. apartment. Space is such a luxury in Tokyo. My friend told me that he's so accustomed to his lack of space now that whenever he comes back to the States now, he wonders how people can live in apartments or houses with SO much space. What do you do with all that space, he wonders?

Given the lack of space, it's not surprising that the Japanese are brilliant at efficiency. To me, the defining adjective for Tokyo is "efficient." Energy-efficient, space-efficient, technology-efficient. The microwave is also the oven. The toilet has a sink on top of it so that when you flush, you wash your hands using the water that will eventually go down to the toilet to refill the tank. There are two flush options - one for pee, one for poop, so that you save water/energy as needed. Japan's greatest contribution to the world is its toilet technology.

Unless you mainly subsist on onigiri (rice balls) and ramen, eating in Tokyo will basically take the rest of your paycheck left after paying your rent. It's truly amazing how much so little can cost. On my second night, my hosts took me to a tiny hole-in-the-wall yakitori place. I wanted to thank them for putting me up so I paid for dinner. Together the three of us literally consumed one onion, 3 scallops, one tiny slab of beef, a few mushrooms, some bean sprouts and one medium okonimiyaki which was completely inferior to the one I had on the street in Osaka. Total price: $250. I guess some of the cost is accounted for by the watered down shochu cocktails we drank but $80/pp in SF would be a fairly nice dinner at a trendy new restaurant, not a hole-in-the-wall! Cost aside, the food in Tokyo is amazing, as long as you stick to Japanese food. Sushi at their mediocre restaurants is still better than the best sushi I've had in SF (although the BEST sushi I've ever had is still Sushi Sasabune in Honolulu).