I’m in Denver this week for my company’s annual kickoff/offsite. Though the scheduled events are Wednesday through Friday, we all needed to arrive by Tuesday evening in order to be here in time for all the Wednesday morning sessions. Though the flight time, if direct, between New York City and Denver is only about 4 hours and 40 minutes, the actual time I spent in transit today, if you just confined it to my first flight’s takeoff time to the final flight’s landing time, was about nine hours. Because I am loyal to American Airlines (for better or worse) while in the U.S., I realized there were no direct NYC > Denver flights at this time of year (they seem to be seasonal for the warmer months! But what about the people who ski…?!). And my connecting options were mostly in Chicago or Charlotte. The ones going through Chicago were out of the travel limit for this event, so I ended up going through Charlotte. The layover time in Charlotte was originally supposed to be quite tight, only about 45 minutes, so I didn’t think I’d have much time there. Unfortunately, my flight got delayed three times, so I ended up spending more time than I’d originally anticipated there. The plus side was that I could leave the concourse to go to another one that had… Midwood Smokehouse, my favorite BBQ spot in Charlotte that now had a location in the airport!

My dreams of delicious brisket or burnt ends were quickly extinguished when I almost sat down and the server said, “I just wanted to let you know that we’ve already sold out of brisket and burnt ends.” My face immediately fell. Well, at that point, there was no reason to eat here if the two best things were gone. I could have chosen the ribs, but I really didn’t want to eat anything that messy because I needed to multitask and get some work done on my computer. So I ended up leaving and going to another spot next door. It was supposed to be a “Santa Monica, California” style eatery. I ended up having a cobb salad and an unsweetened iced tea. After tax and tip, my lunch cost $39. Eeeek.

Well, I guess it’s no wonder my food allowance while on work travel is $125. You think that’s a lot of money until you have to transit through and get stuck at airports, where even the most basic food costs over $25-30.

Eleven years ago, when I first went to Melbourne and stayed at my in-laws’ home, I marveled over their large collection of souvenirs that they’d collected during their travels over their 40-plus years. The souvenirs ranged from the small, cute, antique items, like the little ones you could place in a glass curio cabinet, to the larger, more impactful pieces, like a Japanese cuckoo clock that has a very intense time precision, to paintings and glass sculptures collected during visits to different countries around the world. There’s even a gorgeous Wedgwood Wild Strawberries collection of bone china they had shipped back to Melbourne that they picked up while in England during Chris’s youth. I always take a look at the Wild Strawberries collection every time I visit. Each illustration of strawberry, leaves, and vines are hand-painted. And the pieces are all painted with a genuine gold rim; they are truly pieces of art.

And usually while I am standing by this glass cabinet and staring at the Wedgwood Wild Strawberries bone china, one or both of Chris’s parents will come over and recount the time they purchased this fragile, gorgeous set. After, they will also comment that they don’t use it “nearly enough,” and be unable to recall the last time they took it out to use. This always made me sad: they probably spent a small fortune on something so beautiful and intricately made. Yet since it’s rarely used, no one is actually enjoying it or getting a return on that investment they made decades before. The Wedgwood china set just sits there, dust-free in a glass display case in their dining room.

For a short period when I was younger, I also liked to collect little cute items to eventually display in my home when I returned from my travels. When I was really young, I used to be told that one day when I got married, I could pick out my own wedding china set, and hopefully, someone would be generous enough to purchase it for me and my future husband off our wedding registry (that never happened; we had no wedding registry, and the man I ended up marrying had zero interest in any bone china set). Now, though, during travels, we rarely buy anything that is not a consumable to take home (e.g. food or beverage; tea!). The only real thing we make sure to get before we leave a new place is a magnet to add to our boards of magnets documenting our travels. We don’t have much space living in a small Manhattan apartment. We also don’t like clutter.

And the thing is: while I do love looking at all my in-laws collected items over the years every time I go back to their home, I realize that while I enjoy it, one day when they are gone, who will appreciate these items as much as they did? Their sons do not appreciate most of them and just look at them as piled up clutter. But why would they appreciate them? They didn’t collect these items on their own travels, so they have less or no meaning to them. As for me, I might appreciate them, but I will unlikely have the space to care and keep them all. These are all items that they collected as momentos of their travels, purchased with money that they worked hard to earn. These items are almost symbolic of all their hard work, as well as their parents’ generation of hard work, before them. So while many in my generation may see our parents as hoarders, whether that’s of antique items or even toilet paper, maybe the way our parents see them is as an embodiment of what they worked their whole lives to build. And perhaps they see our generation as a generation of people who don’t appreciate their hard work and is merely quick to write off and throw away embodiments of it.

Japan Airlines will always be on the top of the top lists for me in terms of best in-flight experiences. In a culture that very much values hospitality and caring for others, it’s no wonder that JAL would prioritize the customer experience.

Now traveling with a young child, we get to see how the flight attendants fawn over her and give her the star treatment in flight. On our way from Melbourne to Tokyo, Kaia got offered pretty much every single toy in the JAL toy box (when she was originally told to choose just one…) simply because the flight attendants kept passing by her and gushing over how cute she was. While they did have a kids’ menu, Kaia didn’t really get to enjoy it. Instead, on the flight over, we ended up eating it as part of our appetizer, on top of the kaiseki style Japanese meals we were already indulging in.

On our way back to New York, Kaia was out pretty much the entire time. Although they didn’t have to, the flight attendants kept checking in on me to see if she might need to be woken up to eat. While they did try to prepare a little katsu sandwich for her, I ended up eating part of it since she was really out like a light. They still insisted on checking in and gave me some milk in case she decided to wake up during the landing and wanted something to drink.

American Airlines or any other U.S.-based carrier for that matter will never be able to come close to the level of customer service that JAL does. In fact, when you fly on American, they barely take any notice of your children, much less have separate kids meals just for them. They definitely would not be checking in on your child if they were zonked out the whole flight (as if they would care if your child starved or not?). But it’s one of the reasons I love JAL and love flying on Asian airlines. In Asia, there’s a sense of caring amongst the community that just doesn’t exist in the West.