Whenever we’re traveling, at some point when I’m taking time off from work or seeing my friends in the time leading up to the trip, colleagues and friends will ask me where I am going. Whenever I’m going to a popular place or a place that seems high on the “it” list for travel, like Australia, Thailand, or Spain, people will inevitably respond with oohs and ahhs, respond positively, and say things like, “I’m so jealous!”, “I want to go there so badly!!”, or “OHMIGOD, HAVE AN AMAZING TIME! TAKE TONS OF PICS!” When it’s places that are a tad bit off the beaten track to those who either don’t travel a lot, don’t travel at all, or only go to “popular,” well known attractions, I get questions like, “why are you going there?”, what are you doing there?”, “what’s there that makes you want to go?”, or lastly, “do you have relatives there who you’re visiting?” (this last one, I got a lot for Korea and Taiwan from white colleagues. I am not Taiwanese. I am also not Korean. And Chris is obviously neither). I realize they don’t mean any harm and aren’t trying to be judgmental, but why should Paris get oohs and ahhs while Halifax gets quizzical looks, and Taipei gets the relatives question?

I was having this chat with Chris, and when I told him a colleague who is actually from Canada (suburbs of Toronto) asked why I was going to Halifax, he looked at me plainly and said, “Because I fucking want to go there. And I don’t care what you think or what you think you know about it.” No one informs his travel decisions. We inform our travel decisions. “I don’t take travel advice from morons.”

Well stated. I love my fierce darling.

Before this trip, other than the greenery, the mountains, and the water of Nova Scotia, I was thinking about eating lobster. Chris and I rarely eat lobster while in the U.S. unless it happens to be part of a dish. It’s so expensive and oftentimes not very fresh, especially in New York City (for the record, I think Luke’s Lobster is just okay, and their crab roll is far better than their lobster roll). The only time I’ve had lobster and been extremely satisfied was the one time I went to Maine, and being in Maine, of course the lobster was extremely cheap and cooked just as I ordered it, so it was perfection. The second time I had it and loved it, it was in a lobster roll (buttered, no mayonnaise) at the famous and well-acclaimed Neptune Oyster in the North End of Boston, and I was so turned off by not only the wait to get in (2+ hours), but also the rude and surly service I received.

Well, when I was doing research for this trip, across the board, I found that seafood was (not surprisingly) far cheaper in Nova Scotia, bordering on Maine lobster prices, and with the added benefit of the U.S. dollar strength against the Canadian dollar, I was so excited to get our lobster fix for (relatively) cheap here. There’s lobster rolls on pretty much every menu, and some are as cheap as $15 CAD (that’s just over $11 USD!). I told Chris that I wanted to eat as much lobster as possible, the glutton I am.

Well, we drove out to Lunenberg, a UNESCO world heritage site town just over an hour west of Halifax, and the places that were supposed to have lobster rolls… had none. In fact, they were completely removed from the menus that I had seen online. When we asked the place we ended up eating lunch at about this, she said that the price of lobster was far too high at this time, and that they couldn’t sell lobster rolls at a reasonable price in order to actually make a profit, so they decided to remove them from the menu completely for now. We were both crushed.

It was fine in the end today. We had delicious seafood chowder and local scallops at rock-bottom prices and high freshness, but the lobster lust continued.

Today, we arrived in our fifth Canadian province, Nova Scotia, as part of our goals to hit every Canadian province (and territory). After an annoying connection and long layover in Toronto due to American Airlines not having any direct flights between New York City and Halifax, we pretty much spent the whole day traveling and arrived just in time for dinner. If we had flown direct, the flight would have only taken about two hours, so I guess that’s the price of loyalty sometimes. Luckily for us, Halifax has no shortage of good food, and being right on the Atlantic, seafood is plentiful, local, and fresh throughout the entire province, and at prices that are relatively economical.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about eating and viewing menus in countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is that there is a very strong Asian influence across menus, and it’s usually done tastefully and well. It’s not like when you’re in the middle of the U.S. and you see “peanut noodles” on a random Western-style restaurant, and you’re completely repulsed at the idea of what they mean when they say “peanut noodles” (what they probably mean is that they’ve mixed Skippy peanut butter with some oil and tossed it in some noodles, and who really wants to eat that?). Tonight for example, we ordered tikka masala mussels as a starter, and the curry sauce tasted legitimately like tikka masala, and the mussels were local and extremely fresh tasting. These mussels were definitely not frozen, and that tikka masala really tasted Indian-British, and could have potentially been made in a tandoori-type oven.

In Canada as in Australian and New Zealand, there seems to be a larger respect for Asian cuisine and culture in general. It’s not just about General Tso’s for Chinese, and people don’t just assume that when you want Japanese food that you want sushi. In these countries, when a non-Asian person gives you Asian restaurant recommendations, you could actually trust that their recommendations will actually be good and up to your standard. Sadly, I could never say that about the U.S., even though I’ve lived in three very metropolitan areas.

Up and coming. Trendy. Hipster. All the rage. For whatever reason in San Francisco, any restaurant that has any of those words associated with it will inevitably be a place I will not enjoy. I need to stop adding these new restaurants to my Yelp bookmark list and just stop going to them. I always leave feeling ripped off and like I paid so much for so little of a truly good experience. Aina, Statebird Provision, and The Progress are just some of the places I’ve been to recently and just think… Did I really pay $60-70 for my share of the bill for that? That’s all I get? My friends and I actually paid $8 each for a spam musubi bao – what the hell were we thinking?!

San Tung, El Farolito, and new hole-in-the-walls I find like House of Pancake seem to be the only places I end up loving and really wanting to come back to. These other places are trying too hard, and I don’t want to pay for them anymore.

In just six years, Boston has changed so much that there are certain parts of the city I barely even recognize. We stayed around the South End, near the water front area, and the entire place is completely unrecognizable to me. So many high rises, likely residences, are going up, and construction is endless. Streets are blocked off because they are being redone, and scaffolding is everywhere.

Other changes have happened, too, since I was last here. As in New York, San Francisco, and likely every other major metropolitan city, the constant catering towards people who are vegan and gluten-free is here in Boston and Cambridge. J.P. Licks, an institution of an ice cream shop, has dairy-free, soy-free, and vegan options. Juice Shop and Sweetgreen seem to be in every neighborhood we walked through. And even in the North End, there were multiple gluten-free handmade pasta options on the menus.

And now, Jamaica Plain is now moving from being semi hipster to being upscale and known for high rent. When I first moved to the Boston area in 2004, JP was considered dangerous and not a place to be at night. Now, everyone wants to move there. Chris’s friend’s ex-girlfriend, who recently moved from New York to Boston, now lives in Jamaica Plain. She and her dog love it there. That says everything about how much has changed here.

While in Boston this weekend, since we’d be stopping by the North End (Boston’s Little Italy), I knew I wanted to make a pit stop at Modern Pastry, my favorite Italian bakery in Boston. It was always a competitor of Mike’s, the tourist-overrun bakery that was always extremely disorganized with the most chaotic lines, but I always preferred Modern because their service was fast and friendly, they filled their cannoli to order (preventing a soggy shell), and their tiramisu was probably my favorite version in the world at that point in my life.

Well, it’s been six years since I’ve been to Boston, and I can’t even remember the last time I even visited the North End. Since the last time I visited Modern, they have expanded and renovated; they are not just a little bakery to grab and go, but they have a large cafe-style sit-down area where you can eat your dessert with your coffee at your leisure with table service. They still have the take-out section, but today, it was like nothing I could remember. It was a long and slow-moving line, and it was clear the cashier didn’t give a crap about any of us. She took a long time to fill orders, and she even wandered around the pastry area doing absolutely nothing while the line just got longer and longer. And when the cash register ran out of paper for receipts, she just stood there and pretended to fiddle  with it (without a refill – so convincing that she was actually doing real work!). This is NOT the Modern Pastry I remember.

The cannoli was just as good as I remember, and so was the tiramisu. But this place really sucks now with service that poor. When you stop caring about your customers and start taking them for granted, that’s when you really don’t deserve my business.

Chris decided to book his parents a surprise side trip to Boston for this weekend, so we headed to the airport today. With my executive platinum American Airlines status, I requested that I be added to the upgrade list complimentary and use my 500-mile-upgrade credits to upgrade Chris and his parents. Eight people on this flight were going to get upgraded given the number of empty seats in First Class, and so we essentially bumped four people off the top of the list given my status. I don’t care; how many times has that happened to me?! Too many to count. And it honestly makes me even happier on the inside when I know that I, an Asian American female in her early 30s, is bumping down a bunch of over-privileged and entitled white men.

When we got on, as per usual, there were two other people of color sitting in first class; both were men who were at least middle aged. Everyone else was middle-aged, white, and male. Men always dominate the priority cabins. And as usual, I appear to be the youngest person sitting in the priority cabin, and the only East Asian person. Chris’s mom commented on that, too, after the flight, about the lack of diversity in First Class both in color and in gender. “Privilege” in this country tends to go to white males regardless of what people want to deny about systematic discrimination and discrimination in general. All you have to do is look at things like who’s seated in First Class; who gets pulled over by cops more often, and who gets worse treatment in restaurants than others.

It’s the day after my friend’s wedding, and I’m having my own version of wedding glow. No, I didn’t get married yesterday. No, I didn’t even have sex yesterday. But I had so much fun over the last two days that now I am sad to be leaving sunny Phoenix and my friend’s great friends, warm and hospitable family, and the endless citrus trees that line the streets and homes everywhere in this great metropolis. And I should also mention I’m going back to New York, where a snow storm is on its way this Tuesday. Fun times await.

That’s the other thing about the Phoenix area — these freaking citrus trees are everywhere. In car rides from the airport to downtown, from downtown to Scottsdale and through the residential areas of Phoenix, all I saw were these gorgeous, luscious trees dotted with yellow and orange. FRESH FRUIT TREES. In New York City, I am so enveloped in a concrete jungle that I rarely think about how people living in other parts of the country and world just get inundated with fresh fruit and vegetables on their own property without even trying. As my friend’s grandpa told me, when many people move into their homes in Arizona, their houses come with fresh lemon and orange trees because much of this land was once citrus orchards (the irony considering we are in the middle of a desert out here). And these trees tend to flower and fruit with little to no effort outside of watering; he says in a typical year, his citrus trees are overloaded with fruit from January all the way to nearly September! They try to juice as many of the oranges as possible and freeze the juice for daily consumption, but with just the two of them, they just cannot keep up. They even give them to visiting friends and family, but even after all that, they end up wasting about 70 percent of the fruit. “The trees just don’t stop producing, and we can’t eat and drink them all!”

Well, I would love to have taken home a bag full of fresh, organic citrus if they would offer to give some to me…

The freshest fruit we get is from Fairway or Whole Foods. What a different life. Her dad was so amused at how excited I got about the fresh citrus. Clearly, I’m coming from a very urban area. Now, I can’t even look at the oranges and lemons at the grocery store the same way. This is probably how they feel about bottled orange juice or lemons at the supermarket — not up to their standard of freshness.